British commentators on infrastructure have spoken about overcentralization in their country, often also related to other state capacity issues. This led to a false belief that the United Kingdom (or just England) is too centralized, and to a discourse on devolution that I think doesn’t really get what the success and failure cases are. Beyond very small states like Israel and Singapore, we see extensive devolution of the management certain functions, like health, education, and local public transport, but not others, like intercity infrastructure, social insurance, and most taxes. Germany and Canada both have thriving Land- or province-level politics through having large enough units that democratic elections can be meaningful, and through devolving many functions to the same level that those elections are in fact meaningful. The United States suffers from a severe local democratic deficit because of wrong scale and because each function is devolved to a different level so elections are lower-salience and turn on personalities.

The local democratic deficit

Any devolution has to be to a level high enough that it meaningfully represents how people live their lives. People do not live and work in neighborhoods but in cities and metropolitan areas. This is true regardless of municipal boundaries: a once independent small town that has become a suburb of a major city has the same status as a neighborhood, with only a minority of its employed population working within its jurisdictional limits, and as such is not a good geography to devolve functions to.

The reason for this is that to be meaningful, elections need to be contested in boundaries that people can reasonably discuss with their social circles and peers. Otherwise, people cannot be sufficiently informed. It’s bad enough that I’ve repeatedly seen Germans whose social circles are predominantly immigrant and English-speaking barely know the name of the mayor and not be able to name a single policy that the current Berlin government is responsible for. When there are different jurisdictional limits, this effect is magnified and hits people even if they are very aware of political trends.

Scale

Devolution requires the services devolved to be at the right scale for the level of government. The military, for example, relies on national and even supranational scale, to the point that there are flailing attempts in Europe to involve the EU more. Pensions and social transfers, heavily dependent on a locality’s tax base and age distribution, are almost always national, and if they’re devolved it’s with extensive equalization payments, as in Canada.

In contrast, health and education are both attractive targets for devolution.

Schools don’t really benefit from scale beyond that of the individual school or small group of schools. They rely so much on teacher autonomy and subsidiarity that the state can merely provide loose supervision, for example by setting high school leaving exams. States can still be centralized on this matter – France infamously used to have one class schedule for the entire country – but there are few benefits from this, so in practice this gets devolved, and in France primary, middle, and high schools are devolved respectively to communes, departments, and regions. Even on values matters, for example requirements for teaching sex education over religious objections, there is nothing a ministry of education inspector can do to coerce a community where there’s consensus among the teachers and administrators to the contrary. The American problems with the devolution of education are not about scale (for one, they affect large urban departments if anything more than small suburban ones), but about the above issue of the local democratic deficit and sub-metropolitan devolution.

Health care is similar. Nordic single-payer health care systems are not centralized the way the National Health Service in England is. Finland is divided into 21 health care regions (“Hyvinvointialueet,” or well-being services counties), with state funding and standards but local management; there’s emergency reciprocity in the sense that a Helsinki resident who gets hit by a car in Oulu will get treated in Oulu without getting charged more than if they were hit by a car in Helsinki, but the same Helsinki resident will need to find a primary care doctor and therapist in Helsinki and not in Oulu. This works, since the scale of health care doesn’t extend much beyond the hospital or network of doctors.

This, in turn, has led to a decentralist mentality that views the state as centering coercion and prefers to center care at a much local level. But pensions are care and rarely devolved. Conversely, police is coercion and almost always is, since good police work requires cultivating local ties and community trust and therefore the police is ideal for devolution even as far down as a municipality, and even national police forces are organized by region (for example, the Paris Police Prefecture).

I bring up the care-coercion dichotomy and New Left and NGO attitudes, because infrastructure is usually care-coded, but cannot be devolved beyond the level that it serves. Decisions on local and regional transport have to be done at the metropolitan level, which in Germany is that of the Verkehrsverbund and in Scandinavia is that of the county or region, the latter offering better democratic oversight than the purely intergovernmental Verkehrsverbünde. Intercity transport cannot be devolved at all: high-speed rail and tightly integrated medium-speed rail in the Swiss style both require tight top-down prioritization and lend themselves to national rail bureaucracies, even in generally devolved countries like Germany. Just as the EU flails at military integration, it flails at rail integration, with nobody proposing a coordinated rail system and only some activists, generally regarded as idealistic and reformist like Jon Worth, even discussing regulations like passenger rights and booking harmonization.

