Multilevel governance and the external strategies of subnational governments in Latin America

Abstract

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.

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Multilevel governance and the external strategies
of subnational governments in Latin America
Kent Eaton
To cite this article: Kent Eaton (2021): Multilevel governance and the external strategies
of subnational governments in Latin America, Regional & Federal Studies, DOI:
10.1080/13597566.2021.1875448
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Multilevel governance and the external strategies of
subnational governments in Latin America
Kent Eaton
Crown Faculty Services, UC Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA
ABSTRACT
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.
KEYWORDS Multilevel governance; Latin America; subnational governments; decentralization; regional
authority; paradiplomacy
One of the most extensive governance trends of recent decades is the
decision by national governments to endow subnational governments with
additional forms of authority, along with the resources to fulfil their new
roles (Oxhorn, Tulchin, and Selee 2004; Faguet and Poschl 2015; Hooghe
et al. 2016). Decentralization of authority has represented an especially
remarkable pivot in the global south, where colonial legacies and authoritar-
ian regimes have tended to generate highly centralizing patterns of rule
(Smoke, Gomez, and Peterson 2007; Dickovick and Wunsch 2014). Several
decades into this trend, however, we now know that the decision to decen-
tralize is never really the end of the story; instead it typically unleashes new
forms of conflict between national and subnational governments as the latter
set out to use, defend and/or enhance their newfound powers while the
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Kent Eaton keaton@ucsc.edu Crown Faculty Services, UC Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA
95064, USA
REGIONAL AND FEDERAL STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/13597566.2021.1875448

former often seek to claw back resources and prerogatives. As a result, the
distribution of authority between national and subnational governments
(including at both the regional/intermediate and local/municipal scales) has
proved to be quite fluid in many cases. As the literature on decentralization
in the global south has demonstrated, this fluidity is due in part to the reality
that national governments decide to decentralize largely for short-term and
often for baldly political reasons; rarely are they motivated purely by the nor-
mative desire to deepen democracy, promote economic development, or
enhance citizen security (O’Neill 2005; Falleti 2010). When the political
winds shift, when new parties come to power, or when economic crises are
overcome, national governments frequently pursue a range of (overt and
covert) re-centralizing measures to shore up their power (Dickovick and
Eaton 2013).
The purpose of this article is to explore the question of whether and how
subnational governments deploy external strategies in their attempts to
defend themselves, their authority, and their capacity from these encroach-
ments by the national government. By external strategies, I am referring to
behaviours by subnational governments that lead them to breach the
confines of the domestic political arena that are delimited by the borders
of the state to which they belong. Traditionally, conflicts between national
and subnational governments over which level gets to do what and with
whose money have been understood as struggles that are fundamentally
domestic, often highly politically sensitive for the centre, and generally
well-protected by international norms of sovereignty. The default assumption
is that nation-states get to decide what if any powers to give their subna-
tional governments, and that if these governments do not enjoy sufficient
leverage domestically to demand greater authority from below, there is
little they can do but accept the division of authority on offer from the
centre. As a measure of the sensitivity of territorial governance, it is no
coincidence that, bureaucratically speaking, control over subnational govern-
ments is often merged with internal security matters in Ministries of the
Interior.
To date, scholars have paid significant attention to how international
forces like economic liberalization, the globalization of capital markets, and
the reduction of trade barriers have all played a role in the adoption of
more decentralized modes of governance (Doner and Hershberg 1999;
Sorens 2004; Goldfrank and Shrank 2009). We also know that specific
global actors like bilateral aid organizations and multilateral financial insti-
tutions also heavily supported the decision to decentralize across the
global south, despite some disagreement about whether these organizations
mostly followed and endorsed –or actually helped cause –the decision to
decentralize, which was almost always taken for domestic reasons (Dickovick
2014). But when decentralized institutions are subject to attempts at reversal
2K. EATON

by national governments, is it possible for subnational governments to turn
to external actors as a way to better defend themselves vis-à-vis the centre?
While scholarship on the global north in general and on Europe in particu-
lar has documented the increasingly complex interactions that are taking
place between subnational and supranational levels of politics, thanks to
the literatures on multilevel governance (Hooghe 1996; Hooghe and Marks
2001,2016; Piattoni 2010) and paradiplomacy (Soldatos 1990; Aldecoa and
Keating 1999; Tatham 2016; Tavares 2016), very little is yet known about
the external strategies that subnational governments may be using in the
global south.
1
Regional economic integration has produced a much more
robust set of supranational institutions in Europe than anywhere else,
which means that if subnational governments outside of Europe are also
‘stepping up their game’internationally, we should not just look at suprana-
tional institutions for signs of this activity. Instead, the weakness of suprana-
tional institutional channels of the sort we see in the EU may force
subnational governments to get creative about their external activities.
Toward the goal of better understanding the external dimensions of dom-
estic conflicts over subnational prerogatives, my approach in this article is to
conceptualize a number of strategies that subnational governments can use
in their defense. This focus on defensive strategies adopted by subnational
governments in the throes of conflict with the centre is meant to comp-
lement a literature that has tended to privilege how these governments
have proactively begun to pursue their interests in a more offensive
posture, as in their more aggressive pursuit of direct foreign investment
(Hooghe and Marks 1996; Malesky 2008; Tavares 2016). I focus on Latin
America, perhaps the most dynamic region in the global south in terms of
both decentralization and recentralization. In Latin America, external actors
like the U.S. government, multinational corporations, and transnational
NGOs all shape the authority and capacity of subnational governance in
ways that are both solicited and unsolicited by these governments, but my
concern in this paper is with the former in the sense that I examine explicit
strategies. By ‘strategy’, I refer simply to some plan of (external) action
designed and adopted as a solution to a particular problem –in this case
the defense of subnational prerogatives. In addition to identifying a
number of such strategies and demonstrating how they have been deployed
in specific conflicts, my goal is to begin to illuminate both their potential
payoffs and possible limitations, along with some sense of the extent to
which external forces are actually shaping internal struggles over territorial
governance in Latin America.
While the article is animated by the goal of deepening awareness of the
range of the external strategies pursued by subnational governments,
together with the seriousness (and high political drama) of some of these
efforts, it also raises questions about the effectiveness of these strategies.
REGIONAL & FEDERAL STUDIES 3

