Proposed paper for ASAUK Conference 2018
Stream: The political economy of development in Africa: the politics of economic and social transformation
The interaction between local political economies and decentralisation in Uganda
Chris van Hooft
PhD Candidate, Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge
Uganda currently implements one of the world’s largest decentralised governance systems per capita, with five levels of elected councils and two levels of bureaucracy situated underneath the national level. The Ugandan Government’s goals of implementing decentralisation include improving inclusive decision-making, delivering efficient and effective public services, and transforming agriculture into a more modern and competitive sector. While decentralisation in Uganda has origins in the country’s turbulent recent history, it also arises from economic reforms undertaken in response to structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, the literature discussing decentralisation focuses on its use as an administrative, technocratic solution to governance issues, including corruption and entrenched patronage networks. For example, Rondinelli and Cheema (2007) describe the ways in which advocates of decentralisation view it as a mechanism for improving popular participation in governance, and the efficiency of resource allocation through the budget process.
By emphasising the role of decentralisation for improving administrative issues such as allocative efficiency, the existing literature downplays the significance of the political-economy context in which decentralisation has been implemented. Over three decades, the interaction between decentralisation and the Ugandan context has generated sub-optimal outcomes, with potentially negative effects for service delivery in rural areas. An important example of these unanticipated outcomes is the very-rapid creation of additional districts in Uganda, referred to as ‘district proliferation’.
Since the introduction of decentralisation in the 1990s, the number of districts in Uganda has tripled, and continues to rise. The proliferation of new districts has arguably reached fiscally-unsustainable levels, with a substantial proportion of the budgets of each district being spent on the administration of the district itself, rather than on service delivery. In addition, districts are largely unable to raise their own revenues and remain dependent on the central government for funding. Despite the pressure additional districts create for the budget process, and the negative implications for financing public service provision, the number of additional districts continues to grow.
This paper analyses the political economy of district creation in Uganda, and the consequences of a rapid proliferation of new districts for the Ugandan political settlement. Building on the work of Grossman and Lewis (2014), I examine the coincidence of incentives that drives actors, ranging from the President to villagers, to favour the creation of additional districts. By arguing that the rapid proliferation of districts in Uganda arises from the rational pursuit of self-interest by multiple actors within the political economy, the paper moves beyond the dominant rhetoric of decentralisation as a vector for patronage networks, elite capture and local-level corruption. Instead, the paper positions district proliferation in the context of a livelihood strategy at the level of the household and bureaucracy, and as a political survival strategy for those in elected roles. Viewed through this lens, the pursuit of additional districts becomes less a tool for patronage entrenchment for national and local elites, and more a tool for advancing individual self-interest for a wide range of actors.
References
Cheema, G. S. and Rondinelli, D. A. (2007). Decentralizing Governance: Emerging Concepts and Practices. Brookings Institution Press, Washington, D.C., USA.
Grossman, G. and Lewis, J. (2014). Administrative Unit Proliferation. American Political Science Review, 108(1), 196-217. doi:10.1017/S0003055413000567