Decentralization, Citizen Participation, and the Role of the State

Abstract

Over the past decade, the multilateral development community' has espoused the fiscal and administrative decentralization of the social sectors and often specifically of primary and secondary schooling (e.g., see IDB, 1994: 194; Dillinger, 1995). Although nearly every country in Latin America has undertaken some form of educational decentralization, very little is known about the attributes of such policies. They often go hand in hand with a call for increased parental and community involvement (see Dimmock, Donoghue, and Robb, 1996) that has come both from the top down (e.g., from the multilateral community) and from the bottom up (e.g., from grassroots organizations and nongovernmental organizations [NGOs]). Since 1993, Nicaragua has set in motion one of the most radical educational decentralization experiments in Latin America. Its autonomous schools program implements a system of school-based management with local school-site councils that have a voting majority of parents and allocate resources that derive in part from fees charged to parents. Nowhere in Latin America have parents officially been given so much responsibility, and nowhere have they been asked to provide directly such a large proportion of school resources. The confluence of transferring responsibilities to schoolsite councils and the charging of fees is not coincidental. Both derive from social movements solidly within the so-called neoliberal reform model