External forces and trends like liberalization and democratization have unde-
niably pushed the decentralization trend forward, and yet external actors
have so far not proven to be all that useful as allies that subnational govern-
ments can leverage in defense of their prerogatives when these are chal-
lenged by the centre. In part this is because of a ‘two can play that game’
dynamic. As will become evident in the case studies that follow, when subna-
tional governments have identified and targeted external partners, their
opponents in the national government have often been able to similarly
identify and solicit the support of their own external allies. One walkaway
point is that domestic conflicts over territorial governance, which in an
earlier era seemed almost entirely beyond the purview of actors above and
outside the nation-state, have indeed become externalized and internationa-
lized –but not in a way that redounds only to the benefit of the subnational
combatants in these conflicts.
This article proceeds as follows. In the next section, I conceptualize three
different external strategies that subnational governments have used in
their various clashes with the centre, emphasizing as the main criterion the
territorial scale of the external ally solicited: supranational, national, or subna-
tional. All of these strategies are ‘external’,‘extra-domestic’and ‘inter-
national’in the sense that they transcend the national polity, but they
differ in terms of the level of the external government that the subnational
government is targeting. After conceptualizing these strategies as the ‘subna-
tional-supranational’,‘subnational-national’, and ‘subnational-subnational’
strategies, the next three sections illustrate each one with an example from
adifferent country (Colombia, Bolivia, and Ecuador).
Conceptualizing external strategies across multiple scales
Conflicts over territorial prerogatives between subnational and national gov-
ernments often take on a ‘David vs. Goliath’quality given the structural and
fiscal advantages of the latter over the former. As the generally weaker party
in these conflicts, and following the logic of Edward Gibson’s theory of
‘boundary control (2013)’, subnational governments may seek to bolster
their position by looking for allies beyond the state’s territorial limits. External
strategies can also be understood as a way to generate leverage vis-à-vis
national governments in a dynamic that is analogous to the ‘boomerang
effect’identified by Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink (1998). Keck and Sik-
kink’s expansive list of actors who belong to the transnational advocacy net-
works that apply the boomerang (e.g. local social movements, foundations,
parts of the executive or parliamentary branches of government) does not,
but should, include subnational officials who can try to ‘name and shame’
national governments with the help of external allies (9). Because national
governments often try to defend or justify their assaults on subnational
4K. EATON

prerogatives by emphasizing the corruption or ineffectiveness of subnational
officials, beleaguered subnational governments can try to ally with external
actors who are deemed legitimate as a way to bolster their own legitimacy.
Visibility is especially important in these conflicts because national govern-
ment transgressions against the prerogatives of subnational governments
can go unnoticed by anyone other than the subnational officials themselves,
especially when these take more covert forms (Dickovick and Eaton 2013).
As a first cut at conceptualizing the external strategies adopted by subna-
tional governments, which has received scant attention in the existing litera-
ture outside Europe, one simple criterion deserves emphasis, which is the
territorial scale at which they focus their efforts: supranational, national, or
subnational. Taking scale seriously means that, when subnational govern-
ments decide to externalize their conflicts with national governments, they
also then have several options in terms of the level of external governmental
institutions they want to target. As developed in the paragraphs below and
summarized in Table 1, external strategies at these three territorial scales
are characterized by different combinations of potential risks and possible
pay-offs. Risk here is construed narrowly to refer only to how the external
strategy is likely to be perceived by the national government (as the main
antagonist of the subnational government in question), and payoffrefers
broadly to the benefits (material and/or rhetorical) that the subnational gov-
ernment can hope to secure. This exercise is intended as an initial conceptu-
alization that could and should be further refined and extended.
Perhaps the most obvious way for a subnational government to externa-
lize its conflict with the national government would be to seek representation
in or recourse from a supranational institution to which the member country
belongs. This ‘subnational-supranational’interface has received much atten-
tion in the literature on multilevel governance and the European Union,
which has created multiple institutional channels for the expression of subna-
tional interests (Hooghe and Marks 1996,2001; Tatham 2016). No other
regional attempts at economic integration have come close to the European
experience in terms of the number and potential significance of the insti-
tutional spaces they have created for subnational governments. In the case
of NAFTA’s chapter 11, new mechanisms for the resolution of investor-state
disputes have in fact been used to suppress rather than enhance the
stature of subnational governments (Warner and Gerbasi 2004). But even if
Table 1. Comparing external strategies by subnational governments (SNG).
Scale of external ally Possible risk to SNGs Potential payoffto SNGs
Supranational Medium Low-High
National High High
Subnational Low Low
REGIONAL & FEDERAL STUDIES 5

