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

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. These descriptions are drawn from Andersson, Gordillo de Anda, and van Laerhoven 2008.

  2. The fieldwork was carried out by DESER (South Brazil), SEI (Northeast Brazil), Centro Ideas (Peru, Sierra and Selva), Instituto APOYO (Peru, coastal region), Gestión y Desarrollo (Chile), INDESO (Mexico, center and northern states), and Instituto MAYA (Mexico, southern states).

  3. Two CBO’s were found and interviewed in all municipalities. In Chile, representatives of three community-based organizations were interviewed.

  4. A variety of tests for multicollinearity were performed on the independent variables. The highest degree of correlation between variables (-0.67) was between leftist party candidates and local reelection, likely representing the wave of leftist parties taking power during the same period. Other variables with high collinearly include the obvious relationship between mayoral reelection and the length of their position (0.51).

  5. Although a simple t-test comparing the average number of groups across centralized and decentralized regimes was performed, there is no significant difference.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Political Science Department, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA

    Derek Kauneckis

  2. Department of Political Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

    Krister Andersson

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  1. Derek Kauneckis
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  2. Krister Andersson
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Correspondence to Derek Kauneckis.

Appendix

Appendix

Fig. 1
figure 1

Interaction of national political institutions and local incentive structure

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Graph 1
figure 2

Dependent variable by quality of service and country

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Kauneckis, D., Andersson, K. Making Decentralization Work: A Cross-national Examination of Local Governments and Natural Resource Governance in Latin America. St Comp Int Dev 44, 23–46 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-008-9036-6

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