Decentralization and Rural Areas in Mozambique, Colombia, and Bolivia

Abstract

Political decentralization (hereafter “decentralization”) is the devolution of power from a central government to subnational governments. Nationally, decentralization promotes a system of vertical checks and balances. Subnationally, decentralization may increase basic service provision in rural areas, a benefit of particular importance to countries in the Global South, but it also has known trade-offs. Many countries in the Global South passed decentralization reforms during the Third Wave of global democratic expansion in the 1980s and 1990s. However, Latin American countries more fully implemented these reforms than did African countries. The existing literature focuses disproportionately on decentralization in Latin America and does not adequately explain why a similarly situated region of the Global South would have such different policy outcomes. This article compares decentralization in Colombia, Bolivia, and Mozambique between 1986 and today. Colombia and Bolivia decentralized early and substantively, while Mozambique decentralized later and more shallowly. Today in Mozambique, a national debate about decentralization rages. This analysis is based on over 200 unstructured interviews selected through a snowballing methodology in each of the countries. I conducted interviews in four languages (Spanish, Quechua, Portuguese, and English) over a twenty-seven-year period. Recent Mozambique fieldwork allows the description of the current decentralization debate. Five factors seem to explain differences between the Latin American cases and the African cases: duration of historical experience with liberal democracy ideas, the general level of social indicators at the time of decentralization, political leadership, differential high costs for influential political forces, and unique characteristics of civil society in each country. This article further argues that current literature does not adequately include “ruralness” as a concept in the analysis of decentralization.