About the MSc Development Management

Development Management views the comparative statics and comparative dynamics of development through the lens of institutions and organisations.

The comparative statics of development are – why are some countries rich and some countries poor at any given moment in time, like a snapshot? Comparative dynamics are the process of getting richer and freer and more developed and more sophisticated and more productive, but also the processes of decay in other cases.

In Development Management, we seek to explain these process of development and also, at any given moment in time, to understand the distribution of countries and societies and regions across the world in terms of development through the lens of institutions and organisations.

Development Studies is a much broader course. The key is in the title of that core course. In Development Management, we look at a narrower range of topics and we go much more deeply, because both courses are taught in the same 20-week period.

The project is the other key difference, which brings out all of the practical skills and practical experiences of a live consulting project with a real development agency or a real private sector firm.

So, for example, we have a wide variety of project types and project clients that range from the World Bank, the IMF, the Inter-American Development Bank to ministries and agencies of developing countries to the big international NGOs like Save the Children or Oxfam or Care, straight across to little tiny NGOs located in developing countries such as Peru or Ghana or Bangladesh, commissioning projects across a wide range of things from the geography to infectious diseases to natural resource management to gender rights, etc.

In addition to the core course, students can take optional courses on a long list that includes all of the courses in our department but also a number of other courses across different departments across the LSE such as social policy, political science, environment, the Gender Institute, international relations and law.

In addition to that, students can really take any 400-level course (meaning any MSc level course) at the entire London School of Economics that they can talk their way into – meaning for which they have a suitable background – which means that students with a physics or mathematics background may have additional courses open to them and other students with a legal or economics background may have additional optional courses open to them.

Admissions Criteria for the Programme

Students come from a wide array of backgrounds. The subject matter of development management naturally appeals to social sciences and so we have lots of them. But we also have mathematicians, literature and journalism majors, historians, physicists and engineers. And we welcome all of them.

What we’re trying to pick when we do admissions for the course is the brightest and most diverse array of students who are really fundamentally enthusiastic about doing development management.

Career Opportunities for MSc Development Management Graduates

Our students end up working in governments in developing countries, as well as big and small NGOs, the big multilateral institutions like the World Bank, the various regional banks, the IMF…

A number of students from recent years have gone on to found electronic banking companies in Zambia and South Africa, for example, or social enterprises in places like Bangladesh and Bolivia. Other students go on to work, for example, in unexpected places like investment banks or in manufacturing firms. Really, any sort of employment that deals with the developing world, even if it’s not doing development per se, can benefit from doing development management and these industries can certainly benefit from hiring development managers.

The International Development Department at the LSE is a wonderfully flexible and open place to study.

Find out more and apply here!

The Class of 2014/15

Are you a past or present MSc Development Management student? Have you enjoyed the course? Would you recommend it to interested students? Let us know by leaving a comment below!

Learn more about our other courses

• The MSc Development Studies at LSE
• The MSc African Development at LSE
  
• The MSc International Development & Humanitarian Emergencies (IDHE) at LSE

Professor Jean-Paul Faguet

I’m currently visiting Bolivia for the LACEA 2015 conference, and also giving a series of lectures in La Paz and Santa Cruz associated with my new book. I first lived here in the mid-1990s, and got to know the country well.

Bolivia is transformed since then; the changes are breathtaking. The country is vastly richer, its political establishment has been comprehensively replaced, and the broader social pyramid substantially overturned.

The economy has grown 265% since 1993, and 180% since Evo Morales became the country’s first ever indigenous President. Traditional political parties are essentially dead, and the socio-economic elite that ran the country for so long is now excluded from politics. There has been a remarkable ascent of the mestizo and indigenous lower classes, both politically and economically. Much of this is well-known but nonetheless worth repeating, as changes this vast are unusual and must contextualize what follows.

Here’s a Q&A interview I did recently for World Politics Review on the effects of the commodity boom, and Bolivia’s outlook after the crash.

The Zona Sur area of La Paz, Bolivia. Photo credit: Matthew Straubmuller, via Flickr. Licence: (CC BY 2.0).

1. How effectively has the Bolivian government used the past decade’s commodity boom to promote development and reduce poverty?

This is tricky to answer. A new, path-breaking study by the Fundación ARU, an independent think-tank in La Paz, shows that poverty and inequality plunged between 1999-2011. Average real income rose 45% across the country, and 182% amongst the poorer, more deprived rural population. The income multiple of the top to bottom 10% of the population fell from 42 to 11. And the population in extreme poverty fell from 46% to 19%, while the middle class rose from 17% to 32% of the population.  So both poverty and inequality have fallen dramatically.

But ARU’s analysis also shows that this is mostly due to changes in the labour market, and not the government’s anti-poverty transfers. There has been significant income compression during this period, as unskilled workers’ wages have risen much faster than skilled workers’ wages or professional salaries. This is undoubtedly connected to the commodity boom. But the precise relationship is not yet clear. It does not, however, seem that government policy can claim direct credit, beyond the more general achievements of maintaining macroeconomic stability, which is true.

The government has used much of its windfall to fund significant investments in education and health, with a bias towards poorer rural populations. And there have been many infrastructure projects executed throughout the land. These have contributed to improving human capital indicators, falling transport costs, and increased domestic commerce.

2. How susceptible is Bolivia’s economy to declining natural gas and commodity prices, and what policies have been pursued to diversify the economy and protect it from the commodities cycle?

Bolivia is highly susceptible to falling raw materials prices, and the effects are already being felt in public budgets. The government has announced, for example, that regional receipts from the key Hydrocarbons Tax will fall 40% this year, putting huge stress on subnational budgets.

Despite much talk of economic diversification, little has been achieved. The economy is still dependent on hydrocarbon and mineral extraction, and a highly productive agricultural sector concentrated in the East.  The manufacturing sector is small, and little is exported. The government’s principal response to falling commodity prices seems to be to look for more, opening protected areas to oil and gas exploration.

3. What impact have falling commodities prices had on domestic politics to date, and what are their likely effects in the future?

Remarkably, the effects to date are minimal. The government’s previous inability to spend its investments budgets has left it with enough money in the bank to fund looming deficits for several years before cutbacks really start to hurt. Morales continues to bestride the national stage with no rival or pretender in sight. But a recent set of referenda on regional autonomy, which the government lost, are the first signs that his electoral dominance may be slipping, and that the popular mood may be turning sour.

The new collection of essays edited by Jean-Paul Faguet and Caroline Pöschl, Is Decentralization Good for Development?, is now available from Oxford University Press.

A book-launch roundtable featuring the two editors will take place at LSE on Wednesday 2nd December. More details are available on our Events page.

Related Posts

• Welcome to the LSE. Do I Care What You Think?

• Introducing the MSc Development Management – Jean-Paul Faguet

• Explaining the Capitalist Crisis: Teddy Brett on scale economies for new Imperial College journal

Professor Jean-Paul Faguet

Colombia is not a “typical” Latin American country. It diverges from common views of the region in ways that are interesting and important. It has a deep democratic vocation, lacking the coups and dictatorships common elsewhere. Its one military coup was peaceful and initially enjoyed broad support from the political establishment.

(Originally published in The Cipher Brief.)

Colombia has an enviable economic record. Its number of consecutive quarters of sustained growth in the 20^th century is one of the highest ever recorded anywhere. Bursts of rapid growth followed by extended decline is just not the Colombian way. That, plus a young and growing population, is how it has overtaken Argentina to become the third largest economy in the region.

But violence is what makes Colombia most different of all. The conflict – the phrase “civil war” beloved of journalists has almost never been true – has ground on for 51 years now, for most of that period simmering in remote mountain regions, but at its worst erupting through large parts of the country and into its cities. The chance the country has now to end the conflict is an historic opportunity that could raise Colombia’s economy and its democracy to permanently higher levels of attainment.

Peace would boost the economy in several ways. First and most obviously, FDI should rise as foreigners are no longer deterred from investing in a country where they and their investments may be held to ransom or blown up. Colombia’s large, resourceful, successful private sector would receive fresh flows of foreign capital, technology and expertise looking to capture a part of its fast-growing domestic market. Tourism receipts are similarly likely to jump, as foreigners finally feel able to discover one of the most diverse, and relatively unexploited, geographies on earth.

Castillo San Felipe de Barajas, Cartagena. Photo credit: Marcelo Druck, via Flickr. Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

For institutional investors, a successful peace would reduce political risk, facilitating investment in Colombian firms and securities, lowering interest rates and increasing access to capital.

Most importantly, domestic and international confidence – what Keynes called ‘animal spirits’ – would swell. No longer would Colombians mutter darkly, “The country’s in a bad way but the economy’s doing well.” Peace, perhaps the deepest of Colombians’ yearnings, would feel like a new dawn. It would lift entrepreneurs’ and consumers’ confidence in a way that, by itself, is likely to prove the single largest boost to growth.

Colombia’s smartest graduates and most able businessmen would look inwards for opportunity. Unconstrained by primal risk, firms would venture beyond the vibrant cities, seeking new markets and higher returns in the hitherto more dangerous towns and countryside. This is significant because it would push economic and technological progress into the “other Colombia” that is not only much less developed, but has suffered far more from endemic violence.

For decades, violence has artificially constrained Colombia’s economy and its people. Ending the violence is likely to release pent-up creativity and productivity, and shift the country onto a permanently higher development trajectory. But if the negotiations fail, not only will these benefits be forgone, but Colombians’ belief in the possibility of peace is likely to be shattered for a generation or more.

Remember that the country has been down this road before. The last “peace negotiations” never advanced beyond pre-negotiations about the peace negotiations. For several years, government and FARC representatives talked about talking, while the war took a particularly murderous turn, until the public lost patience and talks were abandoned.

The government of President Santos has bet everything on these peace talks, and so far a public that has reason for skepticism has backed and re-elected him. If talks fail, Colombia may be left worse off than before. But if peace is secured, a brighter future beckons.

Related Posts

• Bolivia after the Boom: Are Hard Times Coming? Q&A with Jean-Paul Faguet

• Student Experience: Consultancy project informs new report on food insecurity in Central America

• Scottish independence: David Cameron is becoming the ‘George Bush of Britain’

In our latest blog series International Development Professor Jean-Paul Faguet wants to know your thoughts on the subject of “Should lecture notes be circulated in advance?”

Every year my MSc Development Management students ask for lecture notes to be circulated in advance. Every year I decline, waving my hands and invoking vague dangers.

This year’s group – a particularly energetic bunch – have prompted me to think more carefully. Rather than put my foot down, or give in meekly to stem the complaints, it seems a better idea to discuss the issues openly. Hence we will honour their request for the next couple of months, on condition that students join my colleagues and me in a debate of the underlying issues.

These issues are not just about note-taking, or when students receive lecture slides, but rather questions that are both deeper and broader about the nature of knowledge and the process of learning.

Such issues are likely to be interesting well beyond one programme, or even one department. The blog seems like a good forum in which to collect ideas and thrash them out. Not least because my own thoughts on the matter are rather fuzzy. I’d like to work out exactly what it is I find objectionable. I’m prepared to accept that it may be middle-aged grumpiness on my part, and open to being convinced I’m wrong.