Co-devolution

There are functions comprising a substantial share of the public-sector budget and its decisionmaking that can be devolved, and can be devolved to wildly different levels. After all, between the school and the province there are multiple orders of magnitude of population. To reinforce democratic elections, it is best if as many different functions are devolved to the same level, to heighten the salience of its political issues. These may include all or most of the following:

• Primary and secondary education
• Tertiary education if the units are large enough
• Health care management (with state funding to deal with differences in resources and age pyramids)
• Road transport
• Public transport
• Police
• State administration (for example, the population registry in Germany is devolved)
• Zoning and development in general

Germany and Canada don’t devolve the same functions. For example, universal health care in Canada is administered by the provinces, whereas in Germany it’s regulated federally with a system of national Kassen and private insurers. However, they share a tendency to devolve multiple high-salience functions to the first-level federal units. Canadian provinces are thus stronger than American states compared with both the federal government and local governments.

In both countries, this interacts with the scale of these units, all large enough to be coherent units of how people live and not too local, to allow for competitive elections. In Germany, that some areas are more left-wing than others just means that the possible coalitions under the proportional system are different, and in truly left-wing places like Hamburg, SPD and the Greens compete for first place. In Canada, there are provincial parties separate from the federal ones, so that even Alberta has competitive elections where federally it is safely Conservative.

The United Kingdom has consistent, coherent regions to devolve to in Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. But in England outside London, it’s never been sure what to do, and the result is that its devolution practices have been a mess of different tiers of authorities, whose boundaries shift with every generational government review. The Metropolitan Counties are popular as of late as subjects of devolution, since they are coherent metropolitan areas and have sufficient population for scale, with population levels between that of Northern Ireland and that of Wales. One can even speculate that counties, or regions comprising a few counties with strong historic ties like East Anglia, Yorkshire, and possibly a Greater Lancashire region including both Greater Manchester and Merseyside, could succeed if many functions are devolved to them at once. In all cases, that politicians who win in these regions can be considered strong candidates for the prime ministership, with Boris Johnson having so ascended from London and Andy Burnham mooted in the media as a replacement for Keir Starmer, underscores that this devolution can lead to the election of strong politicians rather than petty managers of local gossip.

The United States has consistent boundaries of its states, counties, and municipalities as well. But each function is devolved to a different level. State administration is done by states or counties, schools are done by districts that vary between the municipality and the county, policing is done by a combination of overlapping jurisdictions generally at the municipal level, roads are a mix of county and state programs. State and local parties do not exist, and in safe states, governors get ahead not through good management of the state but through partisan outrage bait and performance of resistance to federal authority that indicates either the governor or a member of the federal cabinet broke the law and ought to be in prison.

Infrastructure and devolution

Good infrastructure programs can happen at any level. Usually the same countries that have low infrastructure construction costs for local urban rail also have low costs for high-speed rail; the main exceptions are that Italy has high high-speed rail costs and low urban rail costs and France has low high-speed rail costs and medium urban rail ones, and neither of these patterns is about devolution. It is far more important to follow good procurement practices and keep in-house expertise in the public sector than to optimize which level makes decisions on infrastructure. Indeed, in highly unitary France, RATP (state-owned) will contract smaller cities to offer them public-sector consulting services for infrastructure projects of the type that are generational for them but routine for Paris.

It’s important to avoid devolving the basic functions of the state, which in this case include procurement standards, engineering standards, contract law, and homologation. On the last one, it is notable that vendors at InnoTrans have come to list the countries where their products have been homologated, because it’s not a single EU-wide process and this weakens the Common Market.

It’s equally important to understand that this conversation, especially in its British context, is not really about infrastructure. It’s about other functions. English centralization produces poor outcomes in construction; so do Canadian federalist devolution to the provinces and American hyperlocalism. The commonalities to the three countries lie elsewhere, chiefly in project delivery and engineering standards that ensure high costs and poor outcomes.