Uganda’s decentralization program was among the most radical in Africa, celebrated by scholars and donors alike after its inception in the mid-1990s. Since then, however, awareness of the problems and contradictions underpinning the system has grown steadily. Gina Lambright’s important book constitutes a thorough reexamination of decentralized governance as it actually functions in Uganda, providing further reason for skepticism about decentralization as a panacea for improving state effectiveness and accountability. Analyzing in depth how political relations between the central government and local authorities constrain the ability of local governments to function properly, this book should be read by anyone interested in the realities of decentralization, not only in Uganda but elsewhere in Africa and beyond.
Lambright draws on a range of qualitative and quantitative evidence to compare districts within Uganda and explain why decentralization has produced considerably better local government in some parts of the country than in others. She makes many important points about the relative insignificance of levels of civic participation, the virtual irrelevance of formal administrative relationships between the center and the districts, and the critical role played by popular support for the central government in explaining district performance. The book’s greatest value, however, lies in the analysis of the mechanisms though which patronage by the central government undermines local state performance. By analyzing the specific ways in which the center buys political control over districts, rendering district leaders vulnerable to the whims of the center, it makes a key contribution to our understanding of why local leaders so often fail to engage with local development concerns.
Despite its strengths, the study is not without flaws. These can be conceptualized in theoretical and empirical/methodological terms. Regarding the former, while the book’s emphasis on “informal political linkages” is apposite, the way these are categorized is deceptively neat: “bottom-up” political linkages (local support for central government) and “top-down” political linkages (central government patronage) are contrasted with “formal administrative” linkages. Yet measures such as the number of letters from ministries to districts—the main quantitative indicator used for “formal administrative linkages”—could actually reflect processes that are both informal and deeply political. More explicit engagement with the interplay of formal and informal, political and administrative would have strengthened the text at a theoretical level.
More important are certain empirical concerns regarding the quantitative component. Here the dependent variable (local government performance) is measured using the government’s own performance indicators, along with Afrobarometer data on public satisfaction with the District Chairperson. Lambright emphasizes that the former data are subjective and should be treated with caution, yet there are also numerous problems with the latter (which are also deeply subjective) for measuring local state performance, particularly when people may attribute outcomes produced by the central state to the local, and vice versa. Lambright finds convincing links between support for President Museveni and satisfaction with government, but assuming that this necessarily reflects the performance of the local state is something of a leap. Meanwhile, the measure of central government patronage is the number of cabinet members from each district. While useful, this is problematic as a sole indicator, and there are arguably many more important ways in which the central government distributes patronage among districts. Lingering questions about reverse causality are also not fully addressed in the quantitative part of study.
Thankfully, many of these issues are further unpacked in the three district case studies. The choice of case studies, however, while justified in terms of the explanatory variables, looks rather odd in terms of accounting for the outcome of interest. None of the districts chosen are those rated “poor” in governance assessments, which suggests the question of why the “tremendous variation” among Uganda’s districts has not been explored fully with an examination that includes some of the worst performers. The three districts also have certain striking characteristics that make their experiences seem somewhat unique: one is in the President’s ethnic heartland, one is in a particularly war-affected part of the north, and the other is in Buganda, where central–local relations have been strongly colored by the growing animosity between the central government and the Kingdom. These issues are raised in the discussion of each of the case studies but treated as incidental, rather than possibly being central to the stories of district performance in each case. More generally, the question of the ethnic relations between different regions and the center is oddly marginalized within the book.
None of this, however, is to deny the significance of the central–local political linkages emphasized in the book, which provides an extremely valuable toolbox for analyzing the trajectories of particular districts as well as penetrating insights into some broader trends. Most of the problems identified with the quantitative element relate to lack of available data, and Lambright has worked effectively with what is available nationally (in the face of huge challenges, including the doubling of districts during the research period) as well as contributing important district-level survey work. This book presents a substantial step forward in our understanding of the politics of decentralization, and is recommended to all concerned with how decentralization policies, which have been embraced rather uncritically in recent decades, are actually affecting governance on the ground.