I hope students, colleagues, and alumni will post their views here. Contributions from people with research expertise in pedagogy would be particularly welcome. It would be even better if the winning argument came from students.

Should they have had their lecture notes in advance?

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, students are once again requesting that lecture notes be circulated in advance, something I have always resisted. Here is an attempt to explain (not least to myself) why I find this objectionable.

Tim Forsyth, Professor of Environment and Development, teaching in one of the classrooms in LSE St Clement’s in the Department of international Development. LSE in Pictures on Flickr

What exactly do you have when you have ‘the lecture notes’?

I must admit to a feeling of mystery about why students want lecture notes in the first place.  What exactly do you have when you have them?

To begin with, there is no such thing as ‘the lecture notes’. What you get are my lecture notes. Don’t get me wrong, my lecture notes are fabulous. But they’re mine. They are, in effect, my speaking prompts, a list of things I may not remember when I’m standing in front of you, which I write down to avoid forgetting. They complement all the stuff in my head that, for whatever reason, I’m less likely to forget when I’m standing in front of you. As between the two, the latter tends to be more important. But that’s the stuff I don’t write down. So when you bring my lecture notes to class, what you have is a rough catalogue of aspects of the topic I consider less important.

The main point is that there is no such thing as ‘the lecture notes’ – master notes that work well for everyone. The relevant lecture notes are your lecture notes, processed by your brain for your brain. This is because, especially for Masters level work, each individual brings a different mix of knowledge, experience, beliefs and priorities into the lecture hall with them. You all take different notes, and well you should. Some of the things your professors say are obvious to you, and you don’t bother writing them down. Other things are interesting or mysterious, and you do write them down. This is exactly as it should be, and explains why reading through someone else’s notes can seem so frustrating. We’ve all had this experience at one time or another.  Your brilliant classmate takes notes that bang on about things that don’t need recording, and then – suddenly – fall off a cliff into paragraphs or bullets that don’t connect, leaving huge gaps. That cliff is the divide between what she knew and didn’t know walking into the lecture hall. It’s different from your divide. You and she know different things, you care about different things, and you take different notes. If you missed a lecture, by all means get her notes. But don’t pretend they substitute for your notes. They never will, and neither will mine.

Professor James Putzel teaching students from the Department of International Development in the Hong Kong Theatre, LSE Clement House. LSE in Pictures on Flickr

Notes Are Irrelevant, Learning is Hard

The thing about notes – and this is the best part – is that they work by making themselves irrelevant. It’s a bit like ‘the best rules rarely need to be enforced’. The importance of notes isn’t in the notes. The importance of notes is in taking the notes, meaning you went to the lecture, listened, engaged with original material in your own particular way, filtered the lecture through everything you know, believe, etc., and then wrote down an account of the material that is coherent and prioritizes what, for you, is most important. If you did all of that, and did the readings, and then reflected on both, you went most of the way towards learning the material. You may refer back to your notes later, as a reference, like you look up a word to make sure you know what it means. But not because the knowledge is in the notes. It’s not. It’s in your head. Which is the only place it can be useful.

I’ve had the privilege to teach here for nearly two decades.  And so I know LSE students are a small sub-sub-sub group of the population, and are really smart. But I do sometimes wonder if somehow, subconsciously, students want lecture notes as a shortcut to knowledge. Because in the consumer culture, knowledge acquisition is somehow analogous to downloading a document or an app. If you have ‘the lecture notes’, then you somehow have knowledge.

Professor Jean-Paul Faguet

This is completely wrong. The correct analogy is physical training. Like mastering a sport, acquiring knowledge is hard work. It takes a lot of effort. It’s no joke that our brains account for something like 20% of the body’s energy consumption. Like a good workout, learning is hard and often painful. By itself, that no doubt explains much student frustration this time of year. The problem is, downloading notes doesn’t help much. It doesn’t get you knowledge. All you have when you have my notes is a small pile of paper.

My fear is that circulating lecture notes in advance gives students a false security that they ‘have’ the material, and so don’t need to work so hard to learn it. When I sit amongst students during a colleague’s lecture, I often see them scrolling through lecture slides, taking a few notes in the margins. It’s possible that the information is being assimilated in some ordered way. But it’s also possible that such students are coasting, disengaged, secure in the belief that they have the notes. The danger is that they coast straight through to the final exam, where they’ll be faced with another small pile of papers, all of them blank.

Smaller Considerations

Not less important, just more specific. Many of our lectures contain graphs, charts, and tables that students needn’t try to reproduce by hand. We have always circulated all such figures after the lecture, allowing students to focus on the main ideas and insights.

Any students with specific needs can of course request, and receive, lecture notes in advance.

Lastly, in my first year in this department, our then-Head warned that pre-circulating lecture notes increased the probability that students skipped lecture and stayed in bed, especially between December and March. I never found out how well-founded this claim is, but the little economist in me suspects it’s true. I’d be grateful for empirical evidence one way or the other.  If it is true, then the recent trend towards video recording all lectures must be exacerbating the problem.

Do you agree? Or have you had a different experience? Why do you find lecture notes useful? I’d be interested to hear you thoughts.

Continuing with our blog series “The Great Lecture Notes Debate” we hear from LSE International Development lecturers on why they think it’s a good idea

Teddy Brett – Professor of International Development
I think that a strong case can be made for pre-circulating lecture notes, and have done so whenever I have completed them in time to do so. I am aware that some colleagues feel that this is spoon-feeding students, and reducing the effort they need to make to follow the lecture, but I think that this underestimates the difficulties involved in assimilating the amount of new information incorporated in a complex two-hour lecture in a new field. This is particularly difficult in an inter-disciplinary programme like Development Studies, where few of the students will have any grounding in the basic theoretical assumptions that underpin the diverse topics they are obliged to address.
This is why all of our students feel highly confused right through the programme, and only develop a coherent understanding of our intellectual project after they have been able to go back over the whole course when they have to revise for exams. We make no apology for imposing such heavy demands on them – indeed, doing this is what gives them the edge when they get out into the real world. However, we do need to provide them with as much support as we can since this will not reduce their need to concentrate on what they hear, but strengthen their ability to navigate their way through what are always very challenging presentations that could legitimately be the subject of two or three lectures.
In my view students are likely to get most benefit from their lectures when they come to them having read the required readings, and gone through the lecture outline, so they are aware of the key issues involved, and have thought about the key issues, arguments and evidence that will be presented in the lecture and discussed in their seminars.

Tim Forsyth – Professor of Environment and Development

Personally I create my lectures on Powerpoint, and then post the Powerpoint slides as lecture notes on Moodle before each lecture. I have done this for years.

Professor Tim Forsyth

I do this because students ask for the notes in advance, but I also find it useful for myself — It gives me a structure that I can then talk to, plus it means I don’t have to pause while students write down details. Indeed, I think I would find lectures a lot more stressful if I did not have something already prepared. I think it creates a lecture where everyone has ‘the basics’ already printed, and hence I can talk a lot more about what it all means.

Related Posts

• The Great Lecture Notes Debate 

• The Great Lecture Notes Debate Part Two – The Case Against; Notes vs. Knowledge 

• Why academics (and students) should take blogging / social media seriously

LSE International Development students have their say on “The Great Lecture Notes Debate”:

Xu Gong – MSc in Development Studies.

For me, pre-circulated notes may reduce my motivation to finish all required readings before lectures. I took history classes at the LSE when I was an undergraduate, notes were always posted on Moodle before lectures. I sometimes skipped readings after I read lecture slides. However, MSc courses are much more demanding. Topics in international development are interdisciplinary, and readings and lectures are more difficult to digest without notes in advance.

If lecture outlines are given before lectures, we will be more prepared for the lecture. Meanwhile, it will not reduce our motivation to finish related readings. I think pre-circulated lecture outlines will encourage me to do the readings, and to find the linkages of the readings. It may improve my learning.

Louisa Tomar – MSc Development Management

Although I do not read the lecture slides prior to coming to class, unless explicitly asked, I absolutely see the value of providing them in advance. I often look around the room and see my peers taking thoughtful notes directly on the slides and/or cutting and pasting diagrams and graphs (that I’m struggling to draw!) into their notes in Word, PPT and other programs. I’m envious at how seamlessly many of my classmates build upon material on slides and incorporate them into their electronic notes as they go. I’ve seen them pull up Wikipedia pages on the Economists /theories being discussed and link them into the slides for cross referencing later. I think for many, having the slides in advance allows them to be more thoughtful about what they add and include, so while I’m rushing to take down everything that’s on a slide, my peers are actively listening and adding the bonus material that is being said (some of which, I may not be absorbing to the same degree.) Additionally, we are a very large group so many of us do not sit particularly close to the screen – for anyone who doesn’t have perfect vision, it’s quite helpful to see the slides directly in front of you rather than straining to see the tiny print next to graphs and diagrams.

Michiru Toda – MSc Development Management

To summarize the arguments supporting the notion that the lectures notes be circulated in advance:
(1) There is no master lecture note that works well for everyone because each student has different knowledge, experience, beliefs and priorities into the lecture hall with them.
(2) The important of notes is in taking the notes like training, not in the notes themselves.
(3) The advance circulation might give students a false security and discourage students to work hard. Some students scroll through lecture slides, taking a few notes in the margins.

In terms of (1) and (2), the importance of making own notes, these arguments assume that every student can completely grasp what lecturers talk in order to make their own notes.
In fact, each lecture has different – sometimes strong – accents and English proficiency of students vary. Moreover, some lecturers seem to talk relatively faster in spite of the recommendation that presenters take at least two minutes per slide. As long as LSE is being proud of itself as an international school and accepting students with various levels of English proficiency (IELTS overall 7.0 minimum), international students, especially those for whom English is a second language, should deserve a certain consideration. Considering these points, I would say that the assumption of the argument seems wrong.

In terms of (3), we have to consider the reverse risk that some students might concentrate on taking down every single word rather than deeply reflecting what lecturers are taking. If students keep the lecture notes at hand, they can concentrate on lectures themselves and taking their truly own notes.

What exactly do you have when you have ‘the lecture notes’ in advance?
My argument might stray from directly answering to the question above, but my concern would be ‘what we would lose when we do not have ‘the lecture notes’ in advance’; we might lose the opportunity of delivering/receiving the messages in the lectures.

My arguments focus on the aspect of ‘during lectures’ rather than preparation, hence I would not request the circulation in much advance, as long as students keep the lecture notes at hand during the lecture.

Related Posts

• The Great Lecture Notes Debate 

• The Great Lecture Notes Debate Part Two – The Case Against; Notes vs. Knowledge 

• The Great Lecture Notes Debate Part Three – The Case For; the lecturers’ view

This Wednesday (2 December) we’re launching a new book “Is Decentralization Good for Development?” at the LSE (6:30pm, Hong Kong Theatre). This is a public panel discussion so all interested are warmly invited to join!

Main Street, La Paz, Bolivia

Ahead of this the book’s author Professor Jean-Paul Faguet gives us a preview of the argument put forward in the book.

Over the past few weeks, many people have asked me “Is decentralization good for development?” So I thought I should answer:

YES.

A slightly more nuanced view

Is decentralization good for development? It’s always good to begin by defining key terms. Let’s define ‘development’ as increasing human well-being and freedom. What exactly do we mean by ‘decentralization’?

