A01=Merilee S. Grindle
Accountability
Activism
Author_Merilee S. Grindle
Ayuntamiento
Bribery
Budget crisis
Capacity building
Category=JPH
Category=JPR
Citizens (Spanish political party)
Civil registry
Civil society
Clientelism
Corruption
Decentralization
Democracy
Democratization
Development aid
Dictatorship
Dominant-party system
Economic development
Economics
Electoral fraud
Electoral reform
Elite
Elite capture
Employment
Entrepreneurship
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Foray
Funding
Good governance
Good government
Governance
Government failure
Incumbent
Institution
Institutional Revolutionary Party
Insurgency
Lobbying
Local economic development
Local election
Local government
Ministry of Social Development (Panama)
Multi-party system
Municipal services
New Federalism
New public management
Participatory budgeting
Party platform
Political boss
Political campaign
Political party
Politician
Politics
Poverty reduction
Professionalization
Property tax
Public administration
Public sector
Public security
Quality assurance
Rotary International
Social safety net
Solidaridad
State government
Subsidy
Tamaulipas
Tax
Tax holiday
Urbanization
Voting
Welfare
WIN Party
Product details
- ISBN 9780691140988
- Weight: 369g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 29 Mar 2009
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Many developing countries have a history of highly centralized governments. Since the late 1980s, a large number of these governments have introduced decentralization to increase democracy and improve services, especially in small communities far from capital cities. In Going Local, an unprecedented study of the effects of decentralization on thirty Mexican municipalities, Merilee Grindle describes how local governments respond when they are assigned new responsibilities and resources under decentralization policies. She explains why decentralization leads to better local governments in some cases--and why it fails to in others. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, Grindle examines data based on a random sample of Mexican municipalities--and ventures into town halls to follow public officials as they seek to manage a variety of tasks amid conflicting pressures and new expectations. Decentralization, she discovers, is a double-edged sword. While it allows public leaders to make significant reforms quickly, institutional weaknesses undermine the durability of change, and legacies of the past continue to affect how public problems are addressed.
Citizens participate, but they are more successful at extracting resources from government than in holding local officials and agencies accountable for their actions. The benefits of decentralization regularly predicted by economists, political scientists, and management specialists are not inevitable, she argues. Rather, they are strongly influenced by the quality of local leadership and politics.
Merilee S. Grindle is Edward S. Mason Professor of International Development at the Kennedy School of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author, most recently, of "Despite the Odds: The Contentious Politics of Education Reform" (Princeton).
