This chapter places the observations from previous chapters into a broader framework for analysing decentralisation. Field insights about local government capacity and autonomy point to the importance of focusing on the relationships between politicians and bureaucrats across and within the state government and local governments. Rather than present a full theory, the chapter engages in ‘theorising’ – that is, what Swedberg (2016, 8) describes as exploring ‘the context of discovery and the context of justification’ that precede a statement of theory. The approach takes seriously Geertz's (1973, 24) point about being light and staying close to the ground when attempting to reason in formal, conceptual ways (‘ratiocination’):

The first section surveys the profusion of meanings associated with the term ‘decentralisation’ in the literature. Building on this, the following section distils a specific understanding of ‘de facto decentralisation’ that goes beyond formal (de jure) pronouncements of decentralisation to emphasise local government autonomy and capacity. The third section surveys arguments and explanations for decentralisation in general. Much of this literature is biased towards the rural; works on urban areas focus less on decentralisation (Carter and Post 2019; Rodden and Wibbels 2019) and more on urban contestation. We explore the theoretical literature on ‘why (de)centralisation?’ but viewing it as a spectrum rather than a binary. We also briefly consider explanations for (de)centralisation and why in practice decentralisation takes the form it does. The last section advances a framework to analyse decentralisation where the emphasis is on relationships between bureaucrats and elected political representatives in the state government and local governments. The section draws from the literature surveyed in the previous sections as well as the empirical material of Parts II and III. The framework helps to situate observations regarding city governments in Kerala, Gujarat and elsewhere. Since the emphasis is on how these relationships affect local capacity, we also survey the literature on capacity and discuss how capacity is related to decentralised governance.