Who should be taking what decision?

The sub-continent's rivers should be managed in a coordinated manner -- The Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, rivers all run through more than one country therefore we've got to have more than one country involved in their management.

This is an obvious point made in this newspaper. If upstream is to use more water for -- say -- irrigation then we need an agreement about how much downstream will still get. What about silt flow, of electricity generated by damming this common resource?

Once put in such obvious terms then the obvious is, well, obvious. A country is not the correct management unit of a river -- the extent of the river is that correct management unit. The area within the watershed, the river basin which makes up the whole and entire system, is that correct unit.

But if this is true -- the correct management unit is not a country -- then what else is this true of?

Now I agree, this now starts to read like politics, not economics. For there are those who would insist that it is the “nation's” economy that matters. Or “the nation's” whatever it is under discussion that matters.

And I would argue the opposite. The correct management unit is the one that is best able to deal with the issue under discussion.

At one level this is ridiculous -- there's not one at all who thinks that the two-year-old's bedtime is for anyone but her parents. Well, OK, every dadi in the country disagrees but there we are. It's still the parents who end up doing the deciding.

At another level it's the most important politico-economic decision we face -- who decides, for what? We've already agreed that abstraction of water from rivers is something that happens at greater than national government level -- or should. We've all also all agreed that bedtime is a sub-government decision -- to the extent that dadis are not the true government of us all.

So who should be taking what decision?

Not just at national, or upazila, level, but what is a matter for the government, what is one for just groups of people, and what for individuals?

Take, for example, the price of onions. This is something often talked of in this newspaper, it's something that is important in the life of Bangladesh.

The government makes decisions about it, should there be imports allowed, or exports, or even, at times, attempts to directly control the price.

Or we could use an entirely different system. The price of onions is something wholly to be decided between those who would sell them and those who would buy them. And the price of each kilo will be decided by those doing that at that specific time in that specific place.

We can see that either system might or could work. There would also be benefits and drawbacks to either system. But we still face this basic question of what's the right scale, the right level of decision making, to decide the price of onions.

Or, of course, of the rent in a building, the price of electricity, the taxes upon imports, and on and on. What's the right level of decision making?

For only if decisions are taken by the people with all the information and the correct amount of power are we going to get good decisions.

It's not wholly obvious that the right answer here -- for any of them -- is the national government. So we might well want to consider that the national government is not the right place for the price of anything to be decided. Or even the management of anything.

Or, to put this more simply. If we all agree, as we should, that the national government is too small to make decisions about rivers, then what is it that the national government is too large to make decisions about? Note that it's a question, not an answer.