Decentralisation continues to be well received as a strategy for improving the governance of countries and delivering more responsive and efficient services. Cheerleaders include multilateral agencies like the World Bank and developed countries, like England, which seek to reverse years of centralisation. Evaluating the effectiveness of decentralised models raises the question of what it means to be ‘decentralised’, and how decentralisation itself is measured. This article describes the World Bank’s diagnostic framework for assessing decentralisation and applies the framework to the New Zealand local government system.