the regional institutions that promote economic integration hold little
promise for them, subnational governments in the global south may enjoy
leverage in other supranational institutions, including: (1) regional develop-
ment banks like the Asian Development Bank, (2) regional bodies like the
Organisation of African Unity (OAU), and (3) multilateral institutions like the
United Nations (and its 17 specialized agencies).
The ‘subnational-supranational’strategy poses medium risks: while the
country’s membership in the supranational institution may provide some
cover for subnational governments that activate this strategy, taking a
conflict to a supranational body may be interpreted as a direct challenge
to the national government’s role as the sole nexus or point of contact vis-
à-vis these bodies. Reflecting the heterogeneity of supranational institutions,
the potential benefits derived from this strategy can fall anywhere from the
low to high range: while some of these institutions wield considerable
resources (e.g. the UN Development Program) others are famously loathe
to intervene in domestic conflicts (e.g. OAU) and cannot or do not offer
much in the way of material or logistical support.
According to the second strategy, subnational governments seek to lobby
and/or ally with the national government of a foreign power. Under certain,
somewhat extreme, conditions, subnational governments that are embattled
with their respective national governments may seek to establish their own
separate contacts and relationships with national governments in other
countries, typically either neighbouring countries or countries they consider
especially powerful or relevant (i.e. the U.S. or Spain for Latin America).
Directly challenging the norm of foreign non-intervention in internal disputes
over territorial governance, the idea motivating this strategy is to ask foreign
governments to take sides in these disputes and to align with the subnational
government in question. Similar dynamics are what led Panayotis Soldatos
(1990), with the case of Quebec in mind, to conceptualize ‘paradiplomacy’
as a relatively new phenomenon.
This second strategy may be infrequent given that it poses a more frontal
challenge to sovereignty than the first strategy, and should be considered
both high-risk and high-payoff. Its riskiness is a function of how likely it is
to provoke extreme reactions from the ‘local’national government, whose
sovereign prerogatives are being threatened much more directly than
when subnational governments try to line up support from supranational
institutions. A stark departure from traditional norms of diplomacy, this strat-
egy may also open up subnational governments to charges that they are
serving the goals of foreign actors and lacking in patriotism; especially
where nationalism is a salient political force, alliances with national govern-
ments abroad can worsen rather than improve the perceived legitimacy of
subnational officials. But if successful, this strategy could generate significant
payoffs in the form of (material and rhetorical) support from a powerful and/
6K. EATON

or neighbouring country. While the odds of this kind of strategy succeeding
are perhaps limited, its activation appears to be more likely (1) in the pres-
ence of ideological affinities between the subnational government in ques-
tion and the foreign power, and (2) when foreign access to natural
resources, investment opportunities, and/or strategic exports from the sub-
national region seem to be threatened by the policies of the ‘local’national
government.
Unlike the first two strategies, the third strategy is external but not vertical
in the sense that it looks to partner horizontally with subnational govern-
ments in other countries rather than with external governmental actors at
higher hierarchical levels. In Europe, Hooghe and Marks (1996 and 2001)
identify a number of functionally-specific networks connecting subnational
governments that have strengthened across the EU, some of which bring
together regions that face common policy problems, and some of which
link together highly successful regions (as in the Four Motors association
created three decades ago between Baden-Württemberg, Catalonia, Lom-
bardy, and Rhône-Alpes). More recently, scholars in Latin America have
begun to study cooperation between subnational governments in neigh-
bouring countries. In Argentina and Chile, for example, Silva and Morán
(2010)find that Integration Committees between border regions have
brought the two nations closer together, and Colacrai (2010) argues that
Argentine and Chilean subnational governments have collectively deepened
integration in terms of trade, infrastructure, tourism and culture. Schiavón
(2006) likewise shows how Mexican states that are wealthier and geographi-
cally closer to the U.S. have forged ties with U.S. states across the border to
promote and manage integration. All of this research on Latin America to
date sees the ‘subnational-subnational’strategy as essentially functional to
national objectives in the sense of furthering and accelerating regional inte-
gration. Thus, while these paradiplomatic efforts are far more politically
meaningful than the ‘sister cities’modality (Tavares 2016), it is important to
emphasize that they still run parallel with, and not orthogonal to, the
efforts of national governments –accurately reflecting the ‘para’in
‘paradiplomacy’.
But what are the prospects for cooperation between subnational govern-
ments in separate countries in collaborative relationships that do not further,
complement or deepen the policy objectives of their respective national gov-
ernments, but instead conflict with or undermine those objectives? For
instance, when the policy autonomy of a subnational government is threa-
tened by the national government what help might subnational govern-
ments in other countries provide? There are good reasons to doubt that
subnational governments outside the country could be of much assistance
by virtue of their subnational identities (and coffers). Other possible external
allies examined in this article, including the U.S. government or multilateral
REGIONAL & FEDERAL STUDIES 7

