Democratic Decentralization as an instrument of governance was conceived by a group of European thinkers in the nineteenth century primarily for effecting improvement in governance and ensuring participation of the citizens, protecting individual liberty, and training the citizens in the art of democratic government. Currently, it figures prominently not only in any discourse on governance and development in the developing and transitional countries but also in all policy experiments being carried out in Asia, Africa, and Latin American countries. An attempt was made in 1983 by Rondenelli and Cheema to identify on the basis of experience in the developing countries, four main variants of decentralization, namely deconcentration, delegation to semi-autonomous or para-statal organizations, devolution, and transfer of functions from government to non-government organizations (Rondinelli & Cheema, 1984).