Rescaling Governance and the
Impacts of Political and Environmental
Decentralization
Special issue of World
Development journal, 34
(11) pp1851-1995,2006.
Ed. Simon Batterbury, Univ. of Melbourne,
Australia
www.simonbatterbury.net
The papers are
contributions to the emerging literature on the impacts of changes in the
level or scale of political governance. The ‘impacts’ discussed are broad,
though most of them emerge from neo-liberal development agendas and donor conditionalities designed to improve environmental governance.
Impacts range from landscape changes at field and village, to broad historical changes
to power relationships and social networks - they include changes to levels of
corruption, social wellbeing and social capital; functioning of community-based
natural resource management; regional development, and the effectiveness of new
political institutions to deliver equitable governance. Papers treat the
question of impact and outcome in different ways, but the governance theme is strong
in each. All papers combine on-the-ground empirical assessments (of
decentralization policies, in particular) with historical analysis and
reflection on individual cases. These papers, as we describe in the
introductory article, are important examples of the interdisciplinary contributions
of geography and allied disciplines to the understanding of governance.
The collection
makes the point that scaling ’down’ governance to local levels has serious problems
– many of these, however, replace other problems that existed prior to decentralization reforms being
initiated. Some of these issues are, of course, prefigured in the colonial
period. If one adopts the idea of ‘governmentality’
(see our intro) then a powerful development discourse can have multiple scale
effects, that need to be charted and explained. Scale and history matter – the
new critiques of “scale” in social science, by Massey, Ferguson, and my former
colleagues Sallie Marston and JP Jones don’t work as well in the cases outlines
here when governance occurs at discrete and bounded “scales” and political
hierarchies of power are very important. At these scales, of course, there are
complex social networks operating, as these authors suggest.
The collection has already
been used by DANIDA for training of senior government officials of the Royal Government
of Cambodia, to guide sub-national democratic development for the use of and
management of land and natural resources in the country (November 2006). The
collection is also being adopted in 2007 for teaching at several universities.
You have to subscribe to the
journal to get the papers (until the copyright allows greater access in a few
years), but get in touch with me if you have difficulties.
1. Rescaling governance and the impacts of political and
environmental decentralization: an introduction World
Development 34 (11): 1851-1863. older version here on the link)
Dr Simon Batterbury, School of Anthropology,
Geography and Environmental Studies (SAGES), University of
Melbourne, Australia
& Dr Jude L Fernando, IDCE, Clark
University, USA.
This article introduces a
collection of papers that provide empirical studies of the impacts that result
from changes to established modes of governance: in particular, decentralizing
the scale at which state institutions operate or the privatization of service
delivery. We critically assess the claims made for “good governance” reforms in
the light of these studies. Altering the scale, and the style, of governance
has inevitable consequences for power structures, institutions, livelihoods,
and physical landscapes. We offer a framework for analyzing these consequences,
focusing on the temporal and scalar dimensions of political and environmental
decentralization and changes to established modes of governance.
2. Recentralizing while
Decentralizing: How
National Governments
Reappropriate
Forest Resources. World Development 34(11)
1864-1886
Dr Jesse Ribot, Senior Fellow, World Resources Institute. Dr Arun Agrawal, Associate
Professor, University
of Michigan: Dr Ann
Larson, CIFOR
Decentralization
initiatives have been launched in the majority of developing countries, but
these rarely lay the foundations necessary to reach decentralization's
purported efficiency and equity benefits. This paper uses a comparative
empirical approach to show how central governments in six countries-Senegal,
Uganda, Nepal, Indonesia, Bolivia, and Nicaragua-use a variety of strategies to
obstruct the democratic decentralization of resource management and, hence,
retain central control. Effective decentralization requires the construction of
accountable institutions at all levels of government and a secure domain of
autonomous decision making at the local level.
3. Governing Access to Forests in Northern Ghana: micro-politics and the rents of non-enforcement World Development 34(11): 1887-1906.
[related
article here]
D.
Andrew Wardell, Counsellor-Development,
Royal Danish Embassy, Phnom Penh, Cambodia [Andrew
‘at’ wardell.dk] and Prof. Christian
Lund, IDS, Roskilde University, Denmark
Decentralization of natural
resource management is often presented as a novelty. However, successive
attempts to decentralize authority were undertaken during the development of
forest policy in the Northern Territories
of the Gold Coast Colony between the 1930s and 1950s. From 1960, however, this
was rolled back. Forest policy was thenceforth
characterized by centralization, exclusion, and restrictive legislation. New
forest policies of local management from the 1990s attempt to change this but
differ from "colonial decentralization" in terms of institutional fragmentation
and the absence of effective fiscal decentralization. The assumed illegality of
people's use of the resources and the non-enforcement of the law provides a
context for monetary and political rent seeking for political agents.
