Uganda: District creation and decentralisation

Within the vast literature on decentralisation, there is little attention on one important aspect of decentralisation – namely the creation of new sub-national administrative units. This despite the fact that governments of developing countries such as Benin, Burkina Faso, Republic of Congo, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and Vietnam, among many others, have created a slew of new units since the 1990s. In an attempt to fill this gap, this paper tries to understand what underlying motives lie behind the creation of new districts in the African country of Uganda and how widely applicable these motives may be in other contexts.