Download or read book Boosting Competitiveness Through Decentralization written by Aylin Topal and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decentralization is accepted as one of the defining features of the third wave of democratic transitions in Latin America and commonly understood as an index and an agent of democratization. This rather optimistic perspective is inherent in the literature which is dominated by two theories. The liberal-individualist approach, especially as advocated by the World Bank, promotes decentralization policies on the premise of their efficiency, equity, and responsiveness to local demands. Similarly, the statist approach claims that decentralization can be the route to greater accountability, transparency and participation in governance; they add that this path should be guided by political elites and institutions. These dominant views nevertheless understate the extent to which certain decentralization policies have been implemented in lockstep with neoliberalization. This book examines the relationship between global economic processes and decentralization. It argues that through decentralization policies, the imperatives of neoliberal rules of competitiveness have been diffused into local governments and economies, generating different local development models. Whether decentralization produces democratic opening at the local level is contingent on how the local economy is integrated into global economic processes, and which social and economic groups are empowered, and disempowered, in that transition.
Download or read book Urban Planning in Mexico written by Paavo Monkkonen and published by UCLA Ciudades. This book was released on 2020-12-31 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the scope of urban planning in Mexico through case studies of four municipalities - Campeche, Hermosillo, Leon and Morelia - that have recently updated their plans using new federal guidelines. We seek to advance a research agenda on the impacts of planning and its effectiveness by proposing some foundations for how to assess planning processes, as well as to provide guidance for the federal government of Mexico in its oversight of municipal planning practice and recommendations for the four cities we study. We begin with the concern that the debate over whether urban planning in Mexico “works” suffers from a lack of shared definitions about what is and is not within the scope of urban planning, and a shared conceptual framework for assessing the planning process. The case studies were conducted as part of a graduate studio in the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA. They rely on multiple interviews with planners and professionals in each city as well as documentary and data analysis, and literature reviews. We use a framework of five processes: creating a plan, implementing the plan, raising revenue to fund urban infrastructure, upgrading existing neighborhoods to ensure equal access across neighborhoods, and investing in new infrastructure to support growth. Each case presents a brief urban history and contextual data; a description of local government planning activities, the current plan, the city’s political history, and transparency in local planning; an assessment of planning processes, the mechanisms for changing land uses, and examples one infrastructure project and enforcement of land use rules; and an evaluation of the plan itself, including some GIS analysis local zoning and federal policy. The book’s recommendations fall into three areas: making plans into part of an ongoing and iterative process, increasing coordination between municipal budgeting and planning, and creating transparency and public input to the planning process. More specifically, we find that new plans often ignore successes and failures of prior plans, they do not periodically assess indicators to gauge impact, and discretionary changes in between plan updates diminishes the importance of the plan itself. In the second area, we argue that the scope of planning must be expanded. The plan should be integrated with the municipal budgeting process and municipalities in Mexico should work to generate more local revenues to adequately fund plans. Finally, in the third area, we recommend making planning documents, zoning maps, and basic data on urban conditions accessible to the public. A lack of transparency and the often opaque decision making processes harm the legitimacy of governance. We also outline how the federal government can play a role in advancing these recommendations for local planning processes.
Download or read book Decentralization Democratization and Informal Power in Mexico written by Andrew Selee and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last two decades of the twentieth century, many countries in Latin America freed themselves from the burden of their authoritarian pasts and developed democratic political systems. At the same time, they began a process of shifting many governmental responsibilities from the national to the state and local levels. Much has been written about how decentralization has fostered democratization, but informal power relationships inherited from the past have complicated the ways in which citizens voice their concerns and have undermined the accountability of elected officials. In this book, Andrew Selee seeks to illuminate the complex linkages between informal and formal power by comparing how they worked in three Mexican cities. The process of decentralization is shown to have been intermediated by existing spheres of political influence, which in turn helped determine how much the institution of multiparty democracy in the country could succeed in bringing democracy “closer to home.”
Download or read book Going Local written by Merilee S. Grindle and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-09 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many developing countries have a history of highly centralized governments. Since the late 1980s, a large number of these governments have introduced decentralization to increase democracy and improve services, especially in small communities far from capital cities. In Going Local, an unprecedented study of the effects of decentralization on thirty Mexican municipalities, Merilee Grindle describes how local governments respond when they are assigned new responsibilities and resources under decentralization policies. She explains why decentralization leads to better local governments in some cases--and why it fails to in others. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, Grindle examines data based on a random sample of Mexican municipalities--and ventures into town halls to follow public officials as they seek to manage a variety of tasks amid conflicting pressures and new expectations. Decentralization, she discovers, is a double-edged sword. While it allows public leaders to make significant reforms quickly, institutional weaknesses undermine the durability of change, and legacies of the past continue to affect how public problems are addressed. Citizens participate, but they are more successful at extracting resources from government than in holding local officials and agencies accountable for their actions. The benefits of decentralization regularly predicted by economists, political scientists, and management specialists are not inevitable, she argues. Rather, they are strongly influenced by the quality of local leadership and politics.
