Towards a Theory of Local Governance and Public Goods Provision

Abstract

Under-provision of essential public goods is making development in Africa slower and more inequitable than it needs to be. A good part of this problem concerns the governance of provision at sub-national levels. This article provides a mid-term report on a multi-country research effort to shed light on the institutional sources of variation in local public goods provision. The particular focus is on key bottlenecks to improvement in maternal mortality, water and sanitation, facilitation of markets and enterprise, and public order and security. Drawing on fieldwork evidence and secondary literature, it identifies three clusters of issues and associated explanatory variables which seem to account for much of the variation in intermediate outcomes. They concern the extent of policy-driven incoherence in the institutional framework, the strength of corporate disciplines in provider organisations and the degree to which self-help is able to be 'locally anchored' in two particular senses.

The Politics of Inclusive Development

“…But while the role of top-down accountability comes out strongly in Rwanda and Ghana, in other cases there is evidence that a combination of top-down and bottom-up accountability can drive progress, as in Indonesia, where they worked in tandem but to different effect. The case studies therefore support the move in wider literature towards examining top-down and bottom-up accountability as complementary as opposed to being an 'either or' proposition (Joshi 2012).The cases also illustrate findings made elsewhere that pro-poor service provision might occur where forms of social accountability draw on moral reciprocity, are locally grounded, and build on a culture of participation (Booth 2011a;Hickey 2006;Hossain 2010). For example, the accountability of local leaders in the health sector in Bangladesh depended on the extent to which those leaders were 'embedded' in local networks of relationships between local authorities, citizen groups, and service providers.…”

“…It is well understood, at the conceptual level at least, that politics often underlies or exacerbates capacity constraints (Booth 2011a). The idea of public services as an inherently political undertaking, intimately bound to the nature of the state and the genesis of the social contract, has enjoyed both a long tradition in scholarly enquiry and a recent revival alongside the rise of state-building in development discourse (OECD 2008).…”

The Politics of What Works in Service Delivery: An Evidence-Based Review

“…While there are good reasons to be cautious about labelling cases as 'successful', there is nevertheless a general openness to the idea that stories of success or progress at least, can be useful learning tools (ODI, 2011 8 ). It is notable that recent research into the politics of service provision has turned its attention to explaining variation and exception in the face of overwhelming poor performance (Booth, 2011b), identifying institutional arrangements that are comparably better at dealing with some of the problems that arise in public service provision (Besley and Ghatak, 2007), and explaining why some cases run against the general patterns of institutional failure or corruption (Leftwich, 2010). Like these studies, the purpose here is not to provide a blueprint for success elsewhere, but rather, to begin to advance a research agenda that aims to understand better what accounts for variations in outcomes in the face of widespread under-provision.…”

Developmental States: A Review of the Literature

“…The absence of these in case of SubSaharan Africa is seen to account for its low levels of development and unsuccessful industrialisation. Booth, 2010 Examines the hypothesis of a link between long-horizon centralised rent processes and economic growth. It examines 5 African countries Côte d'Ivoire, Malawi, Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania during periods identified as characterised by long-horizon centralised rent processes.…”