Why do local elected representatives facing similar institutional constraints choose different strategies? This dissertation develops a theory of strategy choice under incomplete decentralization, where municipal councilors remain electorally accountable but depend on bureaucratic and higher-level political actors for implementation, finance, and approval. Administrative, fiscal, and political constraints define the institutional setting, while leverage, the capacity to induce response, and cover, protection from sanction, capture councilors’ unequal positions within it. Drawing on more than 450 interviews, 67 municipal council meeting transcripts, and an original survey of 506 current and former councilors in urban India, I distinguish collaborative strategies based on coordination and follow-up from combative strategies based on public pressure and cost-imposition. Collaboration overwhelmingly dominates. Perceived bureaucratic discretion is the strongest correlate of movement toward combativeness, while leverage and cover do not reliably predict the binary shift between strategies. Instead, leverage more clearly distinguishes procedural from discretionary forms of collaboration. These findings show that incomplete decentralization does not eliminate local representation. It channels representation through continued dependence on actors councilors do not command and shifts attention from whether councilors collaborate to how they collaborate and when they escalate.
Abstract Since their 1994 uprising, Zapatista communities have built social, political, and economic alternatives within autonomous territories, setting an example for multiple Transformation Initiatives and social movements globally. Focusing on economic solidarity through coffee distribution, this article investigates how the boundaries between being inside, beyond, or against the state and the market are relationally conceived and performed by autonomous peasants and European activist networks. The study is based on multiple fieldworks between Europe and Chiapas and years of engaged research. Beyond dual rationalizations between silent and loud resistance, I argue that anticapitalist worlds surrounding Zapatismo connect everyday forms of struggle with broader, structural hopes for change through transnational alliances. It is the existence of an organized infrastructure that allows this form of trade to reproduce its own antagonism, in constant tension against the state, reified as the ultimate perpetrator of the neoliberal order. Revisiting informality through the lenses of anti-systemic movements allows us to decentralize resistance, encompassing non-hegemonic processes from below (and to the left) that cannot be reduced to Western categories nor trivialized as the sole weapons in the hands of voiceless and powerless societies. Articulating Marxist anthropology with decolonial thought through the framework of Zapatista autonomy suggests that it is not enough to categorize resistance as visible or invisible, formal or informal. The study of economic solidarity surrounding the Zapatista experience provides an understanding of the complex realities of anticapitalist resistances today, where collective organization is as much about survival as it is about reimagining power and economy.
This research focuses on the analysis of the Colombian multiculturalism through an operative characterization. In this sense, the assessment of multicultural policies goes beyond the traditional discourse analysis, and instead it empirically reviews the implementation of differential rights translated into concrete public policies. To meet this goal, this study first explores the different symbolic schemes of the relationship between the State-Nation and the indigenous populations. In a second stage, it analyses how the policies that recognize cultural difference since 1991, are articulated with a project of state modernization of neoliberal characteristics, that is exemplified by the territorial decentralization phenomena. Finally, this research presents an analysis of the actual effects of multiculturalism in the fields of health, education, economic production and political governance for the Misak people, specifically for the Resguardo Mayor de Guambia, an indigenous reserve located in the department of Cauca. From this case study, readers will be able to discover how in the Colombian context, there are un-meet aspects (des-encuentros) and paradoxical effects between the Government’s neoliberal vision on public policies, the dynamics of ethnic recognition promoted by the state and the communitarian autonomous processes advocated by indigenous organizations.
This dissertation explores the politics of fiscal decentralization in comparative perspective. Case studies of Argentina and Spain are used to provide insights into the way that the distribution of institutional and economic resources in multitiered polities shapes the extent to which the policy of transferring revenue and revenue authority to subnational governments can be exploited for political gain. This approach draws attention to the political conditions that inhibit the coordination of fiscal reform efforts between the different levels of government and perpetuate the financing of subnational spending with revenue collected by the national government. This political context undermines national fiscal adjustment efforts and leads to economic catastrophes such as those experienced in Argentina throughout the last two decades. Specifically, this study uses statistical analyses and empirical institutional theory to show how patterns of territorial representation and bargaining strategies hindered revenue decentralization in Argentina but advanced it in Spain.The research suggests, first, coalition-building goals drive national executives in Argentina to reach out legislators of the opposition by means of allocating larger shares of federal transfers to the provinces the latter belong to. However, all else equal, legislatively overrepresented, i.e. economically marginal and sparsely populated, provinces will be targeted first. Second, the increasing role of regionalist parties in Spanish national politics and their acceptance in joint-policy mechanisms tilts the allocation of chosen federal transfers slightly in favor of economically developed and densely populated autonomous communities, which are generally governed by regionalist forces. Third, whereas Argentine subnational interests are "locked-in" at the Senate level and intergovernmental negotiations are conducted bilaterally, open-ended institutional arrangements and a relatively impotent senate in Spain boosted the redressing of regional concerns through informal intergovernmental fora and increasing multilateral collaboration Fourth, such differences in patterns of institutional representation and bargaining strategies explain the paucity of fiscal decentralization in Argentina and its relative progress in Spain.