MEXICO
“It is time for Whitehall to accept that growth cannot be ordered from the top down,” Andy Burnham proclaimed at the People’s History Museum in Manchester in late June. “It can only be nurtured from the bottom up.”
In 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador ascended to the Mexican presidency on his third try, and he said much the same. Representing the centre-left populist party he’d founded in 2011, he promised to decentralise the federal government. Despite decades in politics, he was successful in casting himself as a break from the status quo. A familiar picture. Yet his plan to decentralise government fell flat.
Of the 32 federal agencies Obrador had sought to relocate, only a handful ever moved their headquarters. All but one later returned to the capital, having racked up huge costs in the process.
“We say Mexico is a federation,” says Carlos Moreno Jaimes, a professor specialising in the study of federalism at Iteso Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara. “But for many years it’s been a federation only on paper. Mexico is a heavily centralised country.”
Obrador’s plan collapsed, beset by resistance from civil servants, high costs and the pandemic.
“Decentralisation is not in the citizens’ agenda, it’s a topic for politicians and bureaucrats, not of the people,” Moreno Jaimes explains “The people want better security, better healthcare, quality education. Government organisation isn’t a concern.”
Here’s the Mexican lesson for Burnham: devolution alone won’t rebuild trust in politics unless it’s shown to be more than an ideological belief. The UK may be the developed world’s most centralised economy, but there is no guarantee that devolution is the answer.
The link between devolution and material improvements in people’s lives will need to be explicit. Burnham appears conscious of this, coupling his drive to decentralise government with other plans targeting the cost of living, and outlining plans to drive change from the expansion of council housing and greater public control of essential services.
But the new PM should also remember this – that when Claudia Sheinbaum came into power in Mexico, she scrapped her predecessor’s decentralisation plans. What she realised was that it’s not the system through which it delivers the change that counts so much as actually delivering it.
Ella Benson Easton
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ITALY
“Firstly I am from Aosta, then I am from Italy,” my Airbnb host told me. I had made the mistake of praising the “Italian” food at a local restaurant. I should have said “Valdostan” food. Garibaldi may have stitched the nation together in 1861, but Italy is still extremely divided.
The Aosta Valley, in Italy’s far north-west, is one of the country’s five special autonomous regions, along with Sicily, Sardinia, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and Trentino-Alto Adige. It was granted its special status back in 1948.
In the Aosta Valley, genuine devolution went far beyond local councils passing regional bylaws – it gave the area sovereignty over its natural assets. Rather than waiting for handouts, the regional government used its financial vehicle, Finaosta, to buy out a trio of private steel-mill power plants in 1995, before setting its sights on the state-run electricity behemoth, Enel.
By 2000, Aosta had become the first Italian territory with completely localised water and hydroelectric production.
Though still connected to the National Grid, the region generates enough clean energy for its own use via its six large dams and 32 hydroelectric power plants.
“So you see it’s all about how it is managed really,” says Francesco Palermo, a professor at Eurac Research. “If you take Aosta Valley – excellent. But recently in Sardinia when the new regional government was elected, they basically blocked a project with wind turbines and now they have created a major energy crisis in Sardinia.”
“So, ultimately the lesson which I would draw from this is that if you are able to manage autonomy properly, then it is absolutely an asset to have this power. Of course, if you are not good at governing yourself, then it is a little more problematic, right?”
The obvious read-across is with Scotland. Unlike Aosta Valley, Scotland can build wind farms, but they do not own the energy or dictate prices, and the financial wealth is not returned to Scotland.
If Burnham did devolve powers on the same scale to Scotland, would the political symbolism pose a threat to the cohesion of Britain itself?
Jessica Lionnel
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THE PHILIPPINES
Twelve years ago, a peace deal was agreed, with devolution at its centre. Today, Filipinos are losing patience in the process and their trust in the deal is waning.
In 2014, a law created the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, in the south-west of the island. The autonomous region would remain part of the Philippines, but have its own parliament passing laws on health, education, and infrastructure.
The new region would also incorporate sharia law into the judicial system, and preserve other Muslim traditions, including a bespoke school curriculum.
The Moro people, who had lived in the south for hundreds of years, never consented to being part of the Philippines in the first place. After the country was granted independence, Muslim-majority parts were assimilated into the nation state.
What ensued was a struggle that was as much about territory and power as it was about religion – even though some parts did harbour Islamist extremists who endorsed al-Qaida and Islamic State.
In the ensuing violence, Davao City was often a target. In 2003, its airport was targeted in a suicide bombing attack that killed 22 people and injured more than 100 others. Just over a decade later, a popular downtown night market was blown up, killing 14 and leaving dozens wounded.
