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Scoring subnational challenges on the independent (IV) and dependent (DV) variables
Citations
... However, at the subnational level, there is enormous variation in political competition, economic development, and in the enforcement of the rule of law. Subnational governments have the power to implement regional economic development strategies, and their capacity to do so is increasingly shaped by subnational actors and conflicts (Eaton, 2017). Informal practices can strongly affect major policy areas of critical importance to the electorate, and they are key to understanding why some provinces are able to deliver a higher quality of democracy and to undertake development projects that improve the lives of their citizens, while others are not. ...
... Es conceptualmente plausible que los impactos de la LOIV varíen a nivel subnacional ya que el diseño de la norma asigna responsabilidades específicas a los Gobiernos Autónomos Descentralizados (GAD), y la efectividad de la implementación depende en gran medida del grado de desarrollo institucional y de los recursos disponibles de cada provincia. Esta variabilidad refleja las dinámicas descritas por Eaton (2017), quien señala que las capacidades institucionales y los recursos disponibles pueden influir significativamente en la implementación efectiva de las políticas públicas a nivel local. Además, es importante considerar que las desigualdades subnacionales son tan relevantes como las desigualdades de raza o clase social en el acceso a oportunidades y bienestar (Otero-Bahamon, 2019). ...
Esta investigación analiza cuál fue el impacto de la aprobación de la Ley Orgánica de Erradicación de Violencia deGénero sobre la tasa de femicidios a nivel subnacional en Ecuador. Para ello, se emplea un análisis cuantitativo deregresión con datos de panel que evidencia que la problemática de la violencia de género reaccionó a los cambiosinstitucionales formales y revirtió la tendencia en el aumento de los femicidios, pese al incremento de la criminalidad enel país. Sin embargo, se encuentra que a nivel subnacional existen variaciones en la implementación y el cumplimientode la Ley. Más allá de los cambios institucionales normativos generados desde el Nuevo Institucionalismo Feminista,los femicidios se explican desde un comportamiento cultural arraigado y condiciones estructurales de la sociedad másprofundas como la pobreza por necesidades básicas insatisfechas.
... In this paper, we scrutinize how this embeddedness plays a key role in the governance of pesticides at the subnational scale. Controversies over pesticide exposure do not typically take the form of national vs. subnational governments, as is often the case with debates over the form and direction of economic development in Latin America (Eaton 2017; see also the Introduction to this special issue). Disputes over pesticides in Argentina involve articulation among local, provincial, national, and transnational scales, and advocacy strategies typically move beyond the agrarian sector to engage issues like public health and urban planning (Rauchecker 2019). ...
Since the 1990s, agribusiness expansion in Argentina involved the exponential growth of pesticide use throughout the country. Pesticide exposure has become a widespread problem in rural areas and farming towns, but protests and conflicts about this issue are the exception rather than the norm. Why? Based on archival work, interviews, and ethnographic observations, in this paper, we scrutinize pesticide governance at the subnational scale to elucidate this puzzle, focusing on a) informal arrangements (face-to-face negotiations between pesticide users and people affected by them), b) juridical conflicts (lawsuits against farmers over exposure of people and crops to herbicides), and c) regulatory challenges (when rural populations and environmentalists push for local ordinances to curb pesticide exposure). We find that local cultural codes encourage informal agreements and that social inequalities prevent conflicts from arising in the public sphere. The interventions of social movements and civil society organizations (or lack thereof) and the mobilization of expertise also shape pesticide governance. Our analysis highlights that pesticide governance is context-dependent or situated, and informed by subtle but significant power asymmetries.
... Recent literature underscores the coordination problems and ensuing policy conflicts between national and subnational governments as a consequence of decentralization. Eaton (2017), for instance, argues that subnational governments may draw on their authority, resources, and legitimacy to advance their own subnational policy regimes and/or challenge the scope of national policy regimes. Policy conflicts have emerged in some subnational governments, as in the expansion of gold mining in the Peruvian northern region of Cajamarca (Gustafsson and Scurrah 2019). ...
