At the end of the twentieth century, academics and policymakers welcomed a trend toward fiscal and political decentralization as part of a potential solution for slow economic growth and poor performance by insulated, unaccountable governments. For the last two decades, researchers have been trying to answer a series of vexing questions about the political economy of multi-layered governance. Much of the best recent research on decentralization has come from close collaborations between university researchers and international aid institutions. As the volume and quality of this collaborative research have increased in recent decades, the time has come to review the lessons from this literature and apply them to debates about future programming. In this volume, the contributors place this research in the broader history of engagement between aid institutions and academics, particularly in the area of decentralized governance, and outline the challenges and opportunities to link evidence and policy action.

This book, first published in 2005, develops a comparative model of intergovernmental bargaining to account for variation in the capacity of federations in the developing world to undertake economic policy reform, suggesting that many market reform policies are a function of a constant process of bargaining between national and regional leaders struggling for political survival. As the degree of national-regional disagreement mounts, collective action on reforms that require implementation at multiple levels of government becomes more difficult. The degree to which the two factors conflict depends on four factors: the individual electoral interests, a shared intergovernmental fiscal system, the manner in which regional interests are represented in national policy making and the levers of partisan influence national leaders have over subnational politicians. In testing the argument with a combination of cross-sectional time-series and case study analysis, this book contributes to the broad literatures on development and the comparative political economy of federalism and decentralization.

This book, first published in 2005, develops a comparative model of intergovernmental bargaining to account for variation in the capacity of federations in the developing world to undertake economic policy reform, suggesting that many market reform policies are a function of a constant process of bargaining between national and regional leaders struggling for political survival. As the degree of national-regional disagreement mounts, collective action on reforms that require implementation at multiple levels of government becomes more difficult. The degree to which the two factors conflict depends on four factors: the individual electoral interests, a shared intergovernmental fiscal system, the manner in which regional interests are represented in national policy making and the levers of partisan influence national leaders have over subnational politicians. In testing the argument with a combination of cross-sectional time-series and case study analysis, this book contributes to the broad literatures on development and the comparative political economy of federalism and decentralization.