Delegative dilemmas and horizontal logics: Subnational industrial policy in Spain and Brazil

Scholars of “decentralization” have recently revealed the importance of subnational industrial policy in responding to the challenges of globalization. But these treatments tend to make endemic assumptions about either the universal efficiency or inefficiency of decentralization. This article argues that subnational industrial policy performance is politically contingent and develops national patterns that are more composite than endemic. Political contingency is analyzed in terms of subnational incumbents' incentives to delegate authority and resources to industrial policy agencies and the degree of symmetry in authority and information flows across these agencies. A cross-regional/cross-national comparison of several subnational units in Spain and Brazil demonstrates that subnational industrial policy is implemented and maintained where incumbents delegate and policy-making agencies are symmetrically integrated. Alfred P. Montero is an assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton College and book review editor forLatin American Politics and Society. His research on subnational political economy is the subject of his forthcoming book,Shifting States in Global Markets: Subnational Industrial Policy in Contemporary Brazil and Spain, Penn State University Press. He has published on the subject of the political economy of decentralization and federalism inComparative Politics, Latin American Politics and Society, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, and numerous edited volumes.     

From environmental policy concepts to practicable tools: Knowledge creation and delegation in multilevel systems

The problem‐solving capacity and problem‐generating potential of multilevel systems entail the need for the delegation of authority. When the problem concerned is about how to put an abstract policy concept into a practicable policy tool, the choice of the respective delegation trajectory depends on the policy models or the policy‐relevant knowledge that the respective political levels can supply. When regarding the European Union (EU) level as the starting point of knowledge creation and delegation trajectories, and concentrating on transaction costs, policy knowledge and models generated at the international level provide the most cost‐effective solution. Only when the international level is not able to provide further policy knowledge and innovation does the EU delegate its definitional authority, first downward to the member states and then sideways to EU agencies. We illustrate the plausibility of our dynamic understanding of multilevel governance by using Environmental Policy Integration as an example.     

Subnational Economic Nationalism? The contradictory effects of decentralization in Peru

Across the third world, transnational corporations (TNCs) and subnational governments (SNGs) are coming into new forms of contact as a result of liberalization and decentralization. Despite scholarly expectations that subnational governments will respond by seeking out foreign direct investment, in much of Latin America these governments are confronting rather than courting transnational corporations. Conceptualizing this phenomenon as ‘subnational economic nationalism’, the article explores both how subnational governments are challenging neoliberalism and why these challenges often fail to subvert neoliberal outcomes. By examining two struggles against transnational capital that had different outcomes but that took place within a single subnational jurisdiction (Arequipa, Peru), the article argues that decentralization can work at cross purposes. While voters are increasingly demanding that elected subnational officials adopt nationalist positions vis-à-vis TNCs, these same officials often seek financial support from TNCs so that they can compete successfully in the subnational elections that have been introduced by political decentralization.     

Dimensions of Authority in Oversight Agencies: American and Australian Comparisons

Fraud, waste, and abuse damage public administration. Responding involves law enforcement and best practice administration. Many jurisdictions create watchdog agencies to perform this role. A model, which includes seven dimensions of jurisdiction and authority that policymakers should consider when creating an oversight entity, is presented. The model goes beyond the simple functional jurisdiction, i.e., who is overseen and how oversight occurs. Four subnational watchdog agencies in two countries are examined to demonstrate the trade-offs that occur in each dimension when the agencies are designed. This analysis demonstrates there are significant balancing issues at stake, which impact watchdog effectiveness.     

An Approach to Measuring Subnational Administrative Autonomy in Education

Efforts to measure decentralization have focused on political or fiscal autonomy, but not on administrative autonomy. Focusing on the education sector, we measured de facto subnational administrative autonomy across 64 countries/economies, via the domains of human resource management, salary management, budget management, and service content design. The findings reveal that subnational autonomy can differ substantially across those domains and within countries, and that the use of a single country-level indicator for administrative decentralization is inadequate. Furthermore, we show that administrative decentralization is as significant a factor as federal status in evaluating the degree to which a country/economy is decentralized or centralized.     

Subnational governments in a stabilization program: lessons learned in Argentina

Autonomous subnational governments pose a serious challenge to national stabilization strategies. As illustrated by the case of Argentina, fiscal reforms that have been successfuly implemented at the national level have proved to be much harder to induce among subnational governments. Provincial reform is still largely pending and provincial governments continue to generate large public deficits, posing a threat to the success of Argentina's overall reform program in the medium and long term.