institutions, would appear to have far more to offer in the way of resources,
leverage, and capacity. Nevertheless, alliances between subnational govern-
ments that are embattled with national governments for the same reason, or
that seek to defend greater autonomy from those governments for similar
purposes, may still serve a number of limited objectives. Precisely because
a subnational unit in a given country may be quite special, distinctive, or
unusual relative to other units in that same country, and therefore somewhat
isolated domestically, partnering with subnational units deemed to be similar
in other countries can offer a possible way to overcome their isolation. Not-
withstanding these benefits, the ‘subnational-subnational’strategy generates
limited payoffs, and likely poses limited risks as well: national governments
generally do not perceive that their sovereignty could be threatened by sub-
national governments abroad.
Before illustrating each of the three external strategies in the sections that
follow, a few further reflections about and possible extensions of this simple
conceptual schema are in order. First, while it makes sense to emphasize the
different risks and benefits that subnational officials associate with these
strategies, it is important to note that they should be thought of as potentially
combinable rather than mutually exclusive. Faced with the nearly existential
threats that are described below, subnational officials may seek to activate
allies at more than one scale, making multiple overtures and ‘seeing what
sticks’in a dynamic akin to venue shopping.
2
Second, each of these strategies
could be bilateral or multilateral in scope, and at either end of the relation-
ship. In other words, a subnational unit can strategize alone or in concert
with other units in that same country, and it/they can either target one exter-
nal governmental actor or multiple external governmental actors at the scale
of their choosing. The choice between bilateral and multilateral approaches,
along with the degree to which the three strategies are combinable, will
depend largely on context.
Third, while my conceptual schema emphasizes governmental actors at
multiple scales, it should be possible to broaden this framework to include
non-governmental allies at each scale as well (in the form of transnational
NGOs, civil society groups that are organized at the national level, and sub-
national civil-society partners in other countries). External NGOs that are
issue-specific rarely articulate the strengthening of subnational governments
as one of their core goals (unlike such development agencies as USAID or
NORAD), but they often do identify these governments as partners who
can help them achieve their own core goals, including for example the
environmental stewardship that indigenous municipalities might be seen
as guaranteeing, or the human rights protections that might be strengthened
by local government criminal justice reforms. For the great majority of subna-
tional units in Latin America, which often incorporate vast and sparsely popu-
lated rural areas, external NGOs have played especially key roles in bringing
8K. EATON

much needed capacity to subnational bureaucracies, both by training the
employees of subnational agencies and by directly supplying skills like pro-
gramme design and evaluation, service provision, and data analysis. From
the perspective of subnational governments, building relationships with
external NGOs may be seen as less overtly threatening to the centre than
the three governmental strategies emphasized here, even if many national
governments have recently moved to more heavily regulate these NGOs (Car-
others and Brechenmacher 2014).
The subnational-supranational strategy: A mayor’s suspension
in Colombia
When in the aftermath of decentralization national governments in Latin
America have developed concerns about how subnational officials are
using their new authority, they can seek to recentralize the fiscal resources
at their disposal or limit their capacity to act administratively in ways that chal-
lenge national policy preferences. But they can also set their sights on the
third, political dimension of decentralization, which refers to the direct elec-
tion of subnational officials who in the past were appointed and removed
by the centre. While political decentralization has proven to be quite
‘sticky’in the sense that national governments have not been able to directly
reverse or suspend subnational electoral processes (in contrast to fiscal and
administrative recentralization), they have been able to target the individuals
who participate in these elections and to suspend from office those who win.
Where the electoral apparatus that runs subnational elections is not indepen-
dent from the national executive branch, individual candidates may be pro-
scribed from running for office for essentially political reasons rather than
for failing to meet legal requirements. If that doesn’t work, where judicial
systems are likewise politically compliant, the national government can
then try to use the judiciary to remove elected mayors and governors from
office. For example, prosecutors in Bolivia sought to suspend and/or arrest
all four of the governors who led the lowland autonomy movement
described in the next section (succeeding in three cases).
3
The national strat-
egy at play here is to target subnational officials as individuals rather than the
subnational institutions they control.
Domestic judicial institutions play a critical role in adjudicating the jurisdic-
tional disputes that inevitably arise under multilevel governance (witness the
pivotal role played over time by the U.S. Supreme Court vis-à-vis federalism),
but they can only decisively referee these national-subnational disputes if
they enjoy sufficient independence from national executive and legislative
branches. Without a modicum of judicial independence, subnational
elected officials in Latin America are unlikely to find recourse in domestic judi-
cial institutions to protect their formal governing prerogatives when they are
REGIONAL & FEDERAL STUDIES 9

