nly criticized as rigid, unresponsive, inefficient, and often corrupt. A number of explanations for their failures can be proposed. One is the onset of rapid urbanization. In 1960, only 22 percent of the population of the world's "less developed regions" lived in their cities and towns, but over the next 30 years, urban areas captured 52 percent of their total growth. And more urbanization is anticipated. The urban populations of these regions grew by 35 million per year between 1960 and 1990; they are expected to increase by 80 million annually between 1990 and 2020 (United Nations, 1991, pp. 3-6).
Urban growth necessitates infrastructure investments (piped water supply and sanitation, better local roads) that would not be required to absorb equivalent population growth in the countryside. Urban infrastructure is definitionally harder to plan and control from the center. Lack of coordination in the placement of urban schools, water, and roads is more apparent and frustrating to the beneficiaries. Priorities and standards that make sense for one city are often quite inappropriate in another.
By the late 1970s, most centralized providers of national infrastructure were besieged with complaints from localities. The solution recommended generally was to decentralize much of the responsibility for local infrastructure services, and also the management of urban development, to local governments. At its core is the conviction that since local governments are closer to the people, they should be more responsive to them. Local officials should be better informed about their locality's actual needs and opportunities. Where they are elected by the local citizenry, and the citizens have to pay for many of the services they receive, local officials are thought to have stronger incentives for efficiency. They also should
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