In recent decades, decentralization reforms have surged across the Global South, aiming to bring governance closer to citizens. Despite extensive debate on their effectiveness, systematic methods to assess local government performance remain underexplored, particularly in data-constrained...

The Philippines embraced a devolution agenda in 1991, leading to the enactment of the Local Government Code (LGC). Despite over three decades of implementation, devolution has remained incomplete, giving rise to the blurred accountability between the national government and local governments...

The incidence of patronage can vary widely across levels of government within a country. We present evidence of this in the context of Brazil, which has been the focus of most recent research on patronage. In particular, we find that bureaucratic turnover follows political cycles among municipal...

Fiscal federalism concerns the division of policy responsibilities among different levels of government. Many current economic and policy developments, such as globalization, environmental crises and rising inequality, may not appear to be favorable to fiscal federalism, yet countries are...

This paper explores the nuanced relationship between fiscal decentralization and fiscal sustainability. Employing panel data analyses, it scrutinizes how decentralization influences fiscal discipline across different governmental levels. Results for 185 countries show that while tax...

We examine the human development consequences of transferring responsibility for public service provision to local governments in India, using state-level variation in the timing of administrative decentralization reforms. We find that devolution of the responsibility for health functions from...

Changes in political boundaries aimed at devolving power to local governments are common in many countries. We examine the economic consequences of redistricting through the creation of smaller government units. Exploiting reforms that led to sharp variations in the number of government units in...

Decentralization, championed by international institutions, has been one of the most prominent public sector reforms of the last decades, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. To date, few studies propose a quasi-experimental evaluation of its capacity to contribute to local development. We...

Changes in political boundaries aimed at devolving power to local governments are common in many countries. We examine the economic consequences of redistricting through the creation of smaller government units. Exploiting reforms that led to sharp variations in the number of government units in...

Among Polish cities facing socio-economic difficulties are the former regional capitals which lost their administrative status due to the 1998 reform, reducing the number of regions from 49 to 16. Making use of this quasiexperimental setting, we assess the impact of the loss of administrative...

Two key recent events pushed forward the country's decentralization agenda. In 2019, the Mandanas-Garcia Supreme Court ("Mandanas") ruling increased the tax base for intergovernmental fiscal transfers in support of local governments' autonomy and revenue-raising capacity. In 2021, Executive...

State decentralization is often promoted to improve public service delivery. However, its effects on forest conservation are ambiguous. Decentralization might not only improve local forest governance, but also change the incentives to promote agricultural expansion into forests. This study...

Green parties are commonly seen as strong proponents of wind power. This paper presents an alternative view, examining data from the highly decentralized institutional setup in Sweden where approval of wind power applications is delegated to local governments. I demonstrate that the approval...

This paper sheds light on the complex recovery governance in Ukraine by providing a snapshot of the evolving national recovery actors' networks and examining them within a multi-level governance framework, using interviews, social network analysis, and a sense-making workshop. It highlights the...

Decentralization holds a significant role in the context of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), with its nature being not a fixed value but a comparative spectrum. Prior research investigating the measurement of decentralization in nations' governance system provides a foundation for...

Governments in low-income countries are increasingly integrating off-grid electricity provision into national electrification strategies, creating novel, decentralized markets for electricity. This paper studies a highly decentralized product that plays an important role in energy access: pay as...

In response to the challenges posed by an increasingly decentralized energy system characterized by a high penetration of renewable energy sources, grid operators are experiencing heightened pressure to effectively manage grid congestion. Concurrently, both the European Union as well as the...