Recentralisation in Colombia

"Based on scores of interviews with high-level offi cials across fi ve presidential administrations in Colombia, López-Murcia provides a compelling explanation of recentralisation as the result of interactions between economic performance and institutional context. This is a timely contribution to the literature on multilevel governance."

-Kent Eaton, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

"Leveraging within-case variation in economic and institutional variables across fi ve presidencies, the book traces the emergence and success of recentralising coalitions in Colombia. In so doing, it generates important lessons for scholars interested in the determinants of institutional strength and stability, decentralisation and multilevel governance, and Latin American politics."

-Ezequiel González-Ocantos, University of Oxford, UK

"This book will extend and reinvigorate scholarship on decentralization by adding an interactive framework to explain recentralization. Decentralization and intergovernmental relations scholars and practitioners should find this volume worth reading."

-Claudia Avellaneda, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

This book tackles the question of how to characterise and account for recentralisation in Colombia between central and lower levels of government across a 26-year period. Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has once again put the distribution of responsibilities, resources, and authority between different levels of government at the heart of political debate. This book brings this issue to light as a topic central to the study of public administration.Drawing on extensive fi eldwork with more than a hundred interviews with former presidents, ministers, members of congress, governors, local mayors and subnational public offi cials, as well as documentary sources, it begins with a historical account of recentralisation processes in the world. It then proposes a theoretical framework to explain these processes, before tracing and carefully comparing recentralisation episodes in Colombia using theory-guided process tracing.

Julián D. López-Murcia is Associate Professor at the Universidad de La Sabana, Colombia.