Decentralisation as it is being implemented is unprecedented in terms of its lack of democratic accountability, write Ray Kinsella and Eleanor O'Higgins
The decentralisation process being followed by the Government is fundamentally flawed when evaluated against the benchmark of good corporate governance.
This benchmark is as relevant to directors of State companies and agencies as it is to the private sector.
The primary responsibility of directors, for which they are legally accountable, is to act on behalf of their organisation to ensure its well-being and long-term sustainability.
They are required to bring to bear an independent and expert judgment as stewards of the organisation, to ensure that it endures, fulfilling its purposes, regardless of the various regimes which control it at different periods.
In the wake of the Enron/Worldcom debacles, it would be unthinkable that the board of a public company should be regarded as merely giving an unthinking stamp of approval to a momentous decision that crucially affects the company and its key stakeholders.
Yet this is precisely what the boards of State companies and agencies are being compelled to do by a policy process that will brook no challenge.
This leaves them open to charges that they have failed to act in a manner consistent with specific standards of corporate governance, in the long-term interests of their organisations.
All the evidence suggests that the policy-making process has been subverted. It is rather worrying that neither civil servants nor the boards of agencies affected are permitted to ask even the most basic questions generated by their remit and responsibilities.
The notion that decentralisation can be accomplished through "voluntary" decisions is risible. Individuals (including whole families) will be pressurised in one way or another to move.
It's not just the carrot that is being offered in terms of "exciting new opportunities", it is the latent threat of the stick in terms of career non-advancement.
So far, the Government has not seen fit to discommode itself by justifying why it is imposing decentralisation. It has avoided answering basic questions:
Can the Department/agency function effectively in its new location? How are the funding costs to be met without adversely affecting the Department/agency's ongoing responsibilities? What are the wider effects on the integrity and efficiency on the national policy making process?
The process will inevitably lead to centralisation within those key Government Departments which remain intact in Dublin. This has wide- reaching implications. Paradoxically, it is also likely to lead to duplication at the level of some individual Departments as the "decision-making gaps" begin to bite.
One of the most basic issues the Government has refused to address is the direct financial costs associated with relocation.
However, even more significant, is the lack of consideration of the losses associated with deconstructing a body of knowledge, expertise and experience that has been developed, within a particular context, over a long period of time.
This knowledge is subtle and implicit and impossible to replicate.
There are also the losses associated with rupturing of networks on which the efficiency and effectiveness of policy management depends. No less important are the personal costs in terms of civil and public servants, some of whom simply do not wish to move.
The validation of decentralisation requires the satisfaction of basic democratic principles:
• The policy should meet an overriding need.
• The policy should be fully transparent.
• The legitimacy of the policy should be based on an explicit electoral platform which has been fully debated and for which a majority of the citizens have voted.
• Ideally, the policy should enjoy widespread consensus. Consensus-building and partnership has substantially driven the policy-making process in Ireland in recent years.
• Those most affected - and those with expertise in the matter - should be involved in the framing of policy.
• The policy must be well researched in the sense of having been "stress-tested".
• And it must be subject to such standard strategic tests as impact-studies, cost benefit analysis, risk evaluation and, more generally, a detailed evaluation of the wider systemic consequences of the particular policy involved.
Every one of these principles has been violated in the Government's decentralisation project.
Decentralisation is not consistent with regional development. It is simply not the case that "parachuting" in a quarter of a Government department or a state agency can be a catalyst for regional development.
Regional progress can only be achieved on a platform of capacity-building and balanced organic growth, supported by infrastructure and proper forward planning. Such a regional policy should be aligned with other Government strategies, notably the spatial strategy.
At best what is involved in the Government's present process is ad hoc; at worst it leaves itself open to Fintan O'Toole's eloquently phrased charge that decentralisation is "a new form of local patronage".
We believe that the process of decentralisation should be stopped. The alternative is the imposition, by diktat, of a policy that lacks the underpinnings of the best principles of governance - integrity, probity and transparency - at all levels of the body politic.
There is no shame in politicians displaying the virtue of humility.
Ray Kinsella and Eleanor O'Higgins are on the Faculty of the Smurfit Business School, UCD.