Governance and Social Services Delivery in Developing Countries

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Individuals around the world rely on public services to ensure and enhance their own well-being, and to support their communities’ development. Rather than providing services directly, the predominant contemporary role of public sector bureaucrats is to regulate, oversee, motivate, and otherwise govern networks of state and non-state organizations in the joint production of social services. Building on considerable past research examining the provision of public goods in developing countries, the work presented in this panel focuses scholarly attention directly on the complex set of relationships that constitute local services delivery systems, and the factors that influence how well or how poorly those systems serve their communities. Specifically, we contribute to and extend the contemporary literature on local governance within developing countries in three primary ways. First, we examine multiple stages of the policy-making process: from policy formulation and adoption, to implementation, and including the evaluation of two major types of policy interventions. Second, we draw on context-sensitive approaches from political science and public administration, as well as multiple modes of inquiry, to analyze our specific governance cases: framing and social construction, representative bureaucracy, institutional analysis, and social network analysis. And third, we assess the relative contributions of particular and general factors in shaping local governance by bringing four different country experiences into dialogue through our work: health services in Tanzania, urban security in Colombia, municipal budgeting in Peru, and health sector reform in Honduras. Together, this research speaks to ongoing debates about the roles of bureaucrat-client identities, policy legacies and ideas, performance incentives, and decentralization in contributing to the responsive and effective governance of local social services delivery.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 12: Comparative Politics in Developing Countries

Individual Presentations

• A Gendered Interaction: Representative Bureaucracy and Health in Tanzania - Sebawit G. Bishu, University of Colorado Denver

• Rights-Based Frames and the Politics of Urban Security: Lessons from Bogotá - Lindsay Rose Mayka, Colby College

• Making the Grade: Achieving Municipal Incentive Goals in Peru - Jami Nelson-Nunez, The University of New Mexico; Claudia N. Avellaneda, Indiana University; Fiorella Patricia Vera-Adrianzen

• Structuring Local Governance: Evidence from Health Sector Reform in Honduras - Alan Zarychta, University of Chicago

Chair

• Carew E. Boulding University of Colorado, Boulder

Discussant

• Sara A. Newland Smith College