embroiled in significant policy conflicts with the centre. Even in federal cases,
where provincial governors may have their own (possibly compliant) judicial
institutions, disputes with the national government over the formal division
of authorities will necessarily be ruled upon by higher-level judicial powers.
Against the backdrop of this forbidding domestic landscape, and embattled
in political and policy disputes that have taken the form of judicial and legal
persecution, subnational elected officials may try to protect themselves by
pursuing recourse from supranational institutions. While the judicial nature
of the assault suggests the appropriateness of a judicial response, the
national bias in domestic judicial institutions increases the appeal of external
judicial venues.
By far the most prominent example of a ‘subnational-supranational’judi-
cial strategy in Latin America comes from Colombia and the case of Bogotá
mayor Gustavo Petro (2012–15). In a country that sat out the region-wide
left turn that took place after 2000, and where the left has indeed never gov-
erned nationally, the election of a former guerrilla leader to Colombia’s
second most important political office represented a political earthquake,
especially given the municipal bent of the decentralizing reforms that were
introduced beginning in the 1980s (Falleti 2010; Restrepo 2015). Petro’s
various attempts to reverse neoliberalism, which he proposed to do by reg-
ulating urban sprawl, promoting the densification of the city, and re-asserting
public authority vis-à-vis transport and housing markets, put him on a col-
lision course with a number of vested economic interests who enjoyed a
great deal of influence vis-à-vis national institutions (Eaton 2020). Most fate-
fully, Petro sought to un-do the privatization of trash collection and to create
a wholly municipally-owned trash company, arguing that oligopolistic prac-
tices had created one of the most lucrative businesses in the city –along
with a notoriously low quality/high cost service. Due both to poor planning
on the part of Petro’s administration and a campaign of sabotage by the
national government, which embargoed in Colombian ports the dump
trucks Petro attempted to import from the U.S., uncollected trash began to
pile up in the streets of Bogotá.
4
On 9 December 2013, approximately half way into his term as mayor and
in the midst of the trash crisis, Petro was suspended from office by Inspector
General and conservative jurist Alejandro Ordoñez, who further stipulated
that the mayor would be unable to run for any other office for a period of
15 years. Ordoñez justified the suspension on the grounds that Petro had
broken laws requiring competition in public service provision, in addition
to using unauthorized trucks to collect trash. That night, as thousands of
Bogotanos mobilized in Petro’s defense in the city’s main plaza, the mayor
denounced the undemocratic nature of the drive to suspend him and
called for the beginning of a democratic and peaceful revolution in Colombia.
In response to the suspension of Petro from office, one departmental tribunal
10 K. EATON

(Tribunal Administrative de Cundinamarca) issued a ruling that sought to
reinstate the mayor, only to be reversed by the more powerful Council of
State, which upheld the suspension (Gómez 2014).
Anticipating the inability of Colombia’s domestic judicial institutions to
protect him from what was essentially a policy disagreement, Petro appealed
to the Organisation of American State’s Inter-American Court of Human
Rights (ICHR) and asked for an injunction (medidas cautelarias) to prevent
his suspension. That Petro’s request was quickly granted by the ICHR and
that he was ultimately reinstated in his position as mayor could at first
glance be taken as evidence of the utility of this ‘subnational-supranational’
strategy. The story, however, is more complicated, and in ways that raise
doubts about how much this strategy really contributed to the outcome.
First, it is important to note that Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos,
one of the chief opponents of the mayor’s policy vision for Bogotá, refused
to reinstate Petro after the ICHR ruling, ordered his departure from the mayor-
alty, and appointed a close political ally (Rafael Pardo) to finish out Petro’s
term (Reyes 2014). Eventually, President Santos agreed to reinstate Petro
only four months later, in April 2014, days after Petro announced that he
would support Santos’s reelection bid in order to prevent the victory of
anti-peace candidate Oscar Zuluaga in the second round of the 2014 presi-
dential election. In other words, the price Bogotá’sfirst leftist mayor had to
pay for the privilege of finishing his elected mandate was to support the
country’s right-of-centre president, a deeply political and highly contingent
quid pro quo that likely has more to do with the outcome than the inter-
national court ruling itself. Nevertheless, the ICHR ruling may have played a
role in a subsequent decision by Colombia’s Council of State in November
2017, which annulled Ordoñez’s ruling, restored Petro’s political rights, and
clarified that administrative sanctions should never be sufficient to remove
an individual’s political rights.
5
The subnational-national strategy: East vs. West in Bolivia
The most important recent example of the ‘subnational-national’strategy can
be seen in the 2006–2008 conflict that unfolded between the national gov-
ernment and the governors of the four eastern departments in Bolivia’s
lowland region (or medialuna), who sought to coordinate with the U.S. gov-
ernment their resistance to the administration of President Evo Morales
(2006–2019). 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 his-
toric 2005 election of the country’sfirst ever indigenous president Evo
Morales (Humphreys and Bebbington 2010). As support for neoliberal
REGIONAL & FEDERAL STUDIES 11

