Abstract
Governance has not been fully entrenched in Africa so too is the process of decentralisation. In many cases, the lack of these two elements in the management of public affairs in Africa has always been problematic. Governance take into account good practices for service delivery while decentralisation is the transfer of power from upper to lower level of government for the benefit of all. This paper set out to explore how and why decentralisation policy failed to stimulate local economic development in Africa. Inefficiency in the current research refers to the local authorities’ inability to stimulate local economic development. Poor service delivery refers to the lack of institutional processes and practices to support the provision of services to the targeted stakeholders within a specified time period. The argument is that, decentralisation failed to stimulate local economic development in Africa because of lack of Capacity, mismanagement and corruption. The paper is divided into five major parts. It starts by introducing the study followed by a critical theoretical framework presenting different forms of decentralisation, the third part provides a comprehensive explanation of the usefulness of devolution for administrative decision making processes, while the fourth part set the tone by proposing a set of recommendations for future research in this area.