You might think that’s the easier question, but weirdly it isn’t. Not because ‘development’ is simple, but rather because there is far less agreement about what exactly decentralization means, and also less attention given to it. As a result, people employ it – often forcefully – in significantly different ways.

Misunderstandings of decentralization are both obvious and subtle. Let’s start with the obvious. Decentralization does not mean the abolition of central government. It does not mean the transfer of all functions to regional or local governments. For the most part, it does not even mean the complete transfer of any service to subnational governments.

Put so plainly, such a corrective sounds unnecessary. Who would argue that we don’t need central government? I’ve been working in this field for 20 years, and I don’t know anyone serious who promotes decentralization understood in any of these ways. But oddly, many of those who argue against decentralization focus their firepower on an enemy that, on closer inspection, looks surprisingly like a straw man.

So let me say it clearly. Decentralization does not eliminate central government. Decentralization does not eliminate the important, continuing role of central government in the provision of most local public services. With the exception of some very local services with few or no economies of scale, like rubbish collection, the center will continue to be involved in local service provision, even after radical decentralization, in important ways.

What decentralization does, rather, is to empower (or create) subnational governments by devolving significant resources and authority to them. It makes the provision of local, regional, and national public services the joint responsibility of two or more levels of government. It transforms a simple, linear system of bureaucratic fiat (think command and control), run from the capital, into a much more complex system of coordination, cost sharing, and overlapping responsibilities amongst multiple tiers of autonomous government with independent mandates.

Main Street, Baures, Bolivia

The downside of increasing complexity is greater cost. But the upsides are potentially far more important. One is the greater robustness of a multitiered system of independent nodes to failure in any one of its parts. Imagine you live in a centralized country, a hurricane is coming, and the government is inept. To whom can you turn? No one – you’re sunk. In a decentralized country, ineptitude in regional government implies nothing about the ability of local government. And even if both regional and local governments are inept, central government is independently constituted, probably run by a different party, and may be able to help. Indeed, the very fact of multiple government levels in a democracy generates a competitive dynamic in which candidates and parties use the far greater number of platforms to outdo each other by showing competence, and project themselves hierarchically upwards. In a centralized system, by contrast, there is only really one – very big – prize, and not much of a training ground on which to prepare.

Macro vs. Micro-Information
Another key advantage is the greater, more detailed information that decentralized government should be able to bring to bear on any public problem, no matter how small. To better understand this, consider the types of information required to solve any public problem, or provide any high-quality public service. One kind, of course, is technical expertise. Planning a vaccination campaign, designing an irrigation system, and building a water treatment plant are nontrivially complex problems. I could not do any of these things competently myself, and my guess, dear reader, is neither could you. They require specialized knowledge that relatively few people have. Such people tend to cluster in cities, not towns or villages. They tend to work for central government, where the pay is better and the challenges more interesting. Accordingly, central government has an important advantage in the different sorts of technical expertise required for effective service provision.

But service provision also requires what Elinor Ostrom called “time-and-place information”, meaning location-specific geographic, social, and economic characteristics pertinent to both the underlying problem and potential solutions. Such micro-information must be incorporated into service provision if services are to be both efficient and effective. When and where can the targets of a vaccination drive best be reached? Which local organization might be capable of managing an irrigation scheme? How are local sewerage needs likely to grow and change in the future? Information of this sort is crucial to the success of a public project. But it does not reside with central government, which has weak incentives to acquire it. It resides naturally with local government, which has much stronger incentives to find it out and act on it.

The genius of a properly designed decentralization system is that it combines technical expertise from above with local time-and-place information from below, in a way that is superior to what either level of government could achieve on its own. This flows naturally from central and local officials’ independent incentives, operating through their parties and career aspirations. The result is greater public-sector efficiency, effectiveness, and faster development.

Information and public sector robustness have strong implications for some of the broadest, most important, problems facing developing countries today, such as political instability, macroeconomic instability, secessionist movements and the threat of civil war, elite capture and clientelism. The book discusses decentralization’s effects on each of these issues in great detail. The panel will no doubt thrash many of them out this Wednesday.

Do you really believe in democracy?
Lastly, the question of democracy. These days, most people pledge allegiance to it. So consider this: Who should decide on local services that mainly affect the residents of a particular locality? Elected officials in that place, or elected officials in the capital? Officials elected by the affected residents, or officials elected by the entire nation?

I have heard colleagues declare their allegiance to both democracy and the centralized state, and I just don’t get it. Citizens must be allowed to vote… but only for national government? They must not be allowed local governments? Local services with few externalities – like local policing or primary education – whose effects are overwhelmingly concentrated on the residents of a locality… must be provided by a distant central government? Someday maybe someone will succeed in explaining this view to me. But for now – after 20 years of studying and thinking about it – it seems arbitrary, incoherent, and wrong. You either believe in democracy or you don’t. If you really do, and if locally-specific services exist, then you must believe in local democracy too.

If you’d like to learn more on this subject the following are a good source of information on these issues:
1. Faguet, J.P. and C. Pöschl (eds.). 2015. Is Decentralization Good for Development? Perspectives from Academics and Policy Makers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2. Faguet, J.P., A. Fox and C. Pöschl. 2015. “Decentralizing for a Deeper, More Supple Democracy.” Journal of Democracy, 26 (4): 60-74.
3. Faguet, J.P. 2014. “Can Sub-National Autonomy Strengthen Democracy in Bolivia?” Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 44(1): 51-81.
4. Channa, A. and J.P. Faguet. 2012. “Decentralization of Health and Education in Developing Countries: A Quality-Adjusted Review of the Empirical Literature.” LSE/STICERD Working Paper No. EOPP 38.
5. Faguet, J.P. 2004. “Building Democracy in Quicksand: Altruism, Empire and the United States.” Challenge: The Magazine of Economic Affairs, 47: 73-93.

As part of the ongoing “Great Lecture Notes Debate” we hear from Dr Colleen McKenna, Departmental Adviser to the Department of International Development in the LSE Teaching and Learning Centre. Colleen has explored the educational research on how different approaches to handouts stimulate student engagement in lectures and are thought to support student learning and achievement.

Students attending a Department of International Development lecture

I have enjoyed the rich discussion so far in ‘The Great Lecture Notes Debate’ and would like to thank Professor Jean Paul Faguet for the invitation to contribute to this discussion. In this post, I will consider note-taking  in relation to:

1) student learning

2) differently configured handouts (e.g. full lecture notes, partial notes and skeleton notes) and

3) the structure and pace of lectures themselves.

The function of taking notes

Why should we encourage note taking?

The research tends to suggest that note taking has different functions in terms of learning. Two such functions are ‘encoding’ in which students come to ‘own’ the material they’re engaging with in a lecture or, indeed, that which they are reading. A second function of note taking is sometimes termed ‘storage’ and this refers to the retention of material over time. However, the literature suggests that the extent to which encoding and retention are realised depends on a number of contextual factors including the quality of the notes that are taken; the speed and organisation of the lecture;  the opportunities for students to reflect on their notes; and the combination of student notes with scaffolding devices – such as outlines or overviews.

Student taking notes during a class

Combining note taking with handouts

There is broad consensus in the literature that students’ own notes are more effective (both in terms of learning in the lecture and reviewing the material at a later stage) when combined with some sort of framing device (e.g. a handout/slides/advance email)  that outlines the key points and provides an overview  of the lecture. (See, for example, DeZure et al., 2001 – link below).

However, the provision of a full set of lecture notes such as a ‘script’ of the lecture, has generally been found NOT to be as helpful for learning. For example, Russell et al. (1983) studied both student preferences for different types of handouts as well as student performance. In this study, groups of medical students were allocated 3 different types of handouts:

• complete (nearly word for word transcript);
• partial (objectives, outline of topics plus all tables and figures) and
• skeletal (outline containing objectives and brief list of subtopics).

Students were then examined on the lecture content 2-4 weeks following the lecture and again 3 months later. Students expressed a strong preference for receiving the very detailed lecture handouts; however, the researchers found that when students had access to a complete set of lecture notes, they took fewer notes themselves and, more importantly, their performance in relation to encoding and retention declined, particularly for material introduced in the last quarter of the lecture.

Students who were given partial or skeleton handouts tended to perform better on the exams than those who received complete lecture notes. Students with the partial or skeleton handouts wrote more notes, used complete sentences and made more extensive comments. (In this study, the authors tentatively suggest that the ‘partial’ handout used in conjunction with students’ own notes was the optimum combination for learning.)

LSE students taking notes in a lecture

Note taking and lectures

Not surprisingly, the organisation and delivery of lectures can influence student note taking and learning. In their review of the literature on note taking, DeZure et al. (2001) suggest that practices within lectures can help students take notes that are meaningful and in such a way that they are not simply transcribing what they hear. (This type of behaviour leads to cognitive overload and makes it harder for students to listen and engage with the material within the session.)

It is suggested that students are more able to take useful notes in a lecture when:

• the pace is slow enough that students can both take notes and process what is being said
• there are pauses (2-3 minutes) built in midway through and at the end for students to consolidate their notes and write any immediate observations. (Bonwell and Eison, 1991 argue that such pauses ‘significantly’ improve comprehension and retention.)
• verbal and visual cues are used by the lecturer to underscore the organisation of the material and to help students identify hierarchical relationships, key concepts, overarching arguments, etc. (DeZure et al., 2001.)

In many ways, these ideas intersect with Neil McLean’s reflections in his recent LSE Teaching blog post, Observations on observations, which looks at his experiences of observing lectures over the past term.

So, those are a few thoughts from me. Of course, context is important in terms of how we choose to support and stimulate students’ learning in lectures, and clearly there are multiple ways to do this.  Conversations, such as the one on this blog, help to communicate the rationale(s) behind the different ways of approaching handouts and they help signal how different practices motivate learning.

Finally, as an aside, there is also recent research suggesting that writing notes by hand has more educational benefits than typing notes on a computer (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014),  because in the latter, students tend to type up information verbatim rather than processing it and framing it in their own terms. However, that’s for another discussion!

Dr Colleen McKenna, TLC Departmental Adviser to the Department of International Development. Please feel free to get in touch with me at c.mckenna4@lse.ac.uk or to browse the Teaching and Learning Centre’s web pages for academic staff, which may be of interest.

References:

Bonwell, C. & Eison, J.  (1991) Active Learning: Creating excitement in the classroom. Washington: George Washing University. Cited in DeZure, et al. (2001).

DeZure, D., Kaplan, M., & Deerman, M. (2001) ‘Research on student notetaking: implications for faculty and graduate student instructors’. Centre for Research on Learning and Teaching: Occasional Papers No. 16. Michigan. (This is a particularly useful review of the literature with a number of practical suggestions for lecturers as well as an appended student guide to effective note taking and review.) http://www.crlt.umich.edu/sites/default/files/resource_files/CRLT_no16.pdf

Mueller, P. & Oppenheimer, D. (2014) ‘The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard

Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking’. Psychological Science. June 2014 25: 1159-1168.

Russell, I., Caris, T., Harris, G., & Hendrickson, W. (1983) ‘Effects of three types of lecture notes on medical student achievement’. Journal of Medical Education. 58: 627-636.

