By all indications decentralization seems to be working just fine; what is the need for federalism? What differentiates decentralization from federalism?
The difference is the ownership of powers. Under decentralization in a unitary state, all powers are owned by the central government and can be repossessed at will by their owner – the central government in Kampala. In the struggles that competition begets when the owners of power lose, they repossess some or all of those powers. In federal systems, some powers are owned by the center and some by the provinces, states, laender, and cantons (shared powers) that make up the federation. Therefore, unilateral repossession of powers is not possible. Given the competitive nature of intergovernmental relations, a central government in Kampala would find it difficult to resist the temptation to repossess a power it had hitherto decentralized if it found itself more or less continuously losing in the competitive struggle with more junior authorities [the districts in Uganda], a situation that cannot arise in federal states because in those states the division of powers is based on a constitutio
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