Decentralisation in Peru has been one of the more successful areas of state reform in recent years although, as this book shows, the results have been very mixed. The catalyst for change in Peru, long one of Latin America's most centralised countries (particularly since the 1970s), was the collapse of the Fujimori regime. Arguably, this was one of the most hyper-centralised regimes of recent times, with decision-making concentrated in the office of the president.
As McNulty notes, the critique of centralisation was not particularly new; and indeed the 1979 Constitution, which paved the way for the return to civilian rule after the military docenio, mandated the establishment of a system of regional governance. However, the germ for decentralisation came not from the regions or the grassroots but from policy-makers at the centre. Similarly, since 2000, decentralisation has been largely a top-down exercise.
One of the first questions that the book poses, therefore, is: why did policy-makers at the national level decide to go down this road, when the pressure to do so from below, or even among regional elites, was largely missing? The answer, she says, lies largely in the electoral calculations of national elites at a time when political competition was in the ascendant.
But McNulty is interested not just in regionalisation per se, but also in why policy-makers chose to initiate a process of participatory politics at the regional level, specifically the creation of mechanisms both to incorporate civil society in decision-making – the Consejos de Coordinación Regional (Regional Coordination Councils, CCRs) – and to introduce systems of budgetary participation. She argues that this reflects ‘corporativist’ traditions in Peru – citing some exceptional examples such as that of Villa El Salvador – but also, interestingly, enthusiasm from the all-important Ministerio de Economía y Finanzas (Ministry of Economy and Finance, MEF).
Second, the book seeks to analyse the process of reform itself, emphasising the importance of institutional design. Here again, the MEF comes in for some rather unexpected praise. The most interesting and novel part of the book is the author's examination of six regional experiences on the ground. All too often, studies of decentralisation have focused largely on the macro level rather than looking at individual experiences in different parts of the country. She selects six regions: two in the coastal area (Lambayeque and Moquegua), three in the highlands (Cajamarca, Ayacucho and Cusco), and one (Loreto) in the Amazon jungle area.
In each case, McNulty tries to establish what makes decentralisation work. The answers she comes up with are intriguing. Her ‘success stories’ (Lambayeque and Cusco) do not correlate with the departments with the most ample coffers, although Cusco has done well out of the canon system by which extractive industries are taxed. They do not correlate either with institutional capacities ranked among regional governments, measured by the ability to spend the resources at hand. Finally, they do not correlate with the salience of political parties and their ability (or desire) to push for participation. In contrast with Brazil, rooted parties have been conspicuous by their absence in Peru.
The two explanatory variables that McNulty identifies are, perhaps unsurprisingly, the importance of local leadership and the ability of civil society to mesh its agendas with those of local administrations during and after the reform. In the case of Lambayeque, she highlights the role played as regional president by Yehude Simón, a former leftist who managed to gain a formidable, and possibly unique, gift for energising local initiatives in his region. In that of Cusco, she highlights the role of Carlos Cuaresma, also previously a leftist, who saw in community politics a way of boosting his initially weak electoral mandate.
McNulty correctly notes the huge differences in the experiences of civil society organisations in different parts of Peru, with some departments, Cusco for example, having long histories of community-based organisation and participatory practices, whilst in others such as neighbouring Ayacucho civil society was largely obliterated by the experience of civil conflict in the 1980s and early 1990s. She argues that the key to success is the ‘virtuous circle’ established in the interaction between leadership and collaborative organised civil society (p. 142).
This book provides a very useful introduction to the topic under study, providing an important contribution to a key aspect of contemporary Peruvian democracy. It also has the not inconsiderable virtues of being written in straightforward jargon-free English and organised in a clear and logical fashion. I have three main comments to make.
The first is that the focus is almost entirely at the regional level, and other experiences in decentralisation at the provincial and district levels get left out of the picture. This is a shame, since one of the aspects that needs to be addressed is not just the relationship between regional and national governments, but that between local and regional government. Often the gap between the latter is just as large as that between the former. Similar sorts of institution, such as the Consejos de Coordinación Locales (Local Coordination Councils, CCLs), exist at the local level, and here the record, albeit very mixed, is not without interest or significance.
The second comment is that the analysis downplays the dynamics at work within national politics, all the more important because of the top-down nature of the exercise. By the midway point of the Toledo administration, the reformist impulse at the centre of government had weakened, with those most closely associated with the original design replaced. The dynamic behind decentralisation reached a particularly low ebb in 2005, when electors in referenda around the country (with only one exception) voted down Toledo's proposals for macro-regions. Then, under Alan García (2006–11), most observers concur that decentralisation lost further impetus and that many of the promises made at the time of the 2006 elections remained unfulfilled.
Third, more work needs to be done than has been possible within the scope of this volume into how civil society, with all its contradictions, works at the local and regional levels in Peruvian politics in advancing, or otherwise, the process of change.