... The case of artisanal miners in the Madre de Dios region is another example of permeability within the Peruvian state and supports the arguments related to policy conflicts because of competing national and subnational policy regimes in the context of decentralization (Eaton 2017). During the commodity boom, gold prices skyrocketed from US$ 279 in 2000 to US$ 1225 in 2010 per troy ounce, and thousands of artisanal miners in Madre de Dios began to extract gold informally. ...
To meet the growing global demand for minerals and new energy sources, governments in the Global South advance policy interventions to improve the unequal distribution of the cost and benefits of resource extraction. This paper explains the politics behind the implementation of the Closing Development Gaps (CDG) Plan, a new redistributive plan on behalf of Amazonian Indigenous peoples near the oil circuit in the Loreto region of Peru. It emphasizes the long-lasting impact of mobilizing strategies of indigenous organizations, which relayed critical information to policymakers about the claims both old and new of Indigenous peoples neighboring the oil circuit. It also draws attention to the permeability of state institutions, which allowed newer state agencies with distinct policy streams to advance new solutions to old problems. While the CDG Plan seeks to improve resource governance by focusing on infrastructure gaps (e.g., water and sanitation, electrification), it excludes the “political gaps” and the most contentious claims related to the environment that have moved Amazonian Indigenous peoples into struggle in recent years.
... Tras el retorno a la democracia a inicios del siglo XXI, el reto de descentralizar el poder político adquirió una mayor importancia, dado que diversos actores políticos (principalmente los partidos políticos opuestos al régimen fujimorista) y sociales (ONG y academia) demandaban el relanzamiento de este proceso de manera inmediata (López-Follegatti, 2002;Eaton, 2017). Se generó una gran expectativa hacia los gobiernos subnacionales bajo la premisa de que las autoridades regionales y locales conocerían mejor las demandas de la ciudadanía, dada su cercanía en el territorio y una mayor participación de la ciudadanía en el gobierno subnacional. ...
... De esta manera, en julio del 2002 se promulgó la Ley N.° 27783 (Ley de Bases de la Descentralización), la cual definió los objetivos, contenidos, principios, funciones y competencias de los gobiernos regionales y municipales. Este proceso se planificó en cuatro etapas de manera secuencial (Eaton, 2017). 7 La primera etapa suponía la descentralización política mediante la creación de los gobiernos regionales temporalmente con base departamental, la convocatoria a elecciones subnacionales en los departamentos, provincias y distritos y, en principio, la posterior creación de (macro-)regiones 8 a partir de la fusión voluntaria de los gobiernos regionales (departamentales) aprobada a través de un referéndum. ...
... Si bien se aceleró con la transferencia de competencias y funciones a los gobiernos subnacionales y se desarrollaron proyectos piloto a nivel municipal para las competencias de salud y educación (Ballón, 2007), este impulso descentralizador estuvo lejos de tener una coherencia y articulación programática o el acompañamiento del nivel nacional. Al contrario, prontamente se implementaron varias medidas que hicieron retroceder el proceso en otros ámbitos, mostrando tendencias recentralizadoras (Eaton, 2017). Por ejemplo, en 2007 se desactivó el Consejo Nacional de Descentralización (CND) y en su lugar creó la Secretaría de Descentralización (SD) como un órgano de línea dependiente de la PCM cuyas funciones se centraban en la coordinación con los gobiernos regionales y en dar continuidad al proceso de trans-ferencia de competencias administrativas. ...
... And this inability, in turn, had two major hindering factors. A first hindering factor was the power of business and economic elites in the lowland hydrocarbon-producing regions (Eaton 2017). A second hindering factor was a political obstacle rooted in the nature of party-society connections, as movements with an "extractivist" agenda wielded overwhelming power within the party, and the party was primarily responsive to those groups (Anria 2018; Brewer-Osorio 2021; Farthing 2019). ...
