Proceedings of the Fort-Liberté Departmental Forum on Deconcentration and Decentralization under PME-2023

Proceedings of the forum on deconcentration and decentralization held at Fort-Liberté on 9 and 10 December 2020, convened by OMRH with the interior ministry to put territorial governance at the centre of the state modernization programme and to work out what the delegations and vice-delegations should actually do.

The forum is not a debate about principles. Two instruments had already been drafted, the PME-2023 modernization programme and the National Deconcentration Policy, and the proceedings record the discussion of how they would be implemented, opening with local officials including the mayor of Fort-Liberté rather than with central authorities.

The substantive demand the record carries is fiscal: allocation of 30 percent of the public investment programme budget to the territorial collectivities. Around it sit the institutional structures that would have to make it work, the departmental development platform and the coordination unit responsible for the delegations and vice-delegations. The position the proceedings settle on is that the complexity of the tasks requires strong articulation between the action of the territorial collectivities and that of the central power, which is a more careful conclusion than either full devolution or continued centralization.