Going Local: Decentralization, Democratization, and the Promise of Good Governance (review)

Merilee Grindle is Professor of International Development at the Harvard School of Government and one of the foremost authorities on governance, decentralization, and public sector reform. She has authored and edited works such as Challenging the State: Crisis and Innovation in Latin America and Africa and Getting Good Government: Capacity Building in the Public Sectors of Developing Countries.

Grindle’s research has a strong practical orientation, and focuses on the nuts-and-bolts of implementing sustainable reform in industrializing countries. Going Local looks at how decentralization has been implemented in Mexico, a large, diverse country of some 100 million that was, until recently, synonymous with one-party rule. The book sets out the key institutional and policy changes that set the decentralization drive in motion before analysing what has happened and to what extent outcomes match expected results.

Even before the end of the seven decade reign of the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in 2000, Mexico had begun to devolve a substantial amount of revenue-raising and implementation responsibilities to its thirty states and more than 2,400 municipal governments. In the 1980s, municipal governments were given control over property taxes, and made responsible for providing services such as water, sewage and solid waste management, urban transport, and roads. After 1994, federal government allocations to municipal governments rose from virtually zero to almost 2 per cent of GDP. Political dynamics in the country also changed, as greater civic activism and competition for office permeated to all levels of government. From a virtual PRI monopoly before 1990, opposition parties came to control more than 40 per cent of municipal governments by 2000. As a result, from being of little consequence, holding municipal office became increasingly attractive for local elites.

Going Local looks at how decentralization has affected the quality of governance in a sample of thirty municipalities spread across six states in different parts of the country. In order to do this, Grindle constructs an index to gauge the quality of governance in each municipality. Then, based on theories as to how decentralization is supposed to improve the quality of governance, she relates the scores of each municipality to one of four dynamics. These are: political competition; state entrepreneurship; public sector modernization; and civil society activism.

With regard to the first point, Grindle argues that decentralization did increase the opportunities for new groups to attain power. However, she goes on to demonstrate that this did not always translate into better governance. This is because greater competition often resulted in stalemates between interest groups, impeding progress and results. Furthermore, the long history of centralization also meant that institutions at the local level were under-developed. Thus, while power was devolved and the possibilities for change increased, institutional capacity had yet to sufficiently develop to cope with this.

Grindle then analyses the role of state entrepreneurship, or rather, leadership. She argues that it was not intra-party competition that led to changes. Rather, building on the previous point, new groups with different ideas had an opportunity to be elected for the first time. These groups often moved between parties, choosing those that offered them the best possibilities to attain office. In addition, the evidence provides interesting nuances. First, rather than being able to catalyze local-level resources, a crucial aspect of leadership depended on the ability of officials to mobilize resources from other levels of government. Second, while technocratic approaches were valued — so too were more traditional concepts of approachability and personal generosity to constituents. Thus, officials had to meet both ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ expectations of leaders.

Insofar as public modernization is concerned, Grindle argues that this was the most frequent type of change that elected officials sought to introduce. Initiatives ran the gamut of organizational strengthening, computerizing records and services, and changing incentives for municipal employees. These changes, too, were dependent on committed leadership for implementation — thus, they were tools used by change-oriented officials, rather than a stand-alone recipe for...