ABSTRACT
Latin America is home to some of most innovative, radical and in uential experiments with decentralization in the world, a governance trend that by now has a ected all regionsdeveloping and developed alike.1 Just as any attempt to understand the signi cance of this global trend requires considerable attention to Latin America, making sense of Latin American politics today is unthinkable without sustained attention to decentralization and federalism. Decentralization is having a direct impact on the challenges that generations of Latin Americanists have emphasized as the most critical facing the region, including the struggle to deepen democratic practices, the search for broad-based and sustainable economic development, and the e ort to push forward processes of state formation that are still very much ongoing.