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 show-
down 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 auton-
omy 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).
In the attempt to broaden their movement for regional autonomy and
overcome skepticism that they were essentially motivated by the desire to
defend their privileged economic position, eastern elites successfully
deployed a discursive strategy whereby they claimed that lowland (camba)
territorial interests and identities were under attack (Gustafson 2006; Eaton
2007,2011). But these elites also tried to supplement this inherently domestic
strategy with an external strategy that linked them closely to the U.S. govern-
ment in a number of institutional guises, including the U.S. Agency for Inter-
national Development, the National Democratic Institute and the
International Republican Institute (formally non-governmental partisan enti-
ties that mostly finance party-building and democracy promotion efforts in
the global south), and ultimately the U.S. embassy itself. In step with Bolivia’s
ideological polarization, this collaboration between the U.S. and Bolivia’s
eastern region became more pronounced after the October 2003 toppling
of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada, the architect of Bolivia’s‘inclusive
neoliberalism’who was invited to set up his government in one of these
departments (Santa Cruz) when he fell from power in La Paz. In 2004, the
U.S. government shifted its programming away from support for municipal
governments, which had been the focus of Sánchez de Losada’s decentraliz-
ing reforms in the 1990s (Faguet 2013), toward support for (especially
lowland) departmental governments. Specifically, USAID’sOffice of Transition
Initiatives spent $13 million on 100 grants to department governments and
moderate civil society groups (Burron 2012), focusing on ‘building the
capacity of the prefect-led department governments’which were led by
directly-elected governors after 2005 (Wolff2011).
This ‘subnational-national’strategy came to a head in the chaotic fall of
2008, when Bolivia approached the brink of a civil war between highland sup-
porters of the MAS-led national government and lowland supporters of the
movement for regional autonomy (or secession, in the hopes of some of
these supporters). In the context of work stoppages, hunger strikes, and wide-
spread protests against cuts in revenue transfers for the east, Santa Cruz Gov-
ernor Rubén Costas solicited a series of meetings with U.S. Ambassador Philip
12 K. EATON

Goldberg (Fabricant 2011). Immediately after the last of these meetings,
Costas ordered an official ‘take over’of national institutions in Santa Cruz
(including the state-owned television station and tax collecting agency),
the timing of which led many to suspect that the ambassador had signalled
his approval of such an action.
6
President Morales then accused Goldberg of
inciting division and separatism in support of what he termed a golpe cívico-
prefectual (i.e. a civic coup by the departmental prefects) and expelled him
from the country on 9 September 2008. The U.S. responded by expelling Boli-
vian Ambassador Gustavo Guzmán and by decertifying Bolivia’s drug control
efforts, which terminated preferential access for Bolivian exports to the U.S.
market through the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Certification Act.
Bolivia and the U.S. would only re-establish top-level diplomatic ties after
the end of the MAS government in 2019.
The Bolivian conflict thus illustrates some of the key features of the ‘sub-
national-national’strategy, including the role of ideological shifts as an ante-
cedent condition that simultaneously led to the rupture between the two
national governments (i.e. Bolivia and the U.S.) and the closer affinity
between subnational governments and the foreign power (i.e. the medialuna
departments and the U.S.). The case also speaks to the high stakes of this
strategy, which led to a prolonged fracture in diplomatic ties and produced
real economic costs for the Bolivian economy, including the four lowland
departments, where many U.S.-bound Bolivian exports originate. Finally,
the Bolivian conflict clearly reveals the ‘two can play that game’dynamic.
As eastern governors sought to coordinate their efforts with the U.S. ambas-
sador in the most dire phase of the conflict, President Morales then solicited
the intervention of Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), a brand-new
association of Latin American states with a decidedly progressive orientation
created at the high mark of the region’s left turn. UNASUR forcefully indicated
its support for the national government and embraced Morales’s attempt to
treat the departmental protests as a threat to Bolivia’s institutional order and
territorial integrity.
The subnational-subnational strategy: Neoliberal networks in
Ecuador
As a salient example of the ‘subnational-subnational’strategy, this section
focuses on efforts by pro-market actors in the Ecuadorian city of Guayaquil
to strengthen their defense of subnational autonomy by building networks
with ideologically like-minded groups in the subnational jurisdictions of
other Latin American countries. Resented by other Ecuadorian municipalities
for its significant fiscal and structural advantages, Guayaquil sought to
connect with subnational units in other countries that were similarly trying
to defend economic models that clashed with the centralizing ambitions of
REGIONAL & FEDERAL STUDIES 13

their own national governments. Unlike the two strategies discussed above,
this external strategy took a specific organizational form in the 2006 creation
in Guayaquil of the International Confederation for Liberty and Regional
Autonomy (Confederación Internacional por la Libertad y la Autonomía
Regional or CONFILAR). Although this case reveals the ‘low risk/low payoff’
nature of this third external strategy, it also suggests that external horizontal
alliances between similarly embattled subnational governments can provide
much-needed solidarity and moral support, as well as a broader platform
both for ideational exchanges and for the diffusion of more practical infor-
mation about strategies and tactics.
Guayaquil is the capital of a coastal region (Guayas) long considered the
most economically powerful in Ecuador, thanks to the agro-exports that
have flowed through its port since colonial times and that fuelled the rise
of commercial banks with deep and extensive influence over the national
government based in Quito (Burbano de Lara 2009). In the last two
decades, the success of Guayaquil’s consistently pro-market and liberal orien-
tation provided a sharp contrast both with the instability and turmoil that
plagued the national government in the decade between 1997 and 2007,
and with the anti-neoliberal and state-centered orientation of Rafael
Correa’s subsequent decade as president between 2007 and 2017. In these
two decades, Guayaquil took advantage of Ecuador’s distinctive approach
to decentralization, which encouraged subnational governments to apply
for the transfer of authorities from below rather than to unilaterally and sym-
metrically implement transfers in a more top-down fashion (Van Cott 2008;
Faust and Harbers 2012). To defend the ‘Guayaquil model’first from chaos
(1997–2007) and then from ‘socialism’(2007–17), Mayor Jaime Nebot
(2000–2019) emphasized the importance of autonomy by fully utilizing the
city’s formal authority and by acting informally to promote what he called
‘autonomia al andar’, which could be roughly translated as ‘autonomy as
you go’(Silva 2016). The mayor and the local businesses that formed his
core constituency also looked abroad, financing high-profile visits to Guaya-
quil in 2005 on the part of two prominent (and foreign) subnational leaders:
Jordi Pujol, the Catalan leader who championed autonomy during his long
presidency of Catalonia, and Rubén Costas, a leading advocate of autonomy
for Santa Cruz in Bolivia who would become its first ever elected governor.
7
Building on these overtures, CONFILAR formalized an emerging network
between likeminded neoliberals who came to associate the defense of
liberal approaches with the defense of regional autonomy in countries
whose national governments had come under the control of ‘twenty-first
century socialists’. Not entirely unlike the ‘Four Motors’dynamic in Europe,
CONFILAR brought together local government officials and private sector
leaders from three of the richest and most successful regions in Bolivia
(Santa Cruz), Ecuador (Guayaquil), and Venezuela (Zulia), characterized both
14 K. EATON

