Decentralization and Local Governance in Developing Countries: A Comparative Perspective (Mit Press) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262524546 ISBN 13: 9780262524544

Publisher: MIT Press, 2006

Synopsis

Over the past three decades the developing world has seen increasing devolution of political and economic power to local governments. Decentralization is considered an important element of participatory democracy and, along with privatization and deregulation, represents a substantial reduction in the authority of national governments over economic policy. The contributors to Decentralization and Local Governance in Developing Countries examine this institutional transformation from comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives, offering detailed case studies of decentralization in eight countries: Bolivia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Africa, and Uganda.

Some of these countries witnessed an unprecedented "big bang" shift toward comprehensive political and economic decentralization: Bolivia in 1995 and Indonesia after the fall of Suharto in 1998. Brazil and India decentralized in an uneven and more gradual manner. In some other countries (such as Pakistan), devolution represented an instrument for consolidation of power of a nondemocratic national government. In China, local governments were granted much economic but little political power. South Africa made the transition from the undemocratic decentralization of apartheid to decentralization under a democratic constitution. The studies provide a comparative perspective on the political and economic context within which decentralization took place, and how this shaped its design and possible impact.

Contributors
Omar Azfar, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Pranab Bardhan, Shubham Chaudhuri, Ali Cheema, Jean-Paul Faguet, Bert Hofman, Kai Kaiser, Philip E. Keefer, Asim Ijaz Khwaja, Justin Yifu Lin, Mingxing Liu, Jeffrey Livingston, Patrick Meagher, Dilip Mookherjee, Ambar Narayan, Adnan Qadir, Ran Tao, Tara Vishwanath, Martin Wittenberg

About this title

About the Author

Pranab Bardhan is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Scarcity, Conflicts, and Cooperation (MIT Press, 2004) and coeditor (with Christopher Udry) of Readings in Development Microeconomics, Volumes I and II (MIT Press, 2000).

Review

Although Bardhan and Mookherjee are economists, they understand that decentralization is fundamentally a political and social transformation. Their volume begins to challenge artificial disciplinary boundaries that have long impeded better conceptual and empirical analysis of decentralization in developing countries.

―Paul Smoke, Associate Professor and Director of International Programs, Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York University

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0262524546
• ISBN 13: 9780262524544
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 363
• Editor: Bardhan Pranab, Mookherjee Dilip