This book provides a new institutional economics perspective on alternative models of local governance, offering a comprehensive view of local government organization and finance in the developing ...world. The experiences of ten developing/transition economies are reviewed to draw lessons of general interest in strengthening responsive, responsible, and accountable local governance. The book is written in simple user friendly language to facilitate a wider readership by policy makers and practitioners in addition to students and scholars of public finance, economics and politics.
The break-up of the USSR was unexpected and unexpectedly peaceful. Though a third of the new states fell prey to violent civil conflict, anarchy on the post-Soviet periphery, when it occurred, was ...quickly cauterized. This book argues that this outcome had nothing to do with security guarantees by Russia or the United Nations and everything to do with local innovation by ruthless warlords, who competed and colluded in a high-risk coalition formation game. Drawing on a structured comparison of Georgian and Tajik militia members, the book combines rich comparative data with formal modeling, treating the post-Soviet space as an extraordinary laboratory to observe the limits of great powers' efforts to shape domestic institutions in weak states.
Many developing countries have a history of highly centralized governments. Since the late 1980s, a large number of these governments have introduced decentralization to increase democracy and ...improve services, especially in small communities far from capital cities. InGoing Local, an unprecedented study of the effects of decentralization on thirty Mexican municipalities, Merilee Grindle describes how local governments respond when they are assigned new responsibilities and resources under decentralization policies. She explains why decentralization leads to better local governments in some cases--and why it fails to in others.
Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, Grindle examines data based on a random sample of Mexican municipalities--and ventures into town halls to follow public officials as they seek to manage a variety of tasks amid conflicting pressures and new expectations. Decentralization, she discovers, is a double-edged sword. While it allows public leaders to make significant reforms quickly, institutional weaknesses undermine the durability of change, and legacies of the past continue to affect how public problems are addressed. Citizens participate, but they are more successful at extracting resources from government than in holding local officials and agencies accountable for their actions. The benefits of decentralization regularly predicted by economists, political scientists, and management specialists are not inevitable, she argues. Rather, they are strongly influenced by the quality of local leadership and politics.
Federal development in post-Franco Spain reaches far beyond familiar Basque/Catalan nationalistic struggles and includes the creation of an increasing number of intergovernmental networks by local ...governments, particularly municipalities, as they engage regional, central, and other local entities to operate programs and services in basic and emergent policy areas. By examining the intergovernmental networks in an increasingly federalized Spain, Robert Agranoff shows that local governments, although they occupy a strong position in legal and constitutional terms, are in practice subordinate to both central and regional governments and therefore lack adequate power and resources to deal with both the responsibilities assigned to them and those they'd like to assume. As a result, local governments are forced into a series of intergovernmental arrangements and transactions with governmental and nongovernmental organizations.
Within subunits of a democratic federation, lasting political practices that restrict choice, limit debate, and exclude or distort democratic participation have been analyzed in recent scholarship as ...subnational authoritarianism. Once a critical number of citizens or regions band together in these practices, they can leverage illiberal efforts at the federal level. This timely, data-driven book compares federations that underwent transitions in the first, second, and third waves of democratization and offers a substantial expansion of the concept of subnational authoritarianism. The eleven expert political scientists featured in this text examine the nature and scope of subnational democratic variations within six large federations, including the United States, India, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Russia. Illiberal Practices makes the case that subnational units are more likely to operate by means of illiberal structures and practices than as fully authoritarian regimes. Detailed case studies examine uneven levels of citizenship in each federal system. These are distributed unequally across the different regions of the country and display semi-democratic or hybrid characteristics. Appropriate for scholars and students of democratization, authoritarianism, federalism, decentralization, and comparative politics, Illiberal Practices sheds light on the uneven extension of democracy within countries that have already democratized. Contributors: Jacqueline Behrend, André Borges, Julián Durazo Herrmann, Carlos Gervasoni, Edward L. Gibson, Desmond King, Inga A.-L. Saikkonen, Celina Souza, Maya Tudor, Laurence Whitehead, Adam Ziegfeld
This book presents the changing roles of urban governments and how local governments struggle to gain administrative, fiscal, and political power to combat current urban challenges in Kazakhstan. ...Focusing on the cities and regions selected by the national government of Kazakhstan to be the drivers of national economic development, the author analyses the impact of decentralization on the role of local governments. The book examines the practical experiences of city and regional governments with an emphasis on urban planning, public investment in national projects, and management of urban transport. Due to the complexity and irregular distribution of political reforms at different levels of local government in Kazakhstan, three separate studies are presented, each looking at a specific aspect of decentralization reform and local government function related to physical urban development and distribution of public investment. The author argues that, if the national government of Kazakhstan wants to concentrate economic resources in urban agglomerations, it is not enough to assume that local governments are ready to play the role of efficient planners and managers of urban development. A useful analysis illustrating cities and urban conglomerations as engines of growth in economic development, this book will be of interest to academics studying Central Asian Studies, in particular political and economic development, Development Studies, and Urban Studies.
Cities are often seen as helpless victims in a global flow of events and many view growing inequality in cities as inevitable. This engaging book rejects this gloomy prognosis and argues that ...imaginative place-based leadership can enable citizens to shape the urban future in accordance with progressive values - advancing social justice, promoting care for the environment and bolstering community empowerment.
This international and comparative book, written by an experienced author, shows how inspirational civic leaders are making a major difference in cities across the world. The analysis provides practical lessons for local leaders and a significant contribution to thinking on public service innovation for anyone who wants to change urban society for the better.
Political scientists have worried about declining levels of citizens' support for their regimes (legitimacy), but have failed to empirically link this decline to the survival or breakdown of ...democracy. This apparent paradox is the 'legitimacy puzzle', which this book addresses by examining political legitimacy's structure, sources, and effects. With exhaustive empirical analysis of high-quality survey data from eight Latin American nations, it confirms that legitimacy exists as multiple, distinct dimensions. It finds that one's position in society, education, knowledge, information, and experiences shape legitimacy norms. Contrary to expectations, however, citizens who are unhappy with their government's performance do not drop out of politics or resort mainly to destabilizing protest. Rather, the disaffected citizens of these Latin American democracies participate at high rates in conventional politics and in such alternative arenas as communal improvement and civil society. And despite regime performance problems, citizen support for democracy remains high.