This article investigates why, in two different political and institutional contexts, leftist governing parties became agents of empowered inclusion, boosting the capacity of subordinate social actors to shape the agenda of politics and allowing them to push social policy in an inclusionary direction. To explain how and why this happened, it highlights the ambiguous nature of party-society linkages. While societal ties are necessary for sustained significant progress in social and political inclusion, they can also block the later consolidation of achievements. This happens as some groups, once included, block further inclusion. We build our theoretical argument about the two-sided nature of party-society linkages using comparative evidence from Bolivia and Uruguay—two countries where progress toward empowered inclusion has been especially notable in the past two decades. The article contributes to existing scholarship on social and political inclusion by calling for greater attention to the critical but, at times, ambiguous role that the social bases of parties play.
... By drawing on comparisons between federal and unitary systems and by leveraging those comparisons for causal inference, both research traditions have been able to move away from the rigid unitary versus federal divide in earlier studies of intergovernmental relations. By so doing, they have opened and pushed for a discussion about the (ir)relevance of territorial regimes for explaining political outcomes such as the unevenness of political or economic regimes within countries (Eaton 2017). As a general rule, these research programs can be applied to every single place in the world, irrespective of whether these countries are unitary or federal, decentralized or centralized. ...
The Subnational Research (SNR) and Multilevel Governance (MLG) research programs have tackled some of the crucial questions in comparative politics. Despite their shared principle that actors and institutions located at one territorial level are shaped by and shape other levels of government, each tradition has developed its own set of concepts and theories without fully acknowledging the other. We believe that this has been detrimental for knowledge accumulation. We argue that more knowledge accumulation in the study of territorial politics is possible if (1) scholars engage with each tradition, and (2) they are attentive to differences, or blind spots, in each traditions’ theories, concepts, and scope conditions. Drawing on two examples, the Regional Authority Index (RAI) and Kent Eaton’s work (2021) we show the benefits of transcending the boundaries of each tradition. We conclude by proposing a unified framework for the study of territorial politics that incorporates both SNR and MLG.
... Powerful gas and agricultural interests in these departments, which make up nearly two-thirds of the national territory and account for most of Bolivia's export revenue, strongly opposed the rise to national power of the Movement toward Socialism (MAS), which culminated in the historic 2005 election of the country's first ever indigenous president Evo Morales (Humphreys and Bebbington 2010). As support for neoliberal economic policies collapsed at the national level, regional elites in the more export-oriented economies of the lowland departments continued to favour pro-market approaches, setting the stage for a dramatic ideological showdown between east and west over development models (Eaton 2017). Whereas Morales sought to delegitimize departmental authorities, promoting a new constitution that would deny the possibility of departmental autonomy in favour of municipal and indigenous autonomies, his opponents in the eastern departments sought to protect their newfound authority and revenue (derived from the first ever gubernatorial elections in 2005 and a generous tax sharing scheme for departments that had been introduced only the year before Morales's victory). ...
... 9 Second, when comparing the three regions that formed the core of CONFILAR (Guayaquil, Santa Cruz, and Zulia), what emerges is that the only one that was able to defend the more liberal approach they all wanted to preserve for their regions was Santa Cruz. This outcome had much to do with the domestic alliance that Santa Cruz was able to form with other like-minded regions within Bolivia in the east, which its counterparts in Guayaquil and Zulia were unable to achieve (Eaton 2017). Third, the 'subnational-subnational' strategy is subject to electoral shifts and the possible subnational victories of parties whose alignment with the national government means that they will be far less interested in defending subnational prerogatives vis-à-vis the centre. ...
This article examines the external dimensions of domestic conflicts over subnational prerogatives in Latin America – a place where subnational governments cannot leverage their presence in powerful supranational institutions like those of the European Union. In the wake of decentralization, subnational governments across Latin America are adopting a variety of external strategies to defend their newfound prerogatives vis-à-vis national governments. This article conceptualizes three such strategies – targeted at governmental allies at the supranational, national, and subnational scales – and examines how each has been deployed in recent conflicts between national and subnational governments in Colombia, Bolivia, and Ecuador. While domestic conflicts over territorial governance have indeed become externalized in Latin America, external strategies on the part of subnational governments do not appear to have had a decisive impact, in part because their opponents in the national government have been able to similarly identify and solicit the support of their own external allies.
