Reinventing federalism: Gouverance of decentralized institutional experiments in Latin America

This essay analyzes the intersection between local institutional and economic development, while showing how national governments and multilateral agencies can better assist decentralized development, The first part examines the advances made by public-private "partnerships" at municipal and provincial levels across Latin America. Such partnerships have risen in the face of failures by approaches focused mainly on bureaucratic and free market solutions as well as purely centralized and decentralized solutions. I find that partnerships aid development when national or provincial authorities delegate new powers to local actors in order to form new public-private coalitions and when monitoring is based on deliberative or participatory forms of governance. The second part of the essay then turns to a recent institutional experiment in Argentina, in which national government actors, with the aid of the the multilaterals, attempted to help provinces rebuild their institutional capacities by combining learning and monitoring, Again, such an innovation works when the governance is based on delegation and disciplined deliberation. This analysis suggests alternative paths out of the current crisis in Argentina, but notes that sustainable paths of institutional reform demand a rennovation of federalism and the role of the multilaterals.