This paper provides a retrospective on Argentina's reform program with a focus on subnational governments. It identifies elements within the reform program itself, such as windfall increases of guaranteed central transfers, that systematically undermined early efforts to induce provincial reform. It also examines the government's strategy to neutralize their effects through the decentralization of services and the negotiation of two fiscal pacts, as well as its success in introducing major reforms by capitalizing on the financial pressure that resulted from the Mexican crisis. Finally, it draws lessons of experience that may be useful for policy makers faced with the similar challenge of inducing fiscal reform within autonomous subnational goverments.     

Subnational Lobbying and Structural Funds: A French–Scottish Comparison

This article examines subnational actors’ engagement with the European Union's structural funds, and whether these actors are significant in this policy sector. It examines this question by comparing one French regional council with one set of Scottish local authorities. It concludes that there are considerable similarities between the subnational actors studied, in spite of differences in their location and the constitutional structure within which they are located. The subnational actors have unilaterally developed a capacity for engaging in the policy sector. In both cases, however, this engagement is not evidence of a ‘by-passing’ of the central government. Instead, the subnational authorities have worked alongside central government departments to achieve their goals.     

The challenge of design of intergovernmental relations in economies in transition

The governments of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are at a crucial juncture in their movement from highly centralized command economies to more decentralized market economies. While there is a belief in these countries that decentralization brings greater economic efficiency, the reality is that such a transition is a difficult process. This paper examines what types of administrative reforms are needed for the decentralization process, how far along the countries are with respect to these reforms, and what reforms are missing. As we discuss, many of the necessary administration reforms are missing and we argue that more attention must be paid to these elements for successful decentralization of these governments.

This paper examines the recent experience and reform needs of the key administrative aspects of the design of intergovernmental relations in countries in transition in Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union. There is a widespread realization in all of these countries that decentralizing government will help increase efficiency in the public sector just as privatization will improve efficiency in their economies. Decentralization of government operations is also attractive as a way to cement a democratic form of government. Despite the appearances of the existence of an already decentralized system, such as in the case of the Soviet Union, this experiment started in practically all cases with a lack of institutions and experience on how decentralized government operations should be organized.

As different as these countries are, there are many similarities in the reform process they are following in order to decentralize government structure. While the basic components of a decentralized system of government are emerging in many of these countries the structure of government has not fully evolved in a manner that can support such a decentralized system. Often, governments remain structured along a vertical hierarchy: information, budgetary authority, and revenue pass from the central government down to subnational levels of government while little communication or interaction exists at a horizontal level. In general, the assignment of revenue and expenditure has not been clearly defined among the two or three levels of government, central government transfers continue to occur in a relatively ad hoc manner, and the entire budgeting system still rests in many cases on more or less formal system of negotiations and bargaining among the different levels of government. There has been some change in this structure in certain countries. Over the last three years, both Poland and Hungary have legally increased the automony of subnational governments. In 1994 in Russia a new and more transparent system of intergovernmental grants has been established between the federal government and the regions. In 1994 also, Latvia introduced a more transparent formula-driven, transfer formula for the regional and municipal governments.

The focus of this paper is to develop a “blue print” for necessary changes in organization and administration of intergovernmental relations in countries in transition. While many experts have recently been discussing the public finance policy components of this new, evolving relationship among levels of government, less attention has been paid to the structural and administrative challenges and the information design issues that must be met in order to develop and support a system of intergovernmental relations.

The paper is organized as follows: First we review the major responsibilities and their allocation among levels of government, the assignment of revenue sources, and the system of transfers. We then turn to a discussion of the current experience of Eastern European and NIS countries in the context of the structural components of an intergovernmental fiscal system. Next, we analyze the organizational reforms that are necessary for the efficient functioning of a decentralized system of government in the economies in transition. Finally we “rate” the transition economies in relation to their current design of the system of intergovernmental relations and support mechanisms.     

