The Place of the Local Councils in Decentralized Cooperation in Cameroon

Abstract

The emergence of decentralized cooperation depends on the context. If in Europe, it was born with the aim of establishing contact between the State and local authorities. In the African context in general and Cameroon in particular, this emergence has been understood as a solution to the end of the double crises: the socio-political and economic crises. The main form of decentralized cooperation was twinning, with the difference that twinning does not maintain the concrete, while decentralized cooperation maintains an active or proactive concrete action stimulating development actions. As a solution to the double political crisis with demands linked in the 1980s to the republican form of the state. It was necessary to include the latter in the requirements of institutional changes, and in this perspective that the change related, sometimes to the decentralization of the State, having regard to the concern for federalism of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, and sometimes to alleviate the concern of national union. The state ultimately opted by compromise for a decentralized unitary model. This platform, known as the tripartite 4 , was a political concession to stifle federalist inclinations in the English-speaking area, claiming State power. The second context of the emergence of decentralized cooperation constitutes a response to the ambient economic crisis of the 1980s, consecrated by the fall in raw materials, the drastic fall in the economic level of the State with a fall in the budget, the crisis in the paradigm of economic planning or five-year plans as economic factors of crisis. Hence the serious impact on the transfer of funds to local communities, unable to participate effectively in local development programs, today communal development plans (CDP), the state having failed. Decentralization thus appears to be a new approach in the fight against underdevelopment. This is why the structural adjustment 6 plans will support local communities in the social dimension of the fight against poverty. Thus, talking about the place of local authorities in decentralized cooperation in Cameroon seems more to be an illusion than a glimmer, in the sense that the latter play only a very subsidiary role, even derisory in a process of agreement concerning them, in the first place. However, this place is decisive because, thereby confirming the autonomy of the decentralized bodies.