4. Decentralization, Ecological Construction, and the
Environment in Post-reform China:
Case Study from Uxin Banner, Inner
Mongolia. World Development
34(11) 1907-1921
Dr
Hong Jiang, Assistant Professor, Geography, University of Wisconsin
This paper explores why post-reform decentralization in China has failed to bring about environmental sustainability, using a case study from Uxin banner in Inner Mongolia. The local government has promoted intensive grassland improvement in its political, economic, and environmental policies under the umbrella of "ecological construction," a term used to describe the enhancement of vegetation cover on this arid terrain. The government's aggressive approach to ecological construction, however, is incongruent with the ecology of the Inner Mongolian drylands. Consequently, although beneficial to short-term economic growth, "ecological construction" has led to unintended grassland degradation, thus undermining environmental sustainability.
5. Decentralized
Corruption or Corrupt Decentralization? Community Monitoring of Poverty-Alleviation
Schemes in Eastern India World Development 34(11) 1922-1941
Dr. René Véron, Department of Geography, University
of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Dr Glyn Williams, Sheffield University. Prof Stuart Corbridge, London
School of Economics. Manoj Srivastava, London School
of Economics
Democratic decentralization and community participation often stand at the center of an agenda of "good governance" that aims to reduce corruption and increase the state's accountability to its citizens. However, this paper suggests based on empirical studies on the Employment Assurance Scheme in rural West Bengal that the strength of upward accountability (especially to political parties) is as crucial as downward accountability to communities. When these vertical accountabilities are weak, horizontal accountability structures between local civil society and officials can mutate into networks of corruption in which "community" actors become accomplices or primary agents.
6. Is small really beautiful? Community-based natural resource management in Malawi and Botswana. World Development 34(11)1942-1957
Prof Piers Blaikie, School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia
Community-based
natural resource management (CBNRM) remains a popular policy with many
international funding institutions, in spite of growing evidence of its
disappointing outcomes. It is underpinned by theoretically justified benefits
which serve to reproduce and market it. The paper explores approaches to
understand and rectify these failures. The conclusion is that explanatory
effort should be expanded from the "facilitating characteristics" of
potentially successful CBNRM sites to include two sets of interfaces-those
between donors and recipient states, and between the state (especially the
local state) and CBNRMs at the local level. Illustrative
examples in Botswana and Malawi are
given throughout the discussion.
Shorter version published as Blaikie, P. 2005.
Community-based natural resource management in Mali
and Botswana.
In Frank
Ellis, Harry A Freedman (eds.) 2005. Rural
Livelihoods and Poverty Reduction Policies. Routledge. Pp294-308.
7. Local Capacity, Village Governance and the Political Economy of Rural Development in Indonesia World Development 34(11)1958-1976
Prof.
Anthony Bebbington, (Institute for Development Policy and Management,
University of Manchester, UK Leni Dharmawan
(Social Development Group World Bank, Jakarta, Indonesia) , Erwin Fahmi (University of Indonesia, Jakarta) , Scott Guggenheim
(Social Development Group World Bank, Jakarta, Indonesia)
This paper develops a framework for conceptualizing local capacity to address
village level livelihood and governance problems. The framework is based on an
analysis of asset distribution, combined with an explicit analysis of the links
between processes of state formation, state-business linkages and local forms
of social capital. The framework is used to discuss findings from recent
research on village capacity in rural Indonesia. The discussion suggests
that it is possible to link a political, economic approach to rural development
with recent conceptualizations of social capital. Such an analysis can
illuminate the forms taken by and the effectiveness of village level collective
action in ways that either purely political economy or social capital approaches
do not.
8. Paradoxes of Decentralization: Water Reform and Social Implications in Mexico World Development 34(11) 1977-1995
Dr Margaret Wilder, Assistant Professor, Center for
Latin American Studies, University of Arizona, USA & Prof. Patricia Romero Lankao,
Deputy Director, Institute for the
Study of Society and Environment (ISSE), NCAR, Boulder Colorado, USA
Decentralized governance of
water resources is a centerpiece of Mexico's neoliberal
reform strategy. We analyze decentralization based on urban/rural case studies
in distinct geographical regions to ascertain whether it is linked to more
efficient water management or sustainable use of water resources, and to
examine its development implications. We assess whether or not private sector
management is related to a more efficient, sustainable, and accountable
management of water variety of municipal and private management arrangement in
four urban areas. We find that it has not resulted in efficiency or
sustainability gains. For agricultural water management, irrigation districts
in two case studies benefited from the more democratic participatory management
by water users under Mexico's
"transference" strategy, but did not result in greater equity,
efficiency or sustainability of water use. We argue that decentralization in
the Mexican water sector is context specific, and marked by limited benefits. Privatization
is less an instrument aimed at improving efficiency than a channel for
preferred treatment for capital accumulation by private entities as well as a
legitimized way for the state to transfer the burden of water management to
non-state institutions. The creation of new forms of water institutions
requires not the retrenchment of the state but rather its involvement to ensure
accountability, transparency, equity, and sustainability.
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