Related Posts

• The Great Lecture Notes Debate 
• The Great Lecture Notes Debate Part Two – The Case Against; Notes vs. Knowledge 
• The Great Lecture Notes Debate Part Three – The Case For; the lecturers’ view
• The Great Lecture Notes Debate Part Four – The student point of view

This week LSE academic developer Dr Colleen McKenna reported on The Great Lecture Notes Debate for the LSE Teaching Blog, summarising the arguments and speaking to Professor Jean-Paul Faguet about what happens next.

At the end of last term, Professor Jean-Paul Faguet initiated The Great Lecture Notes Debate on the International Development blog. The debate was framed by the question ‘Should lecture notes be circulated in advance?’ and Jean-Paul encouraged contributions from academics and students across LSE and beyond. The debate was motivated by Jean-Paul’s wish to stimulate a discussion, not just about the distribution of lecture notes, but also, as he indicated in his opening post, about the ‘nature of knowledge’ and the learning processes that underpin the use of notes in lectures. (All the academics who took part in the debate provided lecture notes to students, but the overarching concern here was whether notes should be circulated before the lecture and, if so, what form they should take.)

Emerging themes

Over a course of three weeks, there were postings and comments from academics and students, and I contributed a final post which reported on research into the impact of note taking in lectures upon student achievement, which was re-posted here as Monday’s resource.

Themes that emerged included

• the process of taking/making notes in lectures and the resultant learning,
• the varied formats of lecture notes,
• how students use notes and why they value them,
• rationale for providing advance notes,
• ways in which the rhetorical features of a lecture might aid student understanding.

A consideration of how students learn in lectures was a recurrent topic.

Follow-up conversation with Professor Jean-Paul Faguet

Earlier this week, I had a conversation with Jean-Paul who reflected on the process and impact of the online ‘debate’. We started by discussing the central analogy in his second post in which he compares note taking and, by extension, learning in lectures to physical training:

‘Learning is difficult, not in a physical way but in a mental way and so I used that analogy of a workout: at the end of the workout you’re in a bit of pain, your muscles are torn in that way that’s necessary for muscle growth but you know that they get better and you have to do it. But you also feel that along with the pain comes some kind of elation because you made the 10 mile run or you rowed on the river … And so, there’s an analogy there as well, [in terms of learning] that you haven’t understood everything but you recognise that you’ve understood more than you knew before …’

For me, this figurative account of learning as demanding and sometime uncomfortable resonates with the ‘troublesome’ nature of knowledge as expressed in research into threshold concepts.

Using a blog to explore pedagogy

The debate appeared on the teaching thread of the ID blog which has traditionally been about ‘reporting back’ on teaching and courses, but this was the first time that the blog had been used as a forum for exchanges on education issues and Jean-Paul suggested that this conversation was designed to ‘prompt change’:

‘The blog is fairly new and one of the sections is meant to be “notes from the academy” which is a broad title to cover people’s thoughts about teaching … and interesting things that are going on with the students, but up to now it’s been a kind of reporting back … whereas this [The Great Lecture Notes Debate] was more of a discussion; this was meant to be prompting change.’

One of the features of this work that particularly interested me was the public nature of the dialogue and I asked Jean-Paul why he had decided to use the blog to address the question of lecture notes?

‘I expected this to be a discussion that was overwhelmingly internal – so we might have done it by Moodle … but the issues we were discussing weren’t sensitive and they weren’t something I wouldn’t want to share with the outside … I thought it [the ID blog] would give students in particular … an incentive to think through and write down their thoughts.’

While there were fewer contributions than Jean-Paul would have liked, there was nonetheless a post comprised entirely of student contributions as well as student comments elsewhere on the blog.

Next steps

Via Karen Eliot (Flickr, licence: CC BY-SA 2.0)

Jean-Paul hopes that the conversation from the blog will be continued in departmental meetings this term and he plans to write a summary post weaving together the threads of the discussion. In terms of his own practice, he said that he will reconsider the way he develops lecture notes:

‘The whole experience forced me to think more carefully through what I do … So what I think I’ve learned through all of this – and the final post [on research into lecture handouts] was critical in that – it’s important to circulate stuff in advance but circulate the stuff that students need … like definitions, terms, graphs and charts … the skeleton [of the topic] – not the expansive lecture notes.’

Such a pared down set of notes would form the ‘raw materials’ that students need to then ‘assimilate’ the ideas for themselves. Jean-Paul concludes that ‘the real value of the lecture is what happens there in the room and it happens verbally’.

I’ve found the different perspectives fascinating and I look forward to further conversations about education on the International Development blog.

This blog was originally published on the LSE Teaching Blog on 15 January 2015. The full article is available to view here.

Related Posts

• The Great Lecture Notes Debate 

• The Great Lecture Notes Debate Part Two – The Case Against; Notes vs. Knowledge 

• The Great Lecture Notes Debate Part Three – The Case For; the lecturers’ view

• The Great Lecture Notes Debate Part Four – The student point of view

• The Great Lecture Notes Debate – The Educational Research

As the UK government continues negotiations on the country’s exit from the European Union, Professor Jean-Paul Faguet considers what the EU Referendum result has revealed about democracy in the UK.

The Brexit vote may look like the bomb that blew up British politics, aborting the careers of David Cameron, George Osborne, and all the main Brexit leaders. But rest assured, the reality is worse. The Leave vote was a toxic measure that left Theresa May’s new government in an impossible situation, damned whatever it does.

Leaving the EU will inevitably decrease employment, increase poverty, and undermine British power and prestige. It may also end the 300-year-old union with Scotland. (Last year’s Scottish referendum pitted Scot’s hearts against their heads. Brexit aligned the two.) Most MPs understand this, which is why they supported Remain. By contrast, many Brexit voters do not understand. They were promised easy access to the common market, no free movement of people, and more money for the NHS. When the impossibility of that combination sinks in, voters will become angrier than they are now at the lies they were told.

But the alternative – setting aside the Leave vote to remain in Europe – is surely worse. Having been told the nation’s fate was in their hands, voters would react to betrayal with levels of anger unlike anything yet witnessed. Already suspicious of politicians and metropolitan elites, people will become enraged that the referendum was, in effect, a hoax. The effect would transcend specific politicians and parties, and undermine faith in democracy itself. At a time when Europe is buffeted by economic and migratory shocks, and the siren call of right-wing populism rings loud on both sides of the Atlantic, this alternative should provoke horror.

How on earth did we get here? Like automobiles, medications, and financial securities, unregulated democracy can be dangerous. Constitutions regulate democracy. But the UK doesn’t really have one.

The proximate cause of the debacle is the amateurism of David Cameron and his team, who promised an EU referendum with feckless disdain for consequence. Faced with a hundred Tory MPs who complained loudly about Europe, Cameron launched a referendum to buy their silence. This is an instant-classic example of what Mahvish Shami and I call “instrumental incoherence”: when politicians pursue discrete, short-term objectives via deep institutional changes whose effects are long-term, multidimensional, and highly unpredictable. The key point is that the goal politicians seek – no Tory infighting over Europe – may be completely unrelated to the effects their reform – leaving the EU – are likely to have. The logic of instrumental incoherence makes exaggerated, or even false, claims in support of reform even more likely, as we have seen.

But the deeper cause is both more important and more interesting: the UK has no written constitution, and so no clear rules for how such matters should be decided. I have had spirited discussions with sophisticated lawyers who point to reams of books in academic libraries and assure me a UK Constitution does exist. June 23rd gives the lie to that view. It shows clearly why tradition and unwritten norms do not suffice. Without doubt, Britain’s unwritten – and hence informal – constitution provides guidance on many questions. But it is incomplete. On a number of important issues it is either silent or – worse – ambiguous. Without a written constitution that everyone can see, the nation lacks clear ground rules for how the state should be structured, where the bounds of democratic contestation lie, and how decisions of the highest national importance should be taken.

Hence Cameron’s decision to subject EU membership to a 50%-plus-one referendum was perfectly legal. But it was also perfectly foolish. In principle, any referendum could be won by a single vote. Does anyone seriously think such questions should hang on one-vote majorities? If not, why invoke such a mechanism? Imagine what would follow a referendum won by one vote? The latter can only be answered probabilistically, which is another way of saying no one knows. This is no way to run a country.

In most mature democracies, institutional reforms require higher bars of approval, and often extended processes of ratification. A plebiscite may be involved, but one result is not decisive. The question put to the British people recently is not like selecting this year’s favorite song or even choosing the national mascot. It is, rather, a deep structural issue that will affect the nation’s politics, economy, and international relations for generations to come. It is much more akin to amending a constitution, which in the US requires two-thirds super-majorities in both houses of Congress, and separate approval by three-fourths of the states. This is a much, much higher hurdle than 50%-plus-one, and well it should be. The point is not only to increase the difficulty of approving big changes, but also to reveal large, stable majorities for these changes across different aggregations of the electorate. If such majorities do not exist, the reform will fail. Where deep changes to institutions are concerned, this is correct.

Constitutions protect democracy from its own extremes, and the loss of legitimacy that follows. The EU referendum was the democracy bomb that blew up the government and may yet break up the country. God knows how, or if, the situation can be remedied. But if it leads the UK to write, debate, and agree a Constitution, at least it will have done some good.

Professor Jean-Paul Faguet, Programme Co-Director for Development Management, tells us what he has been up to during his sabbatical.

Hello and happy new year from Los Andes!

I visited the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a month this past Oct-Nov, where I revised “The Paradox of Land Reform, Inequality and Development in Colombia” and presented to their comparative working group, and also researched and wrote “Revolution from Below: The Rise of Local Politics and the Fall of Bolivia’s Party System”, and presented that to the Joint Duke-UNC Latin American politics working group.

In December I was in Colombia for the Universidad de los Andes-LSE International Workshop on the Future of the Peace Process in Colombia, where I organized a roundtable discussion on “Inequality and Development in the Long Run”.

This term I’ll be visiting Los Andes again in Jan-Feb, and then in Stanford this April-May co-hosting the first annual LSE-Stanford Conference on Long Range Development in Latin America.  This last will become an annual event alternating between California and London (and hopefully Bogotá and Mexico) that ID research students are especially encouraged to submit papers to.

See you in the new academic year!

JP

Professor Jean-Paul Faguet works at the frontier between economics and politics, using quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the institutions and organizational forms that underpin development. Specific fields include political economy, comparative politics, institutional economics, and development economics.            

In his latest article for Social Europe, Professor of the Political Economy of Development, Jean-Paul Faguet, compares two of the largest democratically voted referendas of 2016 and explains how, despite being fought under similar conditions, outcomes for both were exceptionally different.

A Spanish version of this article is available here.

Last year served up two extraordinary referenda, fought under similar conditions, and with similar results, but which led to remarkably different outcomes. Today in Britain, a new prime minister grimly prepares to trigger fundamental changes to the nation’s economic and legal affairs that she knows will leave it poorer, weaker and smaller. In Colombia, a historic peace is implemented, and the continent’s largest, fiercest, and longest-lived insurgency emerges from the jungle and prepares to disband. How did this happen? This tale of two referenda is interesting in its own right but also for what it teaches us about democracy, leadership, and the meaning of political courage.

