Making Decentralization Work: A Cross-national Examination of Local Governments and Natural Resource Governance in Latin America

There has been increased emphasis in the last three decades on the decentralization of natural resource governance decisions to local government in developing countries as a means of improving environmental quality, public service delivery, and the accountability of local officials. We examine the performance of decentralization of natural resource management services in a large sample of municipal governments in four Latin American countries. Our analysis includes a variety of factors discussed in the literature as important in influencing the responsiveness of government officials to local needs. We provide a nested institutional model in which local officials respond to incentives created by the structure of formal political institutions at both the local and national level. The results provide support for the importance of considering local and national institutional arrangements as these co-determine the political incentives within decentralized systems.

Krister AnderssonEmail:

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Derek Kauneckis   is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Nevada, Reno. His research examines environmental governance, policy design and the development of decision-making structures as they relate to environmental outcomes. Current work focuses on property right arrangements, sustainability and science and technology policy within federal systems. He holds a M.S. in International Development from UC Davis and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from Indiana University at Bloomington. Krister Andersson   is an assistant professor in environmental policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research focuses on issues related to public policy reforms and their mixed effects on rural development and natural resource governance in Latin America. His work has appeared in journals such as World Development, Comparative Political Studies, and the Journal of Policy Analysis, and Management, among others. In the book The Samaritans Dilemma (Oxford, 2005) he and his co-authors examine the institutional incentive structures of development aid.