0 to (cause power or responsibility to) be given to other people:
To be a good manager, you must know how to devolve responsibility downwards.
formal Those duties will necessarily devolve on/upon me.
1 to give power or a responsibility to a person or group that is at a lower level or has less authority:
devolve sth to sb/sth Spending under these budget items must be devolved to local offices.
The constitutional changes to devolve power to local authorities will go ahead.
2 to change something large into several smaller parts of a similar type:
3 to change from one thing to another, often to something bad:
By devolving so much interpretation back to the excavators, such context sheets may serve to undermine hierarchical project structures.
The notion of positive interdependence, therefore, has great resonance with devolving power relationships and engaging participants in meaningful learning experiences.
Clearly, by reverting to a more centralized system the party center felt that in 1989 it had devolved too much power to the ordinary members.
This produces an inherently unstable system, managing at arm's length a complex range of diverse organisations to which self-management has been devolved.
Unfortunately, many of the arguments have devolved to an unproductive level.
That is to say, the public body was divided into linguistically separate parallel halves without officially devolving media competence to substate entities.
All the countries studied were, for example, diversifying the provision of care, trying to integrate provision across traditional service and professional boundaries, and devolving budgets.
Administrative budgets have been devolved, and managers have been given increased autonomy in organising offices.