First, the similarities. Like the UK, Colombia’s government called a referendum on an issue of transcendent importance. Like the UK, its government was confident of victory; the cost-benefit calculus seemed obvious. Like the UK, Colombia’s No campaign was led by prominent populists who deliberately ignored the main issues, instead exploiting social media to stoke voter indignation. Their strategy also relied on hyperbole, fabrication, and outright lies about the consequences of a Yes victory: Colombia would become an atheist country; children’s gender would be undermined at school; pensions would be cut to fund decommissioned guerrillas; FARC leader Timochenko would automatically become president; children would be recruited by homosexual evangelists; peace would turn Colombia into another Venezuela; and my personal favorite: the government had designed secret referendum pens that erased No votes. There were more. Like the UK, none was based on fact. And like the UK, facts didn’t matter.

Finally, like the UK, the government narrowly lost. If the British margin of defeat was modest (52 vs. 48%), Colombia’s was miniscule (50.2 vs. 49.8%) – 54,000 votes in a country of 49 million. The result left both countries staring into a void. Would Colombia revert to war? Would Britain turn its back on Europe? What comes next?

This last is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. In both countries, No/Leave leaders demanded that democracy be respected. But a plebiscite does not equate with “democracy”. It is one specific tool that, like any tool, can be used well or badly. “Democracy”, in the sense intended above, cannot be reduced to plebiscites. It emerges, rather, from a complex of laws, organizations, and norms and practices. Democracy is not so much a “thing” as an aspiration – of government by and for the people. The important question is how to achieve that.

In representative democracies, voters elect politicians, whose job it is to study public issues, carefully weigh pros and cons, and choose on behalf of citizens. Policy-making is done by specialists; citizens are free to live their lives. Guaranteed rights and checks-and-balances protect the interests of individuals and minorities. Such systems are often adept at incorporating technical expertise into decision-making, and their cost per citizen is strikingly low. But the flip-side of specialization is that government can appear distant and detached.

Where do plebiscites fit in? As an injection of direct democracy, a reinvigorating dose of mass participation? Actually, no. Amongst political scientists, “plebiscitary democracy” is a term of abuse. Plebiscites over-simplify complex issues into yes-no questions, and are subject to momentary passions that can be easily manipulated. And often they are – witness Britain and Colombia. Better examples include referenda that confirmed or extended Mobutu, Mussolini, Pinochet and Hitler’s hold on power. All of these were comfortable victories for despots; all were tragedies for democracy.

In a democracy, holding plebiscites on big, complex issues that are likely to affect the nation’s economy, politics and society for generations to come is incoherent – the wrong tool for the task. It is also cowardly, a sign of politicians ducking difficult choices. And it is irresponsible, a rank refusal by politicians to do their jobs.

Now return to the post-referendum void. These are extraordinary moments of uncertainty when sharp changes in trajectory become possible, and leaders wield far more power than normal. The decisions they make at such “critical junctures” shape events in ways that come to seem inevitable, but were not. In Colombia and Britain, leaders certainly seized their moment. But in very different ways that shaped very different futures.

Accepting responsibility for his loss, David Cameron resigned as UK premier, and Brexit leaders fell shambolically by the wayside. Theresa May, an experienced, canny politician, attained power unopposed and unelected. “Brexit means Brexit,” she, a tepid Remainer, declared, and sent the nation down what she knows to be the worse of two paths. The lies that stoked Brexit remain standing. She implements what the electorate – deceived, manipulated – thought it wanted.

Juan Manuel Santos, by contrast, opted to lead. Giving up would have been easier – war is business as usual in Colombia. Persisting with peace was easily the more difficult path. But the rewards for Colombia are immense. And Santos – one of the country’s most successful defence ministers – understood that better than most.

Visibly chastened, he went back to work. “No” campaigners demanded 57 changes to the accord. Government and FARC agreed 56. The new accord was put to Congress, as the constitution demands, and as previous agreements with smaller insurgencies had been. Peace was ratified, reception centers readied, and then Colombians watched transfixed as thousands of FARC fighters emerged from the jungle and laid down their arms.

During all of this, Santos was lambasted for “democratic treachery”. But where, exactly, does democracy lie? In the deliberations and acts of elected Congressmen, or in a referendum result? And where is the treachery? In his failure to “respect the referendum”, or his refusal to return Colombia to five decades of war that killed 250,000 and displaced 8 million more?

To take risks and persist in the face of failure, in pursuit of a better future, is the very definition of leadership. At the critical juncture, Santos proved himself a leader and a statesman. Would that Britain, too, were led by leaders, and not followers.

Professor Jean-Paul Faguet works at the frontier between economics and politics, using quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the institutions and organizational forms that underpin development. Specific fields include political economy, comparative politics, institutional economics, and development economics. He is also Chair of the Decentralization Task Force at Columbia University’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue.   

This article was first posted on Social Europe.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and in no way reflect those of the International Development LSE blog or the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Professor Faguet explains why political economy research on Latin America is on the verge of a major breakthrough, based on deep collaborations between historians, political scientists, economists and scientists further afield, exploring the drivers of divergent development patterns over not decades, but centuries and even millennia.

Why are some countries rich and others poor? Why did some countries, like the UK and France, achieve high levels of economic and human development over a century or more, whereas others, like South Korea and Singapore, did so in little more than a generation? Why does a third set of countries (Ghana, Costa Rica) seem stuck at intermediate levels of development, while in others (Mali, Honduras) development never really got going, or – more dramatically – surged forward for a time and then collapsed (Argentina, Venezuela)?

Big questions like these were out of fashion in the 1980s and 1990s, but they have come storming back to centre stage in the new millennium. Seminal works like Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail (2012) and Engerman and Sokoloff’s “Factor endowments, inequality, and paths of development among New World economies” (2002) brought a powerful resurgence of research into the roles of institutions, factor endowments, and human capital in driving economic growth and inequality across the world.

These ideas have been advanced forcefully and tested in a variety of contexts. Many of these theories are eye-catchingly bold, proposing for instance that colonial mortality rates in, say, North America vs Africa caused some colonies to develop ‘inclusive institutions’ guaranteeing equal rights and a voice for all (Massachusetts), while others developed ‘extractive institutions’ that facilitated rapid wealth extraction by Europeans through the oppression of native and slave populations. But these studies have also been challenged as lacking in empirical nuance, and – more damningly – operating at too high a level of aggregation to distinguish between key dimensions of the package of ‘institutions’ they seek to study. The cross-country studies on which most of this literature is based – typically involving over 100 countries across six continents – imply a geographic reach that is heroic.

And yet the literature these studies spawned remains provocative and rich. In large part, this is because more micro-level studies with creative identification strategies, working with more disaggregated dependent and independent variables, have emerged to shed new light on the central debates. In our view, some of the most methodologically robust approaches involve subnational analysis exploiting subnational variation. Latin America offers an ideal context in which to develop such research, with huge variation across space and time in economic and human development outcomes, and also subnational institutions, human capital, public investment, factors and resources, and other political and geographic variables. And in contrast to other developing regions, Latin America offers comparatively high-quality data, often available across very long periods of time.

New research by young scholars has taken up the challenge with impressive preliminary results suggesting a clear potential to remake the political economy of development. A couple of examples can help illustrate some of the nuanced insights to be gained by going deep (subnational) and long (time scale).

First, by studying land reform and inequality in Colombia over two centuries we can see how a quantity of land equivalent to the entire United Kingdom was transferred mainly to landless peasants, even if Colombia still maintained one of the highest concentrations of land ownership in the world. Thanks to a fabulous database chronicling every individual plot granted by the government since 1901, we can examine how land reform, which waxed and waned over the decades, affected patterns of landholding, inequality, poverty levels, and human development – all at the local level – with a wealth of municipal data that we have spent twenty years compiling.

This analysis reveals that land reform in Colombia did not have an effect on land tenure, inequality, or development, but rather many effects, varying as much as municipalities differ from one another in their key underlying characteristics. Which is to say, a lot. The main pattern of effects we find is bimodal: most of Colombia’s 1100+ municipalities lack a landed elite. In these, rural properties grew larger, land inequality and dispersion fell, and development indicators improved. But in municipalities where such an elite does exist, meaning landholding is highly concentrated in the hands of large landowners, such positive effects are counteracted. Here, land reform led to smaller rural properties, greater landholding dispersion, and lower levels of development. We show that all of these effects – positive and negative – flow through local policy, which in one-third of the country elites managed to distort to benefit themselves. In terms of explaining development and the distribution of land, our evidence implies that land reform’s second-order effects, on the distribution of local power, are more important than its first-order effects, on the distribution of land. What is most striking is that the main impact of a sustained land-distribution efforts was not on the distribution of land, but rather on who does and does not have local power.

A Colombian farmer sowing crops in Huila (Elias Falla, CC0)

Another paper featured at the upcoming LSE-Stanford conference, “Is Extraction Bad? Encomienda and Development in Colombia Since 1560”, examines the effects of a forced-labour institution, the encomienda, which the Spanish imposed on colonial society from the 1500’s through to independence in 1821. Theencomienda obliged “indians” (indigenous people) to pay yearly tribute to their Spanish lords in money, labour, and kind, in exchange for protection and instruction in the Catholic faith. Encomiendas were imposed by the Crown in some areas of Colombia but not others; some were relatively brief whereas others lasted for centuries. We exploit this variation to explore the effects of encomienda on economic output, poverty, human capital, inequality, and state capacity between 1560 and today. Doing so presents numerous statistical challenges, to put it mildly. We try to overcome these with what is called a neighbour-pair fixed effects (NP-FE) strategy, which focuses the analysis on neighbouring pairs of similar municipalities, some with and others without encomienda.

Despite the obviously extractive nature of the encomienda, we find that municipalities that had it have higher levels of municipal GDP and GDP/capita, lower levels of poverty and infant mortality, higher secondary school enrolment, and higher indicators of state presence today, 450 years later, compared to otherwise similar municipalities that lacked encomiendas. How might such an effect have come about? We probe further, using data on intermediate-term outcomes from 1794, 1853, 1912 and 1918. This indicates thatencomienda is strongly and positively associated with both state capacity and population. Places where theencomienda was imposed in 1560 have higher state capacity and larger populations at each of these intermediate dates. Which of these two causal channels dominates? Performing a ‘horse race’ of local state capacity vs population (implying economies of scale and aggregation) reveals that the causality between encomienda and improved present-day economic and development outcomes appears to run through the strengthened local presence of a more capable state.

In both examples, our findings show the benefits of exploiting the finer grain of subnational variation to explore the subtleties of institutions’ effects on development. They also highlight the importance of disaggregating our understanding of “institutions” into conceptually distinct elements, and then investigating each one carefully and in isolation. Land grants to landless peasants are doubtlessly a good idea. But the local political economy “soil” in which the seeds of reform take root can produce vastly different effects, going so far as to decrease medium and small farm sizes, thereby undermining development. Likewise, that the Spanish encomienda was an extractive institution, and objectionably so, is beyond doubt. But our evidence implies that it played an important role in building the state in Colombia, and a stronger local state in turn spurred development. Areas that did not suffer the encomienda are worse off today, a finding that complicates our understanding of institutions and challenges the meaning of “extraction”.

