Decentralized Governance and Accountability is an edited volume whose stated purpose is to harness lessons from academic research on decentralization, with the aim of facilitating the exchange of knowledge between academics and international aid practitioners to inform future donor programming. The volume is organized around ten substantive chapters; each explores a key thematic question related to decentralized governance. In an effort to serve the interests of policy makers, the editors Jonathan Rodden and Erik Wibbels identified these themes in close collaboration with USAID’s Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance. The substantive focus of these chapters is wide ranging. Some address older long-standing questions, such as those about the relative merits of expenditure versus revenue decentralization and of subnational elections versus appointment. Other chapters address issues that have garnered significant attention relatively recently, such as how traditional leaders affect governance outcomes, as well as the effects of the proliferation of subnational administrative jurisdictions. The volume concludes with a chapter authored by three applied researchers offering a “practical postscript” that sheds light on the conditions shaping the potential for the uptake of academic research findings by policy makers and practitioners, particularly in the context of USAID organizations.
Although the insights offered by the volume are numerous, I discuss here three main contributions of Decentralized Governance and Accountability. First, the volume advances our understanding of the specific conditions under which decentralized governance is likely to lead to positive outcomes and when, why, and how it may result in adverse consequences. Second, the volume sheds light on the relative merits of different strategies pursued by donors working in a decentralized context. Third, it lays out an agenda for future research and specifies areas where collaboration between scholars and practitioners is likely to be especially useful and mutually beneficial. In the rest of the review, I elaborate on these contributions.
Decentralized governance has spurred a range of consequences—some beneficial, some mixed, and some adverse. Under what conditions does each type of consequence result? One of the main strengths of this volume is that each of the contributors is able to successfully move beyond the clichéd and uninformative assertion that “context matters” to elaborate on how specific contextual factors interact with the social or institutional features of interest to shape key outcomes. For example, two contributors point to the importance of information and monitoring on the part of citizens in shaping the effectiveness of subnational elections in generating government responsiveness (Guy Grossman) and of decentralized governance in promoting better business performance (Edmund Malesky). Other contributors emphasize the importance of the structure of communities, such as the density of social networks (Wibbels), the embeddedness of traditional leaders in their communities (Kate Baldwin and Pia Raffler), and local ethnic diversity (Thad Dunning). Meanwhile, Christopher Carter and Alison Post shed light on the importance of political competitiveness in shaping the performance of elected municipal government in providing urban services, arguing that such competition can lead not only to greater inclusion but also to excessive pressure to keep service fees low, thereby undermining efforts to maintain or expand existing infrastructure.
One adverse outcome of decentralization emphasized in several chapters is the reinforcement of clientelism and patronage. For example, Jan Pierskalla highlights how the creation of new administrative units at the subnational level often gives higher-level elites new opportunities for allocating patronage to local power brokers. Meanwhile, Dunning and chapter coauthors Gianmarco León and Leonard Wantchekon highlight how political decentralization in weak institutional environments can reinforce clientelistic networks and promote upward accountability to officials and party members at higher levels of government, rather than downward accountability. This discussion resonates with my own work (Anjali Thomas Bohlken, Democratization from Above: The Logic of Local Democracy in the Developing World, 2016), in which I argue that upward accountability is exacerbated when local governments have low levels of fiscal autonomy—a situation that leaves elected local officials highly dependent on party members at higher levels of government for resources. Thus, as several contributors highlight, party structure and organization also often play an important role in shaping the extent to which decentralization leads to upward rather than downward accountability.
The second contribution of the volume is to offer interesting and novel insights about the relative merits of different approaches to decentralized governance taken by donor programs. For example, based in part on his own findings on the role that parties play in influencing local governance outcomes in several Indian states, Dunning highlights how the efforts of donor agencies to strengthen political parties at the local level may not always be beneficial for local governance. Meanwhile, Baldwin and Raffler conclude that, although policies that exclude or disempower traditional leaders are rarely optimal, donors’ decisions to support and recognize traditional governance institutions could, under some conditions, make traditional leaders less dependent on their communities. Thus, they recommend that donors conduct a careful evaluation of the downward accountability and embeddedness of traditional leaders when developing their strategy toward traditional leaders and institutions. Wibbels also concludes that donors should take into account the structure of social networks when designing projects, either by implementing interventions that seek to change the nature of the social networks themselves or that take into account the opportunities and constraints that the existing social network structure provides.
Lastly, the volume does an excellent job of laying out a research agenda on decentralized governance, paying special attention to those areas that would likely serve the interests of both academics and practitioners. For example, Rodden argues that, rather than focusing on the effects of local taxation, which often proves difficult to implement, scholars should explore more common but less academically studied forms of informal local revenue mobilization that are tightly linked to the provision of specific goods and services. Other contributors pay special attention to the design of experiments. For example, in Fotini Christia’s review, she argues that, although community-driven development programs in postconflict settings often comprise a bundle of interventions, donors should implement the different component interventions separately both to allow better identification of the effects of individual interventions and to facilitate implementation and delivery. Suggestions such as these are useful, because they not only focus on gaps in knowledge but also pay heed to the practicalities of partnerships between donors, academics, and governments.
In seeking to tackle a series of complex questions about decentralized governance, this volume undertakes a daunting challenge. Conclusions are often difficult to draw, in part because there is frequently a paucity of empirical research on several of the issues that the contributors explore. Even on questions for which a handful of studies exist, the findings often conflict with one another, and the contributors can at best conjecture as to the reason for the disparate results. And, as with many important questions of interest to both academics and practitioners, the identification of causal effects in empirical research is tricky. Despite these challenges, however, the contributors to this volume do an impressive job overall of striking a careful balance between grappling with the theoretical and methodological complexities of the research on each question and distilling the findings into a set of coherent conclusions. We are left with a series of rich evidence-based insights about decentralized governance, as well as an agenda for future policy-relevant research on the subject to which any scholar working in this area should pay close attention.
