The Overlapping Concepts of Decentralization

Abstract

The existing concepts of decentralization in public administration literature indicate that somewhat different perspectives have been applied to the term, which resulted in creating overlapping concepts of the term(decentralization).This overlapping concept of decentralization is due to the fact that the term is frequently used by different scientific disciplines, particularly political science, political economy, and administrative science. This makes finding one single universal definition to the term (decentralization), impossible. It was noticed that the concepts of decentralization, are frequently used synonymously by political leaders, government officials, journalists’ and by the public media. Among these concepts are (decentralization, federalism, confederation, and local government). In most cases, these concepts are not usedwith adequate precession. Therefore, this paper is mainly devoted to highlight and explain the different decentralized forms of government, and to help the reader to easily distinguish between the overlapping concepts ofdecentralization.