The time is ripe to bring together research that simultaneously produces major substantive findings and serves as a proof-of-concept for new empirical approaches. The LSE-Stanford-Uniandes Conference Seriesseeks to do precisely this, advancing an exciting intellectual agenda that promises to open new windows of understanding on why some societies are rich, free, and abounding with opportunity, while others are not.

This week, Jean-Paul Faguet and Alberto Diaz-Cayeros will co-host a conference on Long Range Development in Latin America at Stanford University, inaugurating a yearly series of high-level conferences co-hosted by the LSE, Stanford, and the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). The research presented will feature new empirical approaches, exploiting novel datasets, subnational variation, and mixed methods in ways that promise to shed light on some of the most complex social issues of our time.

 Jean-Paul Faguet is Professor of the Political Economy of Development at the London School of Economics. He is also Chair of the Decentralization Task Force at Columbia University’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue. His research blends quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the institutions and organisational forms that underpin effective governance and rapid development. He has published extensively in political science, economics, and development literatures, including Is Decentralization Good for Development? Perspectives from Academics and Policymakers (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Governance from Below: Decentralization and Popular Democracy in Bolivia (U of Michigan Press), winner of the W.J.M. Mackenzie Prize for best political science book of 2012.

This article was first posted on the LSE Latin America and Caribbean blog.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and in no way reflect those of the International Development LSE blog or the London School of Economics and Political Science.

To celebrate the Spanish-language launch of Professor Jean-Paul Faguet’s book Popular Democracy: Governance from Below in Bolivia, we will be publishing the first chapter of the book as part of a five part series over the coming month.

You can read our post about the book launches in Bolivia here.

Part 1/5

It must be more-or-less obvious that a department specializing in international development must work in a number of languages. But the extraordinary dominance of English in the academic, policy, and business worlds today often obscures the sheer quantity of knowledge creation happening across the globe, including developing countries, in languages other than English.  And many of us at the LSE publish in non-English languages as well.

En mi caso, español – lengua materna e idioma principal de los países en que he concentrado mi actividad de investigación. Por tanto, es un gusto especial presentar mediante este foro la nueva edición española de mi libro, Descentralización y Democracia Popular: Gobernabilidad desde abajo en Bolivia. Originalmente publicado en inglés el año 2012 por la University of Michigan Press, y muy hábilmente y sensiblemente traducido por Isabel Bastos, esta versión presenta a lectores de toda la región una versión del libro que quizás sea la más útil que existirá jamás.

A continuación presentamos, en 5 segmentos vinculados, la introducción del mismo, que ojalá proveerá a interesados una idea más detallada de los temas tratados y los argumentos que desarrollo allí. Falta sólo ofrecer mis agradecimientos profundos a la Friedrich Ebert Stiftung de La Paz, que auspició la traducción como parte de su programa de apoyo al país.

INTRODUCCIÓN                                                                                              

La revolución silenciosa

En las últimas cuatro décadas, el entusiasmo por la descentralización y los experimentos con ella se han extendido por el mundo. Cuando, en 1995, me encontraba haciendo un curso de posgrado y comenzaba a estudiar la descentralización, los comentaristas ya estaban citando el notable crecimiento de experimentos en políticas públicas (y de estudios académicos) desde comienzos de 1980. Para muchos era como estar en la cresta de la ola, sabiendo que luego cederíamos el paso al entusiasmo por nuevas políticas públicas. Pero, estábamos equivocados; desde entonces, tanto la práctica como el estudio de la descentralización han crecido más y más.

Hace diez años, se estimaba que el 80% de los países del mundo estaba experimentando con una forma u otra de descentralización (Manor 1999). Desde entonces, reformas nuevas o cada vez más profundas han sido anunciadas en naciones tan diversas como Japón, México, Egipto, Camboya, Francia, Bolivia, Indonesia, Turquía, Etiopía y Corea del Sur, así como en muchas otras. La tendencia no favorece a las naciones más pobres: subsidiariedad, devolución y federalismo están directamente en el primer plano del discurso político de la Unión Europea, el Reino Unido y los Estados Unidos. Tampoco favorece a las naciones más ricas: casi todos los países de África implementaron algún tipo de reforma durante 1990 (Brosio 2000). A comienzos de la primera década del año 2000, no había riesgo alguno de afirmar que la descentralización había afectado a la mayoría, sino a todas las naciones del globo.

Pero lo que impresiona no solo es el número de países que se están descentralizando, sino el ámbito de competencia y los recursos que recayeron en gobiernos subnacionales. De acuerdo a Campbell (2001, 2), “los gobiernos locales comenzaron a gastar del 10 al 50% de los ingresos del gobierno central”. Campbell denomina esto “la revolución silenciosa” y expresa que ha generado un nuevo modelo de gobernabilidad basado en el liderazgo innovador y capaz, una alta participación popular y un nuevo e implícito contrato que administra el régimen tributario local. Rodden (2006, 1-2) dice algo similar: “Diferenciándose de las transiciones a la democracia, la descentralización y la difusión del federalismo son quizás las más importantes tendencias en gobernabilidad del mundo en los últimos 50 años”.

Ubicuidad no implica uniformidad. La palabra descentralización esconde una cantidad sorprendente de variaciones en dos dimensiones. Primero, comprende reformas como la desconcentración, devolución y delegación que, en términos de incentivos, son fundamentalmente diferentes —un punto al cual regresaremos en el capítulo 5. Comparar diferentes reformas bajo una rúbrica común equivale a comparar frijoles con plátanos; siempre es posible hacerlo, pero probablemente no es una buena idea. Segundo, la palabra oculta gran variación en la medida en qué reforma es la que se está realmente implementando en diferentes países. Como veremos también en el capítulo 5, hay razones de peso para esperar que muchas de las reformas anunciadas sean resistidas o subvertidas de varias maneras por parte de las principales autoridades responsables de su implementación, haciendo que reformas similares en papel tengan, en la práctica, efectos notablemente diferentes. Para el estudioso de la descentralización, es difícil no insistir demasiado acerca de la importancia de definiciones claras. Este estudio usará la siguiente:

Descentralización es la devolución por parte de un gobierno central (esto es, nacional) de funciones específicas —con todos los atributos administrativos, políticos y económicos que estas conlleven— a los gobiernos democráticos locales (esto es, municipales) que son independientes del central dentro de un ámbito geográfico legalmente delimitado y funcional.

Como han apuntado varios académicos (por ejemplo, Diaz-Cayeros 2006; Eaton 2004), la tendencia hacia la descentralización coexiste con su opuesta hacia la centralización. Esta última encuentra su expresión más obvia en la construcción de uniones de muchos países, como la Unión Europea, el Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte y el Mercosur, muchos de cuyos Estados miembros están simultáneamente descentralizando poder y autoridad a niveles subnacionales de gobierno. En efecto, las dos tendencias coexisten no solo dentro de grupos multinacionales sino también en países específicos, donde la autoridad y los recursos están siendo descentralizados en algunas áreas (por ejemplo, en educación) y centralizados en otros (por ejemplo, en impuestos). Aunque es importante reconocer la existencia de una fuerte tendencia centralizadora como parte del contexto más amplio en el que opera este estudio, aquí no me centro en esto. Este libro más bien se centra en la descentralización, la tendencia mundial más importante, y la gobernabilidad local resultante.

The next part of the series will be published on Thursday 15 June.

Alternatively, you can download the Spanish-language version of the book here.

Professor Jean-Paul Faguet works at the frontier between economics and politics, using quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the institutions and organizational forms that underpin development. Specific fields include political economy, comparative politics, institutional economics, and development economics.            

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and in no way reflect those of the International Development LSE blog or the London School of Economics and Political Science.

To celebrate the Spanish-language launch of Professor Jean-Paul Faguet’s book Popular Democracy: Governance from Below in Bolivia, we will be publishing the first chapter of the book as part of a five part series over the coming month. You can read our post about the book launches in Bolivia here.

In case you have missed it, you can read part 1/5 here. And 2/5 here.

Comprender la descentralización

Estas preguntas son notablemente difíciles de contestar. Hay muchas justificaciones (en disputa) para las reformas en políticas públicas que se han estado implementando en diferentes países. Pero a la fecha no ha sido posible ir más allá de aspiraciones o de una declaración de intenciones para identificar las presiones concretas, o ventajas, que impulsan la descentralización, comparables al rol de las economías de escala y a las proyecciones de poder que inspiran la historia de la centralización. Los entusiastas de esta reforma proporcionan argumentos plausibles basados en teorías de la democracia y el federalismo fiscal para significar que la descentralización potencia la voz del ciudadano y profundiza la participación, dando lugar a un gobierno más receptivo y responsable ante los gobernados. Como resultado, la cualidad y eficacia de los servicios públicos que el Estado brinda deberían mejorar. Pero otros exhiben teorías económicas e institucionales para argumentar de manera igualmente plausible que la descentralización reducirá la eficacia en la producción de bienes públicos y la calidad de la formulación de políticas públicas, y que incrementará la captura del gobierno y la corrupción.

Estos argumentos se exploran en detalle en la revisión del estado del conocimiento sobre la descentralización del capítulo 5, donde queda claro que solo la lógica es incapaz de resolver estas afirmaciones en disputa. El trabajo empírico se puede basar en una teoría rebatible en primera instancia y la evidencia acerca de la descentralización es claramente abundante. Pero también veremos que la evidencia habla con muchas voces. Por cada caso de mejora que sigue a la reforma (en educación, salud, pobreza, etc.), hay un caso en contra de deterioro. A pesar de cuatro décadas de experimentación política en el mundo entero, no está claro finalmente qué es lo que esta reforma ha conseguido.

Algunas de los sondeos más amplios de la bibliografía responden con pesimismo, sembrando dudas acerca de si los efectos sistemáticos de la descentralización pueden ser alguna vez identificados. Tal vez de haber comenzado en la biblioteca de una universidad hace 15 años, hubiese abandonado la investigación. He visto que otros estudiosos lo han hecho y no los culpo. Pero los motivos para perseverar son de peso. Como fenómeno real, la descentralización es simplemente demasiado importante como para abandonarla. No es solo el ámbito y alcance de los servicios públicos y el poder de decisión lo que se está descentralizando por el mundo entero. La cuestión es más profunda y de importancia global, y los economistas políticos deberían ser capaces de contestar a las siguientes preguntas: ¿Qué parte de la sociedad está mejor equipada para gobernarse a sí misma? ¿Cuán grande deberían ser los grupos en los que actúan las personas para llegar a acuerdos y llevar a cabo una acción pública? ¿Acaso la implacable lógica del tamaño de los recursos y del poder nos lleva inevitablemente al Estado-nación, cuánto más grande, mejor?

