The Government That Governs Closest Often Governs Best
Vol. IV, No. 10 - Thoughts on Subsidarity
A few years ago, I had the privilege of serving as the first township administrator in Bethel Township here in Miami County. As part of that work, our township was a member of the Ohio Township Association — an organization that advocated on behalf of townships across the state. Their tagline said it plainly: “The government that governs the closest, governs best.”
That line is as good a definition of subsidiarity as you’ll find anywhere.
Subsidiarity is the idea that decisions should be made at the most local level possible — as close as feasible to the people actually affected. It’s not a radical concept. It’s common sense dressed up in a word most people have never heard. At its core, subsidiarity is about keeping government human-scaled, accountable, and responsive. A Board of Township Trustees deciding on road repairs moves faster, understands the terrain better, and answers directly to neighbors — not to a bureaucracy three levels removed in Columbus or Washington.
Why It Matters More Than People Realize
Most residents don’t think about governance in terms of levels or layers. They think about whether the pothole got fixed, whether the park is safe, whether the zoning decision made any sense. What subsidiarity does is match the decision to the right level of government — the one with the most direct knowledge, the most accountability, and the most skin in the game.
When that alignment works, government is faster and smarter. Local authorities can mobilize resources quickly because they know the community. During natural disasters, for example, local emergency management consistently outperforms centralized response — not because local officials are more talented, but because they’re closer to the problem and don’t have to navigate layers of approval to act.
When that alignment breaks down — when decisions that belong at the local level get made somewhere else — communities lose something harder to measure: the sense that their voices matter.
It’s Also About Who Decides
Subsidiarity isn’t only about where decisions are made. It’s about who gets to make them. When residents are genuinely involved in local decisions — zoning, public services, neighborhood improvements, budget priorities — the outcomes tend to be better. Not because residents are always right, but because they’re closest to the problem and carry real stakes in the solution.
That kind of ownership doesn’t happen when decisions come down from on high. It doesn’t happen when a city council approves a major development without meaningful public input. It doesn’t happen when a state agency overrides a local plan because it’s administratively convenient. Subsidiarity pushes back against all of that. It insists that the people most affected by a decision should have the most influence over it.
A Check on Concentrated Power
Subsidiarity also functions as a structural safeguard. Spreading authority across multiple levels of government makes the overall system more resilient. It reduces the risk of systemic failures, bureaucratic disconnects, and the kind of institutional arrogance that develops when power sits too far from the people it affects.
You see this principle built into governance at every scale. The European Union formally limits central authority to areas where member states genuinely can’t act alone — leaving education, healthcare, and local affairs to individual countries. Our own federal system was designed with a version of this in mind, even if practice has drifted considerably from that original intent.
The Honest Challenge
The real difficulty with subsidiarity is resources. Local governments can’t exercise meaningful authority without meaningful capacity — adequate staffing, technology, legal tools, and financing. When those are missing, subsidiarity becomes a hollow promise. Pushing decisions down to the local level without pushing resources down with them just shifts the blame without solving the problem.
That’s something worth watching here. When state government delegates responsibility to counties, cities, and townships without the accompanying support, it’s not subsidiarity — it’s offloading. It’s also offloading when state government, that has the ability to make decisions fails to do and leaves local governments to deal with actors that are much more resourced than local governments. Residents and their local elected officials deserve to know the difference.
The principle itself remains sound. Not as a theory, but as a standard we can use to ask better questions: Should this decision be made at the state level — or could a city, county, or township handle it better and closer? More often than not, the answer favors local.
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