(Page 2 of 22) - Deconcentration versus Devolution of Water Management in Mexico: Inferences from the Rio Bravo (Rio Grande) Basin authored by Donnell, Howard.

NTRODUCTION

Over the past two decades, democratization and decentralization have been the

dominant trends in political regime change in many parts of the world outside the
advanced industrial countries, especially in Latin America and Eastern Europe, as well as
selected cases in Asia and Africa. While these two concepts are autonomous and do not
necessarily require each other’s concurrent presence in every case, decentralization has
proven to be a primary mechanism by which a political system’s public policy
formulation and implementation may be made more responsive and accountable to
citizens at the subnational (i.e., state and local) level. While political scientists have
devoted a great deal of attention to analyzing the causes and modalities of democratic
transitions, as well as outcomes of subsequent processes of consolidation, until recently
they overlooked the importance of studying decentralization, particularly fiscal
decentralization (i.e., redistribution of resources to subnational governments) as opposed
to merely political decentralization (i.e., redistribution of formal powers). The small but
growing body of political science scholarship on decentralization in Latin America (see
especially Rodríguez 1997; Willis, Garman and Haggard 1999; Garman, Haggard and
Willis 2001; Escobar-Lemmon 2001; Montero 2001) has opened a debate concerning the
political, economic and other potential causes of initial decentralizing reforms as well as
the progress of decentralization in various countries over at least a few years’ time. The
distribution of power to formulate and implement public policy, founded ultimately upon
control of resource flows and their allocation, represents an important aspect of the
contested concept of democratic consolidation. However, heretofore the decentralization
and democratic consolidation literatures have not made this connection explicit.

Mexico, the second largest country in Latin America, is amongst the most notable

country case studies in regard to these broad recent historical trends. It has undergone an
apparent sea change in its domestic and international economic and political relations,
transitioning—albeit in a top-down manner—from a highly centralized, one-party
authoritarian state with a closed, import-substitution economy, to a decentralizing
presidential democracy with a largely open, regionally integrated market economy.
These changes were a function of the “neoliberal” reform of the state initiated in response
to the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s. Political reforms implemented by the
long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional,

PRI

)

as its legitimacy was challenged and popularity declined in the wake of the debt crisis
eventually led to the election of an opposition party candidate to the presidency in 2000.
As in other “newly democratic” developing countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa
during the past two decades, decentralization has been the principal mechanism by which
the reduction of the role of the national government—and hence central government
expenditure—has taken place. In Mexico, this process began in a limited fashion under
president Miguel de la Madrid (1982-1988) in 1983, in the aftermath of the outbreak of
the debt crisis. However, his successor Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) initiated

The research presented in this paper was funded in part by a Fulbright-García Robles Fellowship; a U.S.

Department of Education

FIPSE

Mobility in Higher Education grant; and by The University of Texas at Austin,

with a David Bruton, Jr., Fellowship and a MacDonald Summer Research Fellowship.