Decentralization and Popular Democracy: Governance from Below in Bolivia

Introduction

introduction The Quiet Revolution Enthusiasm for, and experiments with, decentralization have swept the world over the past four decades. When I began studying decentralization as a graduate student in 1995, commentators were already fond of citing the remarkable growth of policy experiments (and academic studies) since the early 1980s. To many it felt like a wave that must be cresting, soon to give way to new policy enthusiasms. But we were wrong—since then both the practice and study of decentralization have grown and grown. Ten years ago an estimated 80 percent of the world’s countries were experimenting with one form or another of decentralization (Manor 1999). Since then, new or deepening reforms have been announced in nations as diverse as Japan, Mexico, Egypt, Cambodia, France, Bolivia, Indonesia, Turkey, Ethiopia, and South Korea, as well as many others. The trend does not favor poorer nations: subsidiarity, devolution, and federalism are squarely in the foreground of policy discourse in the European Union, United Kingdom, and United States. Nor does it favor richer nations: nearly every country in Africa implemented some degree of reform during the 1990s (Brosio 2000). By the early 2000s it was safe to say that decentralization had affected most, if not all, of the nations on the globe. It is not just the number of countries decentralizing that impresses, but also the scope of authority and resources devolved to subnational governments . In Latin America, according to Campbell (2001, 2), “local governments began spending ten to 50 percent of central government revenues.” Campbell calls this “the quiet revolution” and argues that it has generated a new model of governance based on innovative, capable leadership, high popular participation, and a new implicit contract governing local taxation. Rodden (2006, 1–2) makes a similar point: “Other than transitions to democracy, decentralization and the spread of federalism are perhaps the most important trends in governance around the world over the last 50 years.” Ubiquity does not imply uniformity. The word decentralization hides a surprising amount of variation in two dimensions. First, it encompasses reforms such as deconcentration, devolution, and delegation that in incentive terms are fundamentally different, a point to which we return in chapter 5. Comparing different reforms under a common rubric is tantamount to comparing beans and bananas; one may choose to do it, but it is probably not a good idea. Second, the word conceals great variation in the extent to which reform is effectively implemented across different countries. As we shall also see in chapter 5, there are strong reasons to expect many announced reforms to be resisted or subverted in various ways by the central authorities responsible for implementing them, leading reforms that look similar on paper to have remarkably different effects. For the student of decentralization it is dif‹cult to overstate the importance of clear de‹nitions. This study uses the following. Decentralization is the devolution by central (i.e., national) government of speci‹c functions, with all of the administrative, political, and economic attributes that these entail, to democratic local (i.e., municipal) governments that are independent of the center within a legally delimited geographic and functional domain. As a number of scholars have noted (e.g., Diaz-Cayeros 2006; Eaton 2004), the trend to decentralization coexists alongside an opposing trend toward centralization. The latter ‹nds its most obvious expression in the ongoing construction of multicountry unions such as the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and Mercosur (Mercado Común del Sur), many of whose member states are simultaneously decentralizing power and authority to subnational levels of government. Indeed, the two trends coexist not only within multinational groupings but within individual countries as well, where authority and resources are being decentralized in some areas (e.g., education) and centralized in others (e.g., taxation ). While it is important to acknowledge the existence of a strong centralizing trend as part of the larger context in which this study will operate , I do not focus on it here. This book will instead focus on decentralization , the more important of the two trends worldwide, and the local governance that results. 2 decentralization and popular democracy The Historical Context Placed in the broader tide of human history, decentralization is also by far the more unusual phenomenon. The story of humanity’s rise from the plains of Africa to the modern nation-state is a story of continuously increasing centralization as greater and...