Pitfalls of power to the people: Decentralization,local government performance,and system support in Bolivia

Across the developing world, many governments have implemented political reforms—heavily promoted by international donors—designed to transfer greater power to subnational levels of government and to provide a more substantial policymaking and oversight role to citizens. Although economic analyses have frequently argued that such decentralization programs improve the efficiency of public expenditures, far less is known about their political impact. Based on an analysis of two large national public-opinion surveys from Bolivia, a country that has recently implemented one of the most comprehensive decentralization reforms yet attempted in Latin America, we analyze the role decentralized local institutions are playing in shaping citizen attitudes toward their political system. Our findings support the contention that decentralization can bolster citizen levels of system support at the national level. Equally important, however, we also demonstrate that the renewed emphasis on local government can have the opposite effect of producingmore negative views of the political system when the performance of local institutions falters. Jonathan T. Hiskey is assistant professor of political science at the Univeristy of California, Riverside. His most recent research focuses on subnational processes of political and economic development taking place across Latin America. Mitchell A. Seligson is Daniel H. Wallace Professor of Political Science, research professor of international studies, and professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. His research centers on surveys of democratic values and behaviors in Latin America.     

Federal politics and market reform in the developing world

Prior research on the politics of market reform in developing nations has generally ignored the significant role of federal political and economic arrangements in shaping adjustment processes. In contrast, this research develops a model of macroeconomic reform that accounts for the significance of subnational economic policy in the developing world’s nine major federations. I examine five hypotheses which are expected to influence the capacity of developing federations to conduct polity consistent with the exigencies of market pressures. With the use of a cross-sectional time-series analysis of fiscal and monetary policies, I show that the policy divergence between levels of government shrinks when provincial governments have greater fiscal power and there are high degrees of party centralization across levels of government. These findings have important implications for the political economy of market reform, the widespread move toward fiscal decentralization, and the design of regional supranational institutions. This research is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant SBR-9809211. I would like to thank Karen Remmer, Ken Roberts, Wendy Hansen, Alok Bohara, and excellent reviewers for helpful comments.     

Unintended Consequences of Vigilance Activities in Two Project Settings in India

Anti-corruption agencies that are independent and vested with the authority to enforce laws can be a potent force in combating corruption. However, overzealous anti-corruption agencies acting in the absence of an effective institutional environment could paralyse the public sector's decision-making apparatus by instilling a sense of hesitancy into the officials’ minds. Through ethnographic studies of two infrastructure projects in India, I investigate how anti-corruption agencies contributed to project delays. This research supplements the existing discourse on factors contributing to the efficiency of anti-corruption agencies, given the constraints of project settings, and provides insights towards policy making in this domain.     

The Dynamics of Decentralization and Recentralization

Decentralization of authority from central government to sub-national governments is an important part of modern public sector reforms and has been the primary contribution to public sector reform in Denmark and the other Nordic countries. On the assumption that political and administrative actors are authority maximizers, the paper analyses how national and sub-national actors react to these decentralization goals, and the extent to which they are implemented. The analysis points to the importance of both institutional and power variables. It concludes that dynamic change can take place in a public sector which is characterized by strong corporatist and multi-level institutions, such as in Denmark.     

National administrative agencies in transition: A comparison of sweden and the united states

The abilities of national administrative agencies in Sweden and the United States to function effectively are influenced by their responses to three major phenomena: 1) growth in the responsibilities of government; 2) decentralization; and, 3) privatization. This paper delineates how these phenomena have affected the development of national administrative organizations in these two countries. Implications for administering national agencies in increasingly complex interorganizational environments are discussed.     

Network Governance of Private Sector Development Policy Implementation in Singapore

The discussion examines private sector development policy implementation in Singapore, examining the new role of the government's economic development agencies from the point of changing relationships among public and non-state actors in the policy arena. Singapore's model of private sector development consists of an exclusive network of partnerships among economic development agencies and between these agencies and private sector actors, such as business and organized labour, as integral policy stakeholders. As Singapore has moved within the past 15 years towards its articulated goal of becoming a knowledge-based economy and an industrial hub in the Asia Pacific region, the country's model of network governance is undergoing a gradual reconfiguration to include a greater role for local enterprises in the policy process. The changing institutional mechanics of network governance surrounding the new model of private sector development in Singapore are examined, along with the highlights of some implications surrounding this shift.     

Decentralization,Government Capacity,and Environmental Policy Performance: A Cross-National Analysis

This study examines how decentralization and government capacity interactively shape national environmental policy performance. Despite the extensive literature on the policy consequences of decentralization, what remains deficient is a proper understanding of the role that government capacity may play in the process. This study advances an integrative proposition that decentralization can improve policy performance if the government is equipped with capable, efficient and trustworthy administrative apparatus. Findings from a cross-national analysis on national environmental policy performance lend strong support for the general argument by revealing that such positive effects of decentralization are significantly strengthened by the quality of government capacity.     