... While the subnational regions were granted political autonomy, the central government maintained sovereign control over sub-soil resources (Article 66, Constitution). Moreover, in a context of weak bureaucratic capacity, widespread clientelism, and fragmented political coalitions (Eaton, 2017;Arellano-Yanguas, 2018), attempts to exert influence over extractive development presents manifold challenges. ...
... Decentralising reforms have to some extent empowered subnational governments and created new opportunities to influence policy areas-such as mining expansion-over which they lack formal authority. Eaton (2017) argues that there are at least two important reasons for this. First, he contends that, in contexts of weak central states, the importance of formal decentralisation within particular policy areas should not be overstated. ...
... Secondly, in many countries these reforms have created ambiguous and overlapping responsibilities between different governmental levels. Such ambiguities create room for stakeholders to maneuver in promoting alternative policy agendas that may deviate from the national government's interests (Eaton, 2017; see also Verbrugge, 2015, p. 451) and that may allow regional governments to seek to influence mining expansion. However, as Geddes and Sullivan (2011) show in their study on 'local political leadership', in the context of neoliberal reforms, subnational leaders use such room for maneuver very differently and can adopt, consolidate, adapt, resist or contest neoliberalism. ...
The past decade has witnessed profound transformations in subnational territories engendered by a dramatic increase in natural resource extraction. Research to date has concentrated largely on why the transfer of extractive revenues often reinforces a "local resource curse"; however, little work has been done on subnational governments' attempts to maximise the benefits and minimise the costs of mining expansion. Drawing on the literature on subnational governance in the context of resource extraction and neoliberal reforms, this study analyses the strategies-confrontational or collaborative-subnational political leaders pursue and the reasons they pursue them. The findings of the article are based on in-depth field research in two Peruvian subnational regions that are highly dependent on mineral extraction. More specifically, we examine the collaborative strategy pursued in one region and compare it with a confrontational strategy in another. Our analysis indicates that an interplay between institutional capacity and supporting coalitions affects whether subnational leaders undertake a collaborative or a confrontational approach. Based on our findings, we consider the likely effects of these strategies for regional development. By shifting the focus to the agency of subnational leaders, we make an essential contribution to debates about subnational governance in the realm of resource extraction.
... However, while the decentralisation reform has given regional governments the responsibility to implement LUP, under the monitoring of the Environment Ministry (MINAM), Peru remains a highly centralised country with weak regional governments (Eaton, 2017). The distribution of power and capacity between the actors that at the beginning were in favour (MINAM, some regional governments, and civil society organisations) and opposed to LUP (Ministry of Economy and Finance -MEF, Ministry of Energy and Mines -MINEM, and mining corporations) is thereby uneven. ...
... Some regional governments have tried to use the opportunities created by decentralisation more broadly, and by LUP regulations more specifically, to assert their interests in relation to mining companies (Gustafsson & Scurrah, 2019a, 2019b. Those efforts have, however, in many cases been undermined by the weak capacity and unclear mandates of regional governments (Eaton, 2017). Altogether, this puts them in a weak position to enforce a contested institution, such as LUP, without external support. ...
In recent years, international actors have promoted international norms related to sustainable and inclusive resource governance. However, we know little about how such attempts are contested and adapted in domestic reform processes. Drawing on insights from norm diffusion and institutionalist theories, this article traces how first bilateral aid agencies and then OECD have influenced the institutionalisation of a contested land‐use planning (LUP) reform in Peru from 1990 until 2017. Based on 145 interviews and written primary sources, we demonstrate that aid agencies have partially empowered policy coalitions (e.g., civil society and subnational actors) in favour of LUP, whereas OECD's interventions have favoured national elites opposed to LUP. In both cases, we argue that by failing to foresee the political resistance among economic actors and national elites, international actors have contributed to the weakening and elite capture of LUP. Hence, our analysis represents a case of weakly institutionalized norms. The findings extend the existing literature on extractive governance by providing a fine‐grained analysis of the process in which national elites and societal coalitions domesticate the institutionalisation of international norms for sustainable and inclusive resource governance. Our findings have broader implications for debates about extractive governance as well as policy strategies for promoting institutional change in resource‐rich middle‐income countries.