Look Who’s Back: Recentralisation in Colombia

Abstract

Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has once again put the distribution of responsibilities, resources and authority between different levels of government at the heart of political debate. Political leaders and common citizens in a number of cities began to claim more powers and resources for their local mayors, who were perceived as far more attentive than the central governments to deal with the crisis (see BBC 2020; El Clarin 2020; Neira 2020). In Colombia, along with the debate on which level of government must be accountable for the number of cases, deaths and consequences of the policy responses, emerged the question on how and why the country ended up so recentralised.This book offers a new approach: an interactive and cross-temporal framework to explain recentralisation. According to the main argument of the book, Colombia's increases in the levels of recentralisation were the outcomes of the interaction between economic performance and institutional contexts (summarised in Table 1.1). When an economic crisis (decreasing GDP) takes place in a predominantly decentralised institutional context (PDI), one can expect an increase of recentralisation. If an economic boom (growing GDP) occurs in the same context, one should expect a decrease of recentralisation. In turn, if there is an economic crisis in a predominantly recentralised institutional context (PRI), one can expect less recentralisation. If, instead, an economic boom occurs in the same context, one should expect even more recentralisation. The causal