CONCEPT
Subsidiarity
The governance principle
Schumacher adopted from Catholic social teaching:
decisions should be made at the lowest level of organization competent to make them, protecting the smaller unit's autonomy against absorption by the larger.
Subsidiarity is the structural principle that organizes Schumacher's application of
appropriate scale to governance. Formulated in Catholic social teaching (most influentially in Pius XI's 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno) and adopted by Schumacher into his economic framework, the principle holds that decisions should be made at the lowest level of organization competent to make them. A decision that can be made by an individual should not be made by a committee. A decision that can be made by a local community should not be absorbed by a national government. A decision that can be made at the national level should not be transferred to a supranational authority. The principle protects the autonomy of the smaller unit by preventing the larger unit from assuming functions the smaller can perform for itself. It does not reject higher-level authority; it specifies when such authority is legitimate (when the smaller unit genuinely cannot perform the function) and when it is an illegitimate absorption (when the smaller unit could perform