We develop an explicit descent theory in the context of Whitehead groups of non-commutative Iwasawa algebras. We apply this theory to describe the precise connection between main conjectures of non-commutative Iwasawa theory (in the spirit of Coates, Fukaya, Kato, Sujatha and Venjakob) and the equivariant Tamagawa number conjecture. The latter result is both a converse to a theorem of Fukaya and Kato and also provides an important means of deriving explicit consequences of the main conjecture and proving special cases of the equivariant Tamagawa number conjecture.