La primavera de 1994 no me pilló en una biblioteca en Londres o en cualquier otro lado sino en La Paz, donde disfrutaba de los privilegios y me exasperaba con la supervisión del portafolio de “inversión social” del Banco Mundial. El jefe más maravilloso que jamás tendré me permitía pasar una semana al mes en la parte de atrás de un jeep que traqueteaba por caminos de tierra, o viajar en pequeñas avionetas a comunidades remotas para visitar escuelas, clínicas y programas de capacitación que estaban en fase de planificación o ejecutándose. En los tres años anteriores había llegado a conocer y a admirar el duro trabajo y perseverancia de los bolivianos pobres que viven en los interminables valles andinos o que habitan anidados en una curva de un río a lo largo de la frontera con Brasil. Esta gente a menudo carece de electricidad, agua potable y saneamiento. Las escuelas funcionan más allá de su capacidad —niños pequeños y más grandes revueltos en una o dos aulas, y muchas veces sin ventanas, libros o techo. Para muchos la vida no es la del siglo XX sino la de los primeros agricultores que araban la tierra con animales o sembraban con ayuda de azadones.

Esa primavera, el ambicioso nuevo gobierno del presidente Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada aprobó, como una de una serie de reformas fundamentales, la Ley de Participación Popular. Recuerdo claramente las discusiones en la oficina del Banco Mundial en La Paz y las llamadas de colegas en Washington buscando información. Nuestra atención estaba mayormente puesta en las otras tres reformas: “capitalización” (una variante de la privatización), reforma educativa y la reforma del poder ejecutivo. El borrador de la Ley de Participación Popular fue largamente ignorado. Decíamos en broma que “estaban legislando la participación”, con el humor típico del mundo de la cooperación. “Si solo legislaran la riqueza y la felicidad, podríamos irnos todos a casa”. Estábamos equivocados. Al comienzo no comprendimos que se trataba de la reforma descentralizadora. Tampoco comprendimos que la Participación Popular, de las cuatro reformas, sería la única que sobreviviría la coyuntura y que, con el tiempo, se expandiría y profundizaría. Nos imaginamos incluso menos los cambios que traería, colaborando en el alumbramiento de Evo Morales y en la transformación de la política boliviana y, cambiando para siempre, de alguna manera, el país.

No solo recuerdo con cariño mi experiencia de esa primavera, sino que mis memorias también me sirven de refutación a los que ven una conspiración en la reforma boliviana. He leído a menudo, incluso en algunos estudios académicos, que la descentralización fue una imposición del Banco Mundial o una treta dirigida a distraer a los electores de las reformas más profundamente “neoliberales” que el gobierno planeaba implementar. Ninguna de estas afirmaciones es verdadera. El Banco Mundial y el resto de la comunidad cooperante no obligó a Bolivia a descentralizar, ni estos se dieron cuenta de que la descentralización era inminente e incluso ni la reconocieron cuando fue anunciada. En cuanto a la tesis de la distracción, esta solo es verdad si al hablar de “distracción” nos referimos a la profunda reforma que se implementó con sinceridad y rápidamente, con efectos a largo plazo en el gobierno, política y economía de Bolivia. Tal vez tal reforma tenía la intención de distraer al público. Mi propio punto de vista en ese momento, al contemplar las inmensas marchas de protesta en contra de la capitalización y la reforma educativa en las principales calles de La Paz, es que los electores no estaban distraídos. Ahora pienso que la tesis de la distracción es una trivialidad.

Y así de pura suerte me encontré trabajando en Bolivia cuando se estaba implementando una de las más notables descentralizaciones de los tiempos recientes. ¿Funcionaría? ¿Probaría ser el gobierno local más responsable con los votantes o reinaría el derroche y la corrupción? ¿Cómo reaccionarían todas esas aldeas que había visitado? Me fui del país pocos meses después para comenzar un doctorado, pero quedé intrigado en cómo acabaría la reforma. Solo un año después, embarcado como estaba en la bibliografía sobre la descentralización, me di cuenta de que Bolivia representaba un estupendo experimento natural.

The next part of the series will be published on Thursday 29 June.

Alternatively, you can download the Spanish-language version of the book here.

Professor Jean-Paul Faguet works at the frontier between economics and politics, using quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the institutions and organizational forms that underpin development. Specific fields include political economy, comparative politics, institutional economics, and development economics.            

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and in no way reflect those of the International Development LSE blog or the London School of Economics and Political Science.

To celebrate the Spanish-language launch of Professor Jean-Paul Faguet’s book Popular Democracy: Governance from Below in Bolivia, we will be publishing the first chapter of the book as part of a five part series over the coming month. You can read our post about the book launches in Bolivia here.

In case you’ve missed it, you can read part 1/5 here.  And 2/5 here.  And 3/5 here.

Porqué la descentralización en Bolivia – un país frecuentemente ignorado – sobresale como una de las experiencias mundiales más dignas de estudio, y de comprensión? Para comenzar, la descentralización en Bolivia fue reivindicada sinceramente, cosa que no ha sido así en muchos países, y representó un corte radical con el pasado. Desde la revolución de 1952-53, Bolivia tenía un aparato de Estado en el cual el poder se decantaba hacia abajo desde el presidente —a través de los ministros y gobiernos departamentales— a funcionarios nominados en pueblos y aldeas más distantes. La descentralización creó gobiernos departamentales elegidos en todo el país que quedaban en deuda con los electores, no con los ministros. La vasta mayoría de estos municipios era rural y pequeña. Y a diferencia de, por ejemplo, Colombia, que emprendió una descentralización gradualmente a lo largo de una generación, la reforma en Bolivia fue repentina –se anunció primero en enero de 1994 y se implementó en julio de ese año. El cambio en el flujo de recursos de los ministerios centrales y organismos a los municipios fue inmediato y —para la mayoría— masivo. Por tanto, la reforma en Bolivia consistió en cambios importantes en la política pública y flujo de recursos en un punto discreto en el tiempo. Finalmente, y por un golpe de suerte, dos años antes Bolivia había llevado a cabo su primer censo desde los años 1970, y durante uno de mis subsiguientes viajes, había realizado un “censo municipal”. Esta información resultó ser, en términos comparativos, de alta calidad y alcance para un país de este nivel de ingresos, incluyendo información sobre las características políticas, sociales y cívicas, económicas, institucionales y administrativas de todos los municipios bolivianos.

Así me embarqué en lo que nunca esperé serían 15 años de investigación. Mi primera tarea era establecer exactamente cómo se había hecho la reforma y recoger información. Volví a Bolivia en 1995, 1997 y 2007 para conducir una serie de entrevistas de alto nivel con algunos de los arquitectos de la descentralización, políticos influyentes y funcionarios gubernamentales involucrados en la reforma, y con empresarios líderes, expertos en políticas públicas y académicos en La Paz, Cochabamba y Santa Cruz, que habían observado detenidamente el desarrollo del proceso. En algún momento de mi ausencia, unos cuantos de mis compañeros del equipo de fútbol de fin de semana se habían vuelto viceministros en el nuevo gobierno, así que tomando muchas tazas de café, obtuve acceso a una avalancha de datos en bruto acerca de flujo central-local de recursos, planes presupuestarios municipales y gastos e inversiones reales. Estos datos —limpios y sistematizados al año siguiente, y luego actualizados con menos café y más imploraciones— formaron el núcleo de la base de datos que analizo. Podía entonces comenzar a preguntar: ¿Por qué Bolivia se descentralizó? ¿Qué fue exactamente lo que la descentralización cambió? ¿Cómo invirtieron los municipios los fondos recientemente transferidos?

El resultado es el capítulo 1, que examina el impacto de la descentralización en el uso de recursos por sector, la asignación de recursos en el espacio, su distribución entre los municipios más ricos y más pobres, y la capacidad de respuesta de las inversiones locales a los indicadores objetivos de demanda. La estadística descriptiva de la base de datos proporciona evidencia de lo que la descentralización logró o no logró. Como en el caso de cualquier otra forma de estadística descriptiva, no la interpreto más que como indicativa en tanto proporciona un panorama global de las principales tendencias antes y después de la reforma, pero solo insinúa las causas de esas tendencias. En particular, estos gráficos no establecen relaciones causales entre la descentralización y las varias tendencias posteriores a 1994 que describen. Tales afirmaciones pertenecen a capítulos posteriores, basadas en un análisis econométrico más riguroso. Pero antes de adentrarnos en tal análisis, es instructivo exponer los grandes hechos, examinar la topografía fiscal de Bolivia y familiarizarnos con las tendencias más importantes que requieren explicación.

Y las tendencias, como veremos, son muy claras. Los gobiernos locales a lo ancho de Bolivia invirtieron sistemáticamente en sectores diferentes en relación a lo que el gobierno central había hecho hasta entonces, y lo hicieron de manera más receptiva a las demandas locales. ¿Cómo sucedió esto? ¿Cómo los procesos políticos y sociales a nivel micro pudieron llegar a estos resultados agregados? Para responder a estas preguntas, hice seis meses de trabajo de campo en nueve municipios durante 1997, seguidos de una nueva ronda de actualización del trabajo de campo en el año 2009. La investigación fue diseñada como un conjunto coherente de estudios de caso para facilitar el análisis comparativo. Los nueve municipios tenían que ser ampliamente representativos de la diversidad económica, política, geográfica y demográfica. Primero usé una base de datos para identificar una lista corta de municipios prometedores, luego analicé estos —junto con una serie de gente conocedora con experiencia directa en estos gobiernos locales y contextos sociales— y finalmente hice una selección de diez casos. Con ayuda de un gran amigo antropólogo, Armando Godínez, preparé cuestionarios detallados para diferentes tipos de entrevistas, parcialmente estructuradas y no estructuradas. Después de mucho intercambio de ideas y revisión, puse a prueba los cuestionarios en Pucarani. Esto reveló una serie de problemas, sobre todo una pobre redacción y el orden equivocado de preguntas específicas. Revisamos los cuestionarios otra vez, descartamos los resultados de la prueba piloto y volvimos al campo.

Con una superficie el doble de Francia, que abarca desde altas montañas hasta la densa selva tropical, Bolivia es un país maravillosamente diverso. La investigación me llevó a las heladas minas de Atocha, en las alturas de Potosí, y por Charagua, Desaguadero, Guayaramerín, Porongo, Sipe Sipe, Sucre y Viacha, hasta la pequeña Baures en las sabanas del norte de Bolivia. Viajé en aeroplanos grandes y pequeños, en jeeps, motocicletas, canoas y también a pie. En Baures nuestra Cessna aterrizó en un campo de fútbol después de haber sobrevolado en círculos varias veces, lo cual afortunadamente espantó a las vacas y atrajo a la mayor parte de los niños. En el implacable calor de Charagua, la necesidad de consenso de los guaraníes hizo que las entrevistas duraran para siempre, conducidas en la mayor parte en guaraní, idioma que no hablo; así que me dediqué a fumar para seguir despierto. En Porongo, mi última entrevista terminó una noche en una escuela a oscuras, alumbrados con linternas, con la mayoría de los curiosos residentes del poblado apretujados adentro y los demás apoyados en la puerta y ventanas. Esa noche llovió, por lo que el sabio corregidor y yo quedamos atrapados en el lado equivocado del crecido río, con lo que al día siguiente teníamos pocas opciones más que agarrarnos de las muñecas y vadear el río con el agua marrón y furiosa hasta el pecho. Recuerdo este periodo como el “trabajo” más intenso, agotador y maravilloso que he hecho en mi vida.