by the productivity of their export activities and by their natural resource
wealth (e.g. hydrocarbons). Including advocates of free enterprise from Gua-
temala and Peru as well, CONFILAR hoped that its workshops, courses, and
media outreach could trumpet regional successes with pro-market strategies
and focus criticism on the centralizing tendencies of the statist projects that
threatened to eliminate neoliberalism not just at the national level but at the
subnational level as well. CONFILAR held its second major conference in
Santa Cruz in 2007, and was greatly energized by the momentum of the
movement for autonomy in lowland Bolivia, which would culminate in the
2008 wildcat referenda on departmental autonomy promoted by Carlos
Dabdoub as president of the Pro-Santa Cruz Committee (who also served
as CONFILAR’sfirst president).
8
Over a decade later, however, one is struck by how quickly the enthusiasm
generated by CONFILAR evaporated, by how little organizational residue it
seemed to leave, and, more generally, by the limitations of this horizontal
strategy. First, the non-hierarchical horizontality of this ‘low risk’strategy
did not protect the network from denunciations by each country’s respective
president (Rafael Correa, Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez), who labelled the
affiliated groups as separatists and who incorrectly claimed they were being
funded by foreign powers (i.e. the U.S.). This represents a particular twist on
the ‘two can play that game’dynamic; in response to horizontal networking
among subnational governments, presidential opponents sought to externa-
lize the conflict further in the attempt to discredit the emerging network.
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 alli-
ance 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.
For example, the state of Zulia was won by a pro-Chávez candidate in Vene-
zuela’s regional elections in 2012, putting an end to a 12-year period of
control by governors (e.g. Manuel Rosales and Pablo Pérez Alvarez) who
were opposed to Chávez and who had sought to defend regional autonomy
in coordination with their peers in Guayaquil and Santa Cruz.
Conclusion
The shift to multilevel governance is taking place across the globe and yet its
effects may play out very differently depending on cross-national and cross-
REGIONAL & FEDERAL STUDIES 15

regional differences in the underlying strength of institutions, and in the
degree to which formal institutions actually constrain political action. In
Latin America, which is generally characterized by a far weaker institutional
landscape than Europe, the design of new institutional rules that we call ‘mul-
tilevel governance’has generated almost constant conflict over the content
of these rules and quite high levels of institutional volatility –as reflected
in the recentralising efforts that began not long after the ink was dry on
decentralizing legislation itself. Institutional design in the context of weak
institutions is a recipe for the kinds of raw political conflicts between national
and subnational governments that are described in this article. In less institu-
tionalized settings, one could conclude that conflict between the political
actors who are either constituted or transformed by the shift to multilevel
governance is one of the most import effects of this shift –in sharp contrast
to the mostly cooperative behaviours that have been emphasized in applying
the multilevel governance framework to the European Union.
As conflicts over the division of authority between national and subnational
governments continue to rage in Latin America, they have become increasingly
internationalized and thus more difficult to understand as purely domestic
struggles. In this article I have privileged the ‘bottom up’efforts of subnational
governments to secure the help of actors outside their respective states, which
they have sought to do by pursuing external strategies at three different scales.
What the differences between these strategies suggest is that subnational
officials from across the ideological spectrum are looking to a variety of external
actors for help in their conflicts with the centre, and for a variety of reasons.
Facing a hostile national landscape in a country where the left has never won
office, Bogotá mayor Gustavo Petro activated a ‘subnational-supranational’
strategy in the attempt to prevent his suspension from office over policy dis-
agreements with the national government. While the suspension likely failed
for other reasons, the order to reinstate the mayor from the Inter-American
Court of Human Rights brought international attention to his plight and may
have encouraged an important domestic ruling in his favour down the line. In
Bolivia, it was the U.S. government and its obvious unease over the rise to
power of President Evo Morales that encouraged opposition governors on
the right of the spectrum to adopt a ‘subnational-national’strategy, leading ulti-
mately to the expulsion of the U.S. ambassador at a moment when the country
was poised on the verge of civil war. In Ecuador, the domestic isolation of the
country’s most powerful city led its popular but nationally-embattled mayor
to build organizational ties with similarly isolated subnational units and pro-
market local authorities in other countries, a ‘subnational-subnational’strategy
that unfolded along horizontal rather than vertical lines.
While the externalization of domestic conflicts over territorial governance
is undeniable, its impacts on actual outcomes should not be overstated and
deserve further consideration in future research. External actors of the sort
16 K. EATON

