The Politics of Decentralization: Competition in Land Administration and Management in Ghana

Decentralization policy forms part of a broader global ideology and effort of the international donor community in favor of subsidiarity and local participation, and represents a paradigm shift from top-down command-and-control systems. Since 2003, the formalization of property rights through titling became an integral component of decentralized land administration efforts in Ghana. The creation of new forms of local government structures and the related changes in the distribution of responsibilities between different levels of government have an impact on natural resource management, the allocation of rights, and the unequal distribution of powers. This paper aims to understand how decentralization reforms modify the balance of power between public administration, customary authorities, and resource end-users in Ghana. Decentralization’s impact is analyzed based on two case studies. Relying on purposive and snowball sampling techniques, and mixed methods, we conducted 8 key informant interviews with local government bureaucrats in land administration, 16 semi-structured interviews with allodial landholders, 20 biographic interviews and 8 focus group discussions with small-scale farmers. The interviews analyzed the institutions and the roles of actors in land administration. Our case studies show that decentralization has the tendency to increase local competition in land administration where there are no clear distribution of power and obligation to local actors. Local competition and elitism in land administration impact the ability of small-scale farmers to regularize or formalize land rights. Thus, the paper concludes that local competition and the elitism within the land administration domain in Ghana could be the main obstacles towards decentralization reforms.

Features of Decentralization Processes of Developed Countries in the Post-Pandemic Society

Globalization and rapid information processes that are inherent in today's post-pandemic society, contributing to the reorganization of the authorities of many countries and their contacts with regions, local territorial units or civil society. Such changes, first of all, provide for delegation of authority at the level of regional and local authorities. However, many developing and today position their own society as post-modern, continue to be in a state of disunity of the branches of government, with a high level of corruption and abuse of official position, improper distribution of resources, inappropriate tax system and incompetent provision of services by relevant authorities. This affects the relevance of studying foreign experience in building a rational, effective, balanced public administration system, the leading place in which in almost all developed countries is the decentralization of the state and, above all, the executive branch. The foreign experience of the successful implementation of decentralization reforms is investigated. The main characteristics inherent in the decentralization of power in European countries are given, including in the context of the existence of a pandemic. The features of decentralization of power in France, the UK, Germany and other countries are highlighted. It is substantiated that the experience of decentralization reforms in each country is unique and reflects the specifics of the development of a particular country, and therefore it is impractical to introduce foreign experience without taking into account the particular economic and political development of a particular country.

Designing Decentralization in Jordan: Locating the Policy among the Politics

Jordan introduced legislation in 2015 to initiate a process of decentralization. Both the decision to decentralize as well as the form of decentralization that Jordan ultimately pursued have thus far been explained as regime efforts to reinforce its position and that of its clientelist base. While acknowledging that Jordan’s decision to decentralize was driven by broader political dynamics (including patron-clientelism), the article questions the extent to which these dynamics can account for the actual design of Jordan’s decentralization reforms. Through a detailed examination of the process through which the 2015 Decentralization Law was passed, the article argues that the Law was not only a result of patron-client politics, but also the product of a complex policy process. Drawing on this close-range investigation of the policy process leading to the Law, the article outlines some of the key parameters within which Jordanian policy is made, thereby contributing to the burgeoning literature that calls for policy to be brought into the study of authoritarian regimes.

Local Government in Japan

To understand the complex dynamics and role of local government in Japan’s democracy, three related questions need to be addressed. First, how much capacity and autonomy do local governments have to act? Second, what impact does local government have on national-level elections and policies? And finally, how responsive and accountable are local governments to residents? This chapter will seek to address these questions by first laying out the institutional framework of Japan’s local government system, including its recent decentralization reforms. In the second section, it illustrates how these institutional features combine with underlying socioeconomic conditions to shape local representation and intergovernmental relations. In the third section, it briefly considers two interlinked and key challenges facing local government: combatting depopulation and improving representation. The chapter finds that Japanese local government is significant in scale and indispensable to the administration of the Japanese state; decentralization reforms have further expanded local responsibilities while minimizing interventions from the central government; local governments continue to have a significant impact on the national arena, both electorally and policy-wise; local policy innovations in a wide range of areas have been co-opted nationally, while local lobbying and opposition pressures have induced central governments to respond to local interests; aside from some exceptional periods and limited regions, local government representation has not been driven by partisan or programmatic competition; and, more recently, local voters are demanding more of their representatives who have lost their clientelist role as communities face increasingly competitive environments, fiscal constraints, and pressures to innovate.

Decentralization reforms in Mozambique: The role of institutions in the definition of results

With the introduction of the economic reforms in the late 1980s, the opening up of the political arena and the end of the civil war in the early 1990s, the decentralization process began in Mozambique. Different research developed in recent years shows that, as is the case in other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the impact of the decentralization reforms on the promotion of local development and the strengthening of democracy in Mozambique is modest. How can this modest impact be explained? Based on three important reforms in the decentralization process in Mozambique, namely the ‘7 million’, municipalization and decentralized provincial governance, this article seeks to answer this question by analysing how different aspects of the institutions affect the results of the reforms. The main argument in the article underlines the idea according to which the results of the decentralization reforms in Mozambique are constrained by the nature and by the operation mechanisms of the political system. Of these institutional factors/constraints, state capacity and independence from private interests, particularly political groups, stand out in the three reforms analysed throughout this article. In this context, the reforms develop according to group interests, particularly party political interests, which capture the state and use the reforms as a mechanism for maintaining and bolstering political power. In this sense, rather than being a means of improving the provision of public services and strengthening democracy, decentralization works more as an instrument for reinforcing state control and pandering to the elite. This is probably the biggest challenge decentralization is facing in Mozambique, therefore making it a fundamental issue to be taken into account in any reform in this area, within the context of strengthening democracy and promoting local development.