Durante tres meses en la primavera de 1997 y otros tres meses en el otoño, entrevisté a alrededor de 300 personas en un programa sistemático aplicado a cada municipio; reuní mapas, presupuestos y otros datos locales; y observé en general la vida local. Los resultados de esta investigación se convirtieron en nueve estudios de caso de las diferentes respuestas locales al mismo impacto de descentralización, y de lo que motivó estas respuestas. Los dos estudios incluidos en este libro son los casos extremos de fracaso y éxito municipal. Comparar los extremos resalta de forma inequívoca las diferencias sistemáticas en la toma de decisiones. Esto, a la vez, facilita la teorización acerca de las causas internacionales, los efectos y las condiciones necesarias que se relacionan con la calidad de los gobiernos locales; de ahí que los capítulos 2 y 3 partan del nivel nacional para examinar cómo funciona la gobernabilidad a nivel municipal o submunicipal. Me baso aquí en evidencia de calidad y en abundante descripción para analizar el trabajo de los gobiernos locales a un nivel micro, en el peor y en el mejor de mis estudios de caso, Viacha y Charagua, que representan bien los extremos de desempeño municipal en la totalidad de Bolivia. Los otros siete casos confirman las perspectivas analíticas presentadas aquí, pero solo las mejoran moderadamente. Están transcritos como un capítulo extra disponible en governancefrombelow.net, y en el sitio de web de la editorial de la Universidad de Michigan.

The next part of the series will be published on Thursday 6 July.

Alternatively, you can download the Spanish-language version of the book here.

Professor Jean-Paul Faguet works at the frontier between economics and politics, using quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the institutions and organizational forms that underpin development. Specific fields include political economy, comparative politics, institutional economics, and development economics.            

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and in no way reflect those of the International Development LSE blog or the London School of Economics and Political Science.

To celebrate the Spanish-language launch of Professor Jean-Paul Faguet’s book Popular Democracy: Governance from Below in Bolivia, we will be publishing the first chapter of the book as part of a five part series over the coming month. You can read our post about the book launches in Bolivia here.

In case you’ve missed it, you can read part 1/5 here.  And 2/5 here.  And 3/5 here.  And 4/5 here.

Si la descentralización condujo a una capacidad de respuesta de alta calidad en un municipio y a la falta de ella y a la corrupción en otro, ¿qué nos es posible concluir de Bolivia en general? El capítulo 4 vuelve a la base de datos para examinar si la descentralización hizo a los gobiernos más o menos receptivos a las demandas locales con un conjunto de pruebas econométricas y una base de datos original que incluye el universo de los municipios en Bolivia, territorio y población en el periodo de 1987 a 2007. Los resultados confirman los cambios dramáticos expuestos en el capítulo 1, pero en más detalle y con mayor rigor analítico.

¿Cómo se compara la evidencia de Bolivia con la teoría de la descentralización y la evidencia de otros países? ¿Puede la bibliografía ayudarnos a comprender mejor la reforma boliviana? ¿Puede Bolivia ayudarnos a comprender mejor la descentralización? El capítulo 5 enfrenta estas cuestiones a través de una extensa revisión del estado de conocimiento acerca de la descentralización, comenzando con la teoría y continuando con la bibliografía empírica.

En Bolivia, las claras tendencias a nivel nacional coinciden con las marcadas variaciones a nivel local en calidad de gobierno y de toma de decisiones. Esto nos lleva a otra pregunta crucial: ¿Por qué algunos gobiernos locales son mucho mejores que otros? El capítulo 6 generaliza, a partir de las experiencia de Viacha y Charagua (e implícitamente la de los otras siete municipios), para construir un modelo teórico en el cual el desempeño del gobierno local es conducido por factores claves en la economía, política y sociedad local. Describo el entramado estructural que integra una serie de ideas bien establecidas sobre las elecciones y el lobby, con perspectivas más recientes sobre las organizaciones civiles y sus vínculos sociales. Luego coloco los intereses económicos, los actores políticos y las organizaciones ciudadanas al centro de este enfoque, en un contexto dinámico para analizar cómo interactúan estos actores en el tiempo y toman decisiones públicas que responden o no a los electores y los hace responsables ante estos últimos.

Las predicciones de este modelo concuerdan bien con la evidencia cualitativa de Viacha y Charagua. ¿Son estas predicciones aplicables de manera más general? El capítulo 7 vuelve a la base de datos para probar estas ideas en relación a todos los municipios de Bolivia. Me concentro en los factores determinantes para la toma de decisiones durante el periodo descentralizador de 1994-2007. La respuesta es decididamente afirmativa: la información sostiene la teoría y, en efecto, nos permite ajustarla más.

La teoría hasta ahora es sólida, a corto plazo, en cuanto a la evidencia cualitativa a nivel micro y a nivel macro con respecto a la evidencia cuantitativa. ¿Puede ser estable a nivel micro a largo plazo? ¿Puede explicar los profundos cambios en gobernabilidad en nuestros dos estudios de caso entre 1997 y 2009? El capítulo 8 vuelve a Viacha y a Charagua 12 años después para valorar cómo la gobernabilidad local ha cambiado en este lapso. En ambos municipios los procesos de gobierno y los resultados de las políticas públicas cambiaron de manera significativa. Los factores que impulsaron estos cambios son los que se teorizan en el modelo, y los resultados que observamos concuerdan bien con las predicciones del modelo. Es de notar que esta evidencia a largo plazo se explique tan bien con un modelo construido antes de que se recogiera la evidencia.

El capítulo 9 concluye este estudio generacional de la descentralización (1987-2009) en este país resumiendo los efectos de la reforma en Bolivia y conectando estos con los variados métodos empíricos que usé. Sostengo que estos métodos C² (cualitativo y cuantitativo) combinados con el enfoque “N-grande” sobre un país es clave para entender la dinámica institucional compleja y matizada que la descentralización puso en marcha. Coloco la experiencia boliviana en un contexto más amplio y analizo lo que el caso boliviano nos dice acerca de la descentralización de manera más general, incluyendo lecciones específicas para futuros reformadores. El libro termina con una discusión acerca del rol que jugó la descentralización en la transformación política de Bolivia y los vínculos profundos entre descentralización y democracia.

This it the final part of the series.

You can download the Spanish-language version of the book here.

Professor Jean-Paul Faguet works at the frontier between economics and politics, using quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the institutions and organizational forms that underpin development. Specific fields include political economy, comparative politics, institutional economics, and development economics.            

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and in no way reflect those of the International Development LSE blog or the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Professor Jean-Paul Faguet’s annual letter to students:

Professor Jean-Paul Faguet

Dear students,

Welcome to the LSE. I don’t care what you think.

Or maybe, to be a bit more accurate, the fact that you think something is not itself very convincing. I am interested – indeed very interested – in what you think, because in some respect it is bound to be wrong. I’m here to teach and you’re here to learn. Identifying those mistaken assumptions, informational gaps, and incorrect mental models is one of our most pressing priorities. Along the way we will also identify the many correct assumptions, informational assets, and insightful mental models that you also have.

But it is important that we both understand this from the start: your opinions do not have some irreducible merit because they are yours. Nor do mine, nor do any of my colleagues’. What does have merit is the product of our intellectual work, founded on solid theory and well-chosen evidence, leading to insights about how the world works that are both non-obvious and true. We’re pretty sure we have some of these at the LSE – otherwise we wouldn’t be here. But we’re equally sure that there’s a great deal that we, and the rest of the world, do not yet understand. The main point of academia – especially at the postgraduate level – is to distinguish what we know from what we don’t know, and to improve the tools we have for pushing back the darkness. In the latter especially, your help is crucial, precisely because you are not invested in the tools and models that we currently have, and so are more likely to come up with creative new ones.

Welcome to the LSE. It’s going to be intense and frustrating at first. And then it’s going to be exhilarating. We’re delighted that you came.

All the best,

Jean-Paul Faguet

Professor Jean-Paul Faguet is Professor of the Political Economy of Development and Programme Co-Director, Development Management. He works at the frontier between economics and politics, using quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the institutions and organizational forms that underpin development. Specific fields include political economy, comparative politics, institutional economics, and development economics.            

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and in no way reflect those of the International Development LSE blog or the London School of Economics and Political Science.

MSc Development Management student, Aly Bryan, reflects on a recent development workshop led by Professor Jean-Paul Faguet who questions whether a “shock” to the fiscal system can lead to effective fiscal decentralisation. 

Whenever our illustrious Programme Director Professor. Jean-Paul Faguet speaks, we listen. Not because of a (possibly misguided) sense that everything he says is true, but because he challenges us to think critically, to question our preconceived notions, to understand the nuances in development. His recent Thursday afternoon lecture on Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations was no different. Over the course of two hours, Dr. Faguet walked us through the arguments for and against fiscal decentralization, ultimately prompting that the reason fiscal decentralization often fails is because so many reforms are not seriously pursued. Central governments seek to retain residual authority, effectively handicapping the decentralization effort. So, the most effective way to push through fiscal decentralization is through a quick “shock” when possible. But why?

First, some background. Where political decentralization refers to the devolution of political authority from a central to a local authority (and so the reason you might vote for both local and national elections), fiscal decentralization does the same with the budget. Under a fiscally decentralized state, localities get a share of the central budget based on pre-determined factors (for example, budget could be allocated based on population). Once allocated, these funds are spent at the discretion of local governments.

There are many compelling reasons that decentralized financing will improve quality of governance. For one, public services – such as waste removal – are much better financed by local government (imagine if Theresa May in the UK or Justin Trudeau in Canada had to sign off on every trash collection). Fiscal decentralization also makes local government more responsive to its citizens who are better able to track whether the money that’s meant to be allocated to, say, repairing potholes is actually being spent to do so. Yet, despite calls for increased accountability and devolution of power to the local level – and in fact most countries claiming they are actively decentralizing – most developing countries maintain de facto centralization.

After all, it’s hard to give up power once you have it. And particularly for many leaders of developing countries, that power came about relatively recently. This phenomenon, termed the “endowment effect” by behavioral economists captures the way in which we ascribe greater value to a physical item (or in this case all of the trappings that come with power) when it is in our possession than when it is not. There is a natural tendency to undercut any attempts to take away that power. In situations where decentralization happens gradually, then, national actors will seek to preserve some of their authority, weakening the decentralization effort from the start.

Ultimately, what this comes down to is who can shape our communities. In development, it often seems like this question has one correct answer: communities should be shaped by the individual constituents that live in them. We are taught to pursue bottom-up approaches to development that actively engage with key stakeholders to facilitate transformative change from the inside out. We discuss provisions to preserve livelihoods and invest in capacity building on the ground.

But this slow, deliberative process does not work for fiscal decentralization. In fact, at least according to Dr. Faguet, fiscal decentralization is the exception that proves the rule. To effectively decentralize requires an exogenous “shock” to the system. No focus groups, no capacity building – at least not to start. Instead, policymakers need to find the window and take it, whether that be a transition of power or a moment of strategic policy change.

Alyssa (Aly) Bryan is an MSc Development Management student from the USA. Aly previously studied Political Science & Economics at Davidson College

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and in no way reflect those of the International Development LSE blog or the London School of Economics and Political Science.