Structural and Textural Dimensions of Territorial State Organisation

In the framework of devolution, British scholars have inquired how to assess the constitutional position of the local government in the UK and its effect for improving or hindering autonomy and democracy at the local level. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the same topic from a more general and comparative perspective, combining conceptual tools of continental public law and political science. To do this the paper proposes to differentiate three concepts of territorial state configuration. These concepts are territorial structure, territorial texture, and vertical diffusion of state authority. This paper asserts that the confusion of these three dimensions has not only impaired an adequate assessment of the constitutional position of local governments, but that the structural dimension has been under-theorised, thus distorting measurements of subnational authority. Moreover, scholars have underestimated structural constraints upon changes in the local government position within the polity. Finally, an operationalisation of the new findings is offered by plotting selected countries in a Cartesian system comparing them from the perspective of territorial structure and vertical authority diffusion.     

Multi-Level Governance as ‘Post-Constitutional’ Politics: Subnational Actors and the Swedish Constitution

In 2011, an amendment was introduced to the Swedish constitution to provide stronger protection for local self-government. This article seeks to explain this amendment in the light of the development of central-local relations towards multi-level governance (MLG). It explores the adaptation hypothesis, i.e. the developments in MLG are followed by an adjustment in constitutional policy that is influenced by subnational actors, through an empirical study of the most prominent Swedish subnational actor – the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SALAR). The research showed that SALAR developed an agenda for the regulation of central-local relations in the constitution. SALAR was able to exert influence with this agenda by participating in the policy-making process prior to the amendment of the constitution. The research findings underscore that even though MLG per se has little to do with constitutional policy, it has consequences for such policy due to the role played by subnational actors.     

TRANSFORMING PUBLIC SERVICES: CONTRACTING FOR SOCIAL AND HEALTH SERVICES IN THE US

Government contracting with private service organizations has grown rapidly in the United States in the last 25 years. Advocates of contracting hope that it will spur competition among service agencies, lowering costs and improving service quality. In practice, however, contracting departs significantly from this competitive model. Instead, government and private agencies develop long-term relationships which can be considered regimes governed by specific norms and expectations. These regimes profoundly influence the delivery of services and the politics of contracting. This article analyses these regimes in the context of the contested nature of public authority. The article concludes with suggestions for reforming public policy to improve the performance and effectiveness of contracted services.     

NOT SO ‘ARM'S LENGTH’: REINTERPRETING AGENCIES IN UK CENTRAL GOVERNMENT

Administrative decentralization to government agencies (so‐called ‘agencification’) has attracted much attention in recent years, increasingly for its longevity or evolution after the ‘high’ managerialism of the 1980s, and largely through a neo‐positivist epistemology. Drawing on techniques of narrative and discourse analysis, and a model of incremental ideational change, this article identifies the necessity of supplementing those existing large‐N analyses of agencification's expansion and decline with qualitative attention to the endurance of policy meaning. It demonstrates how the original foundations of managerialism, civil service empowerment and decentralization from the UK's seminal ‘Next Steps’ agency programme are eschewed in contemporary reform discourse, where agencification is instead advocated as centralized, politically proximate and departmentalized governance. This substantial reinterpretation of the arm's‐length concept not only challenges existing claims of continuity in UK administrative policy, but also demonstrates the utility of interpretive methods for exploring longevity in public management more widely.     

Governance,federalism and organizing institutions to manage complex problems

In managing complex policy problems in the federal system, state and local governments are organized into different arrangements for translating policy goals into policy outcomes. Air quality management is used as a test case to understand these variations and their impact on policy outcomes. With data from Clean Air Act implementation plans and a survey of state and local air quality managers, five separate institutional designs are identified: (1) central agencies; (2) top-down; (3) donor–recipient; (4) regional agencies; and (5) emergent governance. Findings indicate that some arrangements (donor–recipient and emergent governance) result in notably better air quality than others (central agencies, top-down). Specifically, when designed to allow bargaining between state and local officials, intergovernmental management is still the most effective approach to complex policy problems; but, in absence of this, conventional federalism arrangements are less effective than public agencies self-organizing around shared policy goals.