discussed in this paper can bring not just fiscal and organizational resources
but also visibility, leverage, and even legitimacy to subnational governments
in their struggles with the centre, but they can also be mobilized by the
centre itself as national officials learn to play the same game. Given the sig-
nificant advantages they typically enjoy relative to both local and provincial
governments, national governments may ideally prefer to keep external
actors out of their conflicts with these governments, particularly at the
outset. As Gibson (2013) has reminded us, it is the weaker actor who wants
to externalize its conflict with a stronger actor. But once the border is brea-
ched by the increasingly bold and aggressive external strategies of subna-
tional governments, then national governments may well follow suit by
lining up their own external allies. The help provided by external allies may
appear to be especially critical for subnational governments because of the
structural disadvantages they usually face in these domestic conflicts, but
the increasing heterogeneity of the international environment (populated
by a proliferating number of multilateral and transnational actors) means
that both sides in these conflicts are likely able to find sympathetic external
allies. In Bolivia, for example, when conservative governors in the eastern low-
lands sought the support of the U.S. in their efforts to defend departmental
prerogatives from a centralizing and leftist national project, the national gov-
ernment was able to respond by leveraging the intervention of a supportive
(and left-leaning) new international body (UNASUR). In Ecuador, pro-market
voices in Guayaquil built networks with likeminded subnational actors in
Bolivia and Venezuela in the attempt to defend regional autonomy, efforts
which presidents in all three countries then sought to delegitimize as
directed and funded by the U.S. government.
While the three cases examined in this article cast some doubt on the
effectiveness of the range of external strategies available to subnational gov-
ernments, and on the decisiveness of the support that external actors can
offer, much more research is needed to know whether these strategies
might be more successful elsewhere in the global south –even elsewhere
in Latin America. The empirical examples and country cases drawn upon in
this article are exclusively unitary and exclusively Andean. External strategies
may face rosier prospects in federal cases. The weakness of constitutional pro-
tections for subnational governments that is characteristic of unitary cases
may simultaneously increase the appeal of external strategies for those gov-
ernments, while making it easier for the national government to repress those
same strategies. Perhaps more importantly, a number of political realities in
the Andes, including post-conflict dynamics, the erosion of liberal democratic
norms, and generally feckless legislatures have all greatly empowered presi-
dents in their conflicts with subnational governments, enabling them to
ignore formal institutional constraints and flout the rule of law. More institu-
tionalized settings may well offer subnational governments greater
REGIONAL & FEDERAL STUDIES 17

safeguards if and when they decide to ‘go international’in their conflicts with
national governments.
Notes
1. The conflicts examined in this paper occupy the conceptual space between
‘protodiplomacy’, which scholars use to refer to diplomatic efforts by subna-
tional governments that are seeking independence, and ‘paradiplomacy’
which scholars use to refer to diplomatic efforts by subnational governments
that do not necessarily challenge their respective national governments but
instead work ‘parallel’to traditional diplomacy (Tavares 2016).
2. I am grateful to Simon Toubeau for this insight.
3. As another example, many of the regional presidents in Peru who oppose large-
scale mining projects have been arrested on corruption charges. See ‘Los pre-
sidentes regionales que ahora están presos’,El comercio, June 13, 2016. Vene-
zuela is the country that has most aggressively sought to preemptively bar
opposition candidates from running for subnational office. For example, in
2008 the National Electoral Court banned 272 candidates from running for sub-
national offices, including Leopoldo López the popular mayor of Chacao who
was prohibited from running for Metropolitan Mayor of Caracas.
4. Interview with Susana Muhamad, Petro’s Secretary of the Environment, Septem-
ber 14, 2017, Bogotá.
5. ‘Consejo de Estado tumba fallo que sacó a Gustavo Petro de la Alcaldía de
Bogotá’,El Espectador, November 15, 2017.
6. Interviews with Andrés Gallardo, President of the Municipal Council of Santa
Cruz, February 27, 2104, Santa Cruz; and Eliane Capobianco, Director of Auton-
omous Development in the Department of Santa Cruz, February 24, 2014, Santa
Cruz.
7. Interview with Juan José Illingworth, former National Deputy, June 10, 2008,
Guayaquil.
8. Interview with Benjamin Rosales, former Governor of Guayas, January 14, 2014,
Guayaquil.
9. In response, the Guayaquil-based business group that financed CONFILAR’sfirst
conference (Corporación Guayas) published an op-ed piece refuting these
charges. See ‘Los “separatistas”de Guayaquil’,El Diario, May 15, 2008.
Acknowledgements
For constructive comments on an earlier version of this article, I would like to thank
Nicholas Charron, Jean-Paul Faguet, Amuitz Garmendia Madariaga, Agustina
Giraudy, Imke Harbers, Liesbet Hooghe, Charlie Jeffery, Hanna Kleider, Sandra Leon,
Gary Marks, Emanuele Massetti, Sara Niedzwiecki, Simona Piattoni, Lorenzo Piccolo,
Arjan Schakel, Sarah Shair-Rosenfield, Prerna Singh, Michael Tätham, Simon
Toubeau and Christina Zuber.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
18 K. EATON

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