Two key parts of the Philippine arrangement were an annual block grant from the central government, and the promise of elections. Twelve years later, the first elections for the devolved government are yet to happen and Filipinos are losing faith.
More than anything, Burnham should remember this – if you promise devolution, you need to provide it fast.
Ben Sturt
FRANCE
Who knew that, with his idea of a “No 10 of the North”, Andy Burnham was channelling both the aristocratic French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville and the socialist president François Mitterrand?
“We see a powerful nation, England, in which governmental centralisation is carried to a very high degree: the State seems to act as a single man,” wrote de Tocqueville in Democracy in America in 1835.
“I cannot conceive how a nation could live, let alone prosper, without strong governmental centralisation. But I believe that administrative centralisation serves only to sap the energy of the peoples who submit to it… It may well contribute to the fleeting greatness of one man, but never to the lasting prosperity of a people.”
Burnham could also be said to have drawn inspiration from Mitterrand’s reforms of 1981-82. What has been described by the sociologist Jean-Claude Thoenig as the left wing president’s “authoritarian and rather unexpected decentralisation policy” of shifting decision-making, budgets and legal authority from Paris to locally elected government, began the process of wresting power from an omnipotent capital.
France even wrote decentralisation into its constitution in 2003, and by 2015 under François Hollande the regions merged from 22 were pared back to 13, with economic powers strengthened. But this was never about building a decentralised country from scratch. Lyon, Bordeaux and Toulouse had been major centres for centuries.
How has the 44-year experiment in France worked out? Thoenig, a professor at Paris-Dauphine, has argued that power really shifted from Paris to elected local political barons, not citizens.
As for the money, France’s regions now manage a combined budget of €39.7bn. But their fiscal autonomy has shrunk. Only around 31% of regional revenue now comes from taxes they actually control, while two-thirds comes from a share of national VAT. And as a reminder of how centralised France remains, Île-de-France, home to Greater Paris, generated just over €5bn in revenue in 2023, while Guadeloupe and Guyane collected only around €468m and €582m respectively.
The success stories come with caveats. Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse and Strasbourg genuinely transformed themselves once they gained real planning and financial powers in the 1990s and 2000s. Yet a joint study by France’s National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies and the National Agency for Territorial Cohesion found no universal decentralisation dividend.
Meanwhile, much of what the French call the “empty diagonal” stretching across central France continued to lose population and economic activity.
Despite its patchy results and the huge amounts of public debt built up by the regions, the French public wants more decentralisation and regionalism, not less. On the other hand it has also helped to produce a two-speed France, and the promise of rebalancing the country was only partially fulfilled.
Emma-Kate Symons
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TAIWAN
When the Taiwanese human rights activist Lee Ming-che got out of jail after serving a five-year sentence in China, he was asked what felt different about Taiwan. He answered – to my amusement – the e-receipt system.
In Taiwan, the receipt system includes a lottery. Mostly, these are small prizes, like winning a few hundred Taiwan dollars. But the largest prizes are in the billions. The way you participate in the lottery is by checking your receipt numbers to see if you’ve won.
Why a lottery? If everyone asks for a receipt, it means vendors have to run all of their sales through the till, making it much harder to do business “under the counter”. It’s a way of making sure people pay their taxes – a clever, decentralised idea that has the combined effect of a whole department of tax inspectors.
For many, it’s often a monthly ritual to sort through your receipts and see if you’ve won or not. Several years back, a digitisation app was introduced to make it easier to check if you’ve won – you only had to photograph receipts, rather than go through them manually to check each number.
More recently, this has taken the form of the e-receipt system. Now, you have a QR code on your phone that stores can scan. If you win, notification is automatic. This also makes it easier to collect winnings.
If you don’t want your lottery ticket, you could donate the paper receipt. Many stores still have boxes you can throw your receipt into. If you win, the proceeds go to charity.
It works in part because the Taiwanese government is quite efficient at processing paperwork. Paying your taxes is rather easy in Taiwan. You can just go to a local government office, sit down for a few minutes while a clerk pulls up your data, and then you’re on your way.
More bureaucratic procedures, such as changing your name, can also be done quickly. Several years ago, the sushi chain Sushiro ran a promotion where people with “salmon” in their name would receive free sushi. The result was that large numbers of people started to change their names to Salmon. When the promotion ended, they changed their names back.
This is not to say that everything is efficient and streamlined in Taiwan. For example, the banking system is a bureaucratic nightmare. Taiwan also lags behind when it comes to acceptance of international credit cards and digital payment systems.
But the point is this – if you want local government services to work, you need an efficient government bureaucracy. The new UK prime minister might want to keep that in mind.
Brian Hioe
