At the end of last week, Myanmar Development Resource Institute’s Centre for Economic and Social Development and Asia Foundation jointly released a report by Hamish Nixon and Cindy Joelene entitled “Fiscal Decentralization in Myanmar: Towards a Roadmap for Reform”. Not the most gripping topic, you might think. Nevertheless, as the country seeks to deconstruct a strongly unionist system put in place by successive military and military-backed regimes, it’s important to find ways to allocate to sub-central tiers of government not only public functions, but also public money. Aware both of the difficulties inherent in any financial reform programme, and of relevant international experience, the report proposes a dual strategy of deconcentration within policy sectors, and decentralization across government layers. It claims to build incrementally on three recent developments. First, line ministries have started to assign enhanced activities and budgets to their regional and state offices. Second, regional and state assemblies have gained a greater share of the national budget. Third, several essentially ad hoc initiatives have together fed funds to sub-central levels. At the same time, however, the report looks beyond anything implicit in the drift of fiscal policy since 2011 to argue for a central oversight body tasked with driving further decentralization. It opts for a high-level political body such as a national commission or secretariat. This is from page 48: “The most important recommendations of this paper, therefore, are not just about a specific decentralization proposal, but rather the need to form coordinating institutions and a policy process to manage these evolving fiscal decentralization reforms.” In a state long characterized by woeful governance, that would be a major innovation moving well beyond incrementalism.