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Transformation from Below in Bangladesh: Decentralization, local governance, and systemic change*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2018

JEAN-PAUL FAGUET
JEAN-PAUL FAGUET*
Affiliation:
Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
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Abstract

I examine decentralization through the lens of the local dynamics it unleashed in Bangladesh. I argue that the national effects of decentralization are largely the sum of its local-level effects. Hence, to understand decentralization, we must first understand how local government works. This implies analysing not only decentralization, but also democracy, from the bottom up. I present a model of local government responsiveness as the product of political openness and substantive competition. The quality of politics, in turn, emerges endogenously as a joint product of the lobbying and political engagement of local firms/interests, and the organizational density and ability of civil society. I then test these ideas using qualitative data from Bangladesh. The evidence shows that civic organizations worked with non-governmental organizations and local governments to effect transformative change from the grass roots upwards—not just to public budgets and outputs, but to the underlying behaviours and ideas that underpin social development. In the aggregate, these effects were powerful. The result, key development indicators show, is Bangladesh leap-frogging past much wealthier India between 1990 and 2015.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 51 , Special Issue 6: Institutions and Economic Development in South Asia , November 2017 , pp. 1668 - 1694
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

*

I thankfully acknowledge the LSE's William Robson Memorial Prize. I thank Taifur Rahman, who conducted much of the background research for this paper, and Zulfiqar Ali, Cathy Boone, Qaiser Khan, and Yaniv Stopnitzky for their insights and constructive criticisms. I am grateful to Pradeep Chhibber, Ruth Collier, Tim Dyson, Kent Eaton, Steve Fish, Armando Godínez, David Lewis, Dilip Mookherjee, Ken Shadlen, Atiyab Sultan, seminar participants at UC Berkeley, the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, the 2014 CRASSH conference at Cambridge, and my LSE Development Management students for their thoughtful suggestions. All remaining errors are my own.

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