Decentralization and democracy

On 20 May 2002, Timor-Leste emerged into independent statehood armed with the basic instruments of its administration grounded in the long historical process of creation of a unified and centralized polity, as well as a constitution that embodied the principles of decentralization and called for a sweeping reform (Farram 2010: 1-2). The central administration was unevenly developed and the spread of the public administration away from the capital into the rest of the country, where more than 80% of the population lived, was thinly structured. The effort necessary to build an actual national state administration inspired by the model enshrined in its constitution represented an agenda for a generation. The situation was aptly captured by the Timorese officer quoted in the epigraph to this chapter that considers the process of decentralized state-building in its intimate relations with the issue of the development of a democratic polity.

The constitutional mandate

The CRDTL devotes several sections to the nature of public administration, inscribing the process of decentralization into the main architecture of the state and allocating the prescribed organs of local governance a relevant role in the equilibrium of powers and the system of checks and balances.

Right at the beginning, CRDTL stipulates in the ‘fundamental principles’ that inform the political organization of the country that (Section 5.1) ‘[o]n matters of territorial organization, the State shall respect the principle of decentralization of public administration’. Further down, in the chapter dedicated to the ‘organization of political power’, Section 72.1 on local power reads: ‘Local government is constituted by corporate bodies vested with the objective of organizing the participation by citizens in solving the problems of their own community and promoting local development, without prejudice to the participation by the State’. Section 71.1 establishes that ‘[t]he central government should be represented at the different administrative levels of the country’. And Section 63.1 on political participation considers that ‘[d]irect and active participation by women and men in political life is a requirement of, and a fundamental instrument for consolidating the democratic State’.