Comparative Perspectives on Educational Decentralization: An Exercise in Contradiction?

The principal thesis of this article is that policies of decentralizing the governance of educational systems, although often popular and compelling in the abstract, tend to carry the seeds of their own contradictions. Based on material from a number of European and developing countries, the three most common arguments in favor of decentralization—redistributing power, enhancing efficiency, and improving learning—are shown to conflict with powerful forces favoring centralization. In an attempt to make the political dynamics of the debate more transparent, the utility of decentralization as an instrument of conflict management and compensatory legitimation is being analyzed against the background of contemporary theories of the state. Lastly, the article focuses on the uneasy relationship between decentralization and evaluation as a case in point for the tensions surrounding the decentralization issue.