Reclaiming the authority to plan: How the legacy of structural adjustment has affected recentralization in Bolivia
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Date
2016
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AESOP
Abstract
Thirty years after structural adjustment policies decentralized developing country governments, signs are emerging of a slow return to centralized state authority. Nearly 140 countries and over 40 international institutions agreed through the Paris Declaration and Accra Agenda for Action to “align” and “harmonize” aid efforts in support of country-led and country-owned development. Today, many Latin American governments are beginning to implement policy, bureaucratic, institutional and civil society strategies to “reclaim the role of protagonist that [they] lost as a result of decentralization” (Dickovick and Eaton 2013, 1454). What is not apparent in these agreements and emerging trends is exactly how, and how well, national governments can implement actions after reclaiming the authority to plan.
After Bolivia became one of the showpieces for structural adjustment and neoliberal reforms, by the late 1990s the size and power of the central government had shrunk considerably, local governments were taking more control of local decisions, and NGOs had rushed in to fill many social service gaps. When Evo Morales was elected President of Bolivia in 2006, he set out to take back his authority to govern numerous sectors. I consider the extent to which the Morales administration was able to achieve one its most ambitious attempts to re-establish state-led, equity-oriented development – the Zero Malnutrition (ZM) Program. The ZM program grew out of a frustration with what had become a fragmented, NGO-led health care system that had stalled efforts to reduce malnutrition.
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Proceedings of the IV World Planning Schools Congress, July 3-8th, 2016 : Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice in the north and in the south
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