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Thirteen - Social Policy, Target Populations and Policy Analysis in Colombia
- Edited by Pablo Sanabria-Pulido, Nadia Rubaii
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- Book:
- Policy Analysis in Colombia
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 10 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2020, pp 223-238
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Summary
Introduction
In Colombia, in the 30 years that have passed since the constitutional change of 1991, a very high proportion of Colombians have gained access to policies such as health, primary and secondary education, and basic services. Moreover, over the past three decades of state growth, redistributive (equality) and identity (diversity) policies have become part of the government's agenda. In this context, the needs of an ever-increasing list of populations (young people, elderly people, people with disabilities, indigenous communities, Afro-descendants, victims of armed conflict and so on) began to be addressed through expanding target population-based policies. In policy studies terms, the Colombian state expanded its basic welfare and its policy targeting, as a substitute to a welfare state with universal coverage.
The increase of basic welfare policies and policy targeting helped to reduce the rate of poverty and to improve the quality of life to many millions of people, particularly so in large Colombian cities. However, the results of these policies have been very marginal in terms of the general reduction of income inequality. For example, in the context of Latin American states, the case of Colombia seems one of the most serious in terms of the lack of impact of income redistribution of fiscal and social policy. This implies that the one of the most pressing policy questions in Colombia is why, after such an important institutional change (a completely new Constitution) that doubled the size of the state, so little has changed terms of income distribution.
Addressing this puzzle, this chapter suggests that this can be explained through the concept of the truncated state (Holland, 2013). This notion refers to welfare regimes in countries where the construction of social security systems reflects the pre-existing social stratification and the capacity of powerful pressure groups to create their own protection schemes. This chapter suggests that one possible explanation for this “truncated” type of social policy that exists in Colombia could be the limited political power and representation (in Congress, the judiciary and the executive) of the marginalized populations that have been targeted.
All in all, this chapter has three main sections. The first section introduces the general changes to social policies, first looking into the expansion of basic welfare and then exploring the evolution of policy targeting.
Seven - Metropolitan Governance and Policy Analysis in Colombia
- Edited by Pablo Sanabria-Pulido, Nadia Rubaii
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- Book:
- Policy Analysis in Colombia
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 10 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2020, pp 113-134
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Summary
Introduction
The process of urbanization of Colombia has led to the configuration of a highly urbanized country with a large number of urban centers across most of its territory and four different cities as main development poles. Alongside these urban centers, greater urban agglomerations have developed, creating new scales of urban interaction but also a new scope for wicked problems. Namely, Colombia has nowadays at least four metro-regions of more than two millions inhabitants, six metropolitan areas exceeding one million inhabitants and 24 metro-regions with more than 250,000 in habitants, a rare situation in the Latin American context where most countries’ populations tend to be concentrated in the capital city, with the exceptions, perhaps, of Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico. This has put Colombia in a good position to experiment with policy instruments related to metropolitan coordination for more than 50 years, creating several natural policy experiments whose results are of interest to policy scholars around the world.
Indeed, there are several policy areas such as environmental policy, transportation, land policy and zoning, and housing policy, where it is possible to witness a growing trend in the use of metropolitan instruments in order to address problems that go beyond municipal boundaries. In spite of these developments, formal metropolitan administrative structures, and greater use of metropolitan instruments to solve policy problems, are still unevenly distributed in Colombian cities. For instance, of the three larger cities, only one has a formal, solid, metropolitan government. Likewise, only six of the 24 metro-regions with more than 250,000 inhabitants have a formal metropolitan government structure. The lack of coherence of these administrative structures has proven to be an obstacle for policy consolidation, since the few cases of metropolitan governments that are in place remain as isolated local experiments, with very little action on the part of the national government to create a national policy framework for learning from these examples and create an suitable approach to metropolitan governance and interjurisdictional collaboration/intermunicipal cooperation.
The low level of consistency in metropolitan policies in Colombia shows that although a legal framework for the constitution of metropolitan governments has existed since the late 1970s, very few processes have led to the eventual consolidation of a metropolitan government structure.
1 - The Complexity of the Organizational Design for Implementation of a Peace Accord
- Edited by James Meernik, University of North Texas, Jacqueline H. R. DeMeritt, University of North Texas, Mauricio Uribe-López
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- Book:
- As War Ends
- Published online:
- 18 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 25 July 2019, pp 22-45
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Summary
The objective of this chapter is to explore the future effect of organizational design on the likelihood of success or failure of the implementation of peace agreements using the Colombian peace accord as a case study. Previous exercises analyzing the implementation of peace agreements in the world have attributed great importance to aspects other than organizational design to explain the success or failure of the implementation. For example, the peace studies literature tends to explain problems in implementation by highlighting the factors associated with the war itself (type of conflict, types of spoils available, etc.) or by giving great importance to political factors (position of relevant actors, level of polarization, etc.) as the variables that explain each success or failure (Stedman, 2001; Hartzell, 2002; Cousens et al., 2003). However, these studies do not consider organizational design as a relevant factor for understanding why implementation processes fail or are successful.