Download or read book Nonprofits and Their Networks written by Daniel M. Sabet and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the border of the United States and Mexico, few policy issues face such acute challenges as those related to water. Border cities face an uncertain future water supply, low-income neighborhoods often lack water and sewer services, and water contamination poses a risk to the health of residents and the environment. Responses by government agencies on both sides of the border have been insufficient. Increasing economic development has mainly resulted in increasing problems. These limitations of government and market forces suggest that nonprofit organizations—the so-called “third sector”—might play an important role in meeting the growing challenges in the region. Finding that these organizations do have a positive impact, Daniel Sabet seeks to understand how autonomous nonprofit organizations have emerged and developed along the border. He employs data from more than 250 interviews with members of civil society organizations and public officials, surveys of neighborhood association leaders, observations at public meetings, and many secondary sources. His research compares the experiences of third-sector organizations in four prominent Mexican border cities: Tijuana, Nogales, Ciudad Juárez, and Nuevo Laredo. Sabet finds that political change is a necessary precondition for the establishment of an independent third sector. The demise of one-party rule in Mexico has given nonprofit organizations greater opportunities to flourish, he finds, but persistent informal rules still obstruct their emergence and development. Sabet concludes that the success of the third sector will depend on the organizations’ networks. He examines organizational ties to three key groups—U.S. nonprofits, the business community, and government-created methods for public participation—and evaluates the importance of these connections for the future.
Download or read book General Technical Report RM written by and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Democratizing the State written by Ernesto Isunza Vera and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-11-04 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democratic institution-building experiences, innovative forms of social organization, and the development of multiple state-society interfaces represent a significant political phenomenon in Latin America in the last half-century. By comparing the two largest countries of the subcontinent, Brazil and Mexico, Democratizing the State examines social accountability and social control regimes. These regimes are conceived configurations of relationships between actors, organizational structures, norms, and resources, all arranged in a stable and institutionalized manner to exert social control over state actors and functions. The book addresses the contrasting characteristics and different functions through which the citizenry and civil society exert control over state action in both countries. Characterizing these experiences broadly as regimes is novel and enlightening regarding the work of practitioners and scholars on political participation, social accountability, and democracy in the global South and the global North.
Download or read book Decentralization In Mexico written by Victoria Rodriguez and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book assesses the impact of decentralization on Mexico’s intergovernmental relations and examines the constraints upon the devolution of political power from the center to the lower levels of government. It also discusses the distribution of power and authority to governments of opposition parties within the context of a more open political space. Victoria Rodríguez uncovers a new paradox in the Mexican political system: retaining power by giving it away. She argues that since the de la Madrid presidency (1982–1988), the Mexican government has embarked upon a major effort of political and administrative decentralization as a means to increase its hold on power. That effort continued under Salinas, but paradoxically led to further centralization. However, since Zedillo assumed the presidency, it has become increasingly clear that the survival of the ruling party and, indeed, the viability of his own government require a genuine, de facto reduction of centralism.
Download or read book Advances in Human Factors Business Management and Leadership written by Jussi Ilari Kantola and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 654 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes new theories and practical approaches for promoting excellence in human resource management and leadership. It shows how the principles of creating shared value can be applied to ensure faster learning, training, business development and social renewal. In particular, it presents novel methods and tools for tackling the complexity of management and learning in both business organizations and society. Discussing ontologies, intelligent management systems, and methods for creating knowledge and value added, it offers novel insights into time management and operations optimization, as well as advanced methods for evaluating customers’ satisfaction and conscious experience. Based on two AHFE 2020 Virtual Conferences: the AHFE 2020 Conference on Human Factors, Business Management and Society and the AHFE 2020 Conference on Human Factors in Management and Leadership, held on July 16–20, 2020, the book provides researchers and professionals with extensive information, practical tools and inspiring ideas for achieving excellence in a broad spectrum of business and societal activities.
Download or read book Water and Politics written by Veronica Herrera and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2023-11-29 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the world’s population lives in cities in developing countries, where access to basic public services, such as water, electricity, and health clinics, is either inadequate or sorely missing. Water and Politics shows how politicians benefit politically from manipulating public service provision for electoral gain. In many young democracies, politicians exchange water service for votes or political support, rewarding allies or punishing political enemies. Surprisingly, the political problem of water provision has become more pronounced, as water service represents a valuable political currency in resource-scarce environments. Water and Politics finds that middle-class and industrial elites play an important role in generating pressure for public service reforms.
Download or read book New Institutions for Participatory Democracy in Latin America written by Kenneth E. Sharpe and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-11-09 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume describes and analyzes the proliferation of new mechanisms for participation in Latin American democracies and considers the relationship between direct participation and the consolidation of representative institutions based on more traditional electoral conceptions of democracy.
Download or read book Becoming Maya written by Wolfgang Gabbert and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, it is commonly held that the population consists of two ethnic communities: Maya Indians and descendants of Spanish conquerors. As a result, the history of the region is usually seen in terms of conflict between conquerors and conquered that too often ignores the complexity of interaction between these groups and the complex nature of identity within them. Yet despite this prevailing view, most speakers of the Yucatec Maya language reject being considered Indian and refuse to identify themselves as Maya. Wolfgang Gabbert maintains that this situation can be understood only by examining the sweeping procession of history in the region. In Becoming Maya, he has skillfully interwoven history and ethnography to trace 500 years of Yucatec history, covering colonial politics, the rise of plantations, nineteenth-century caste wars, and modern reforms—always with an eye toward the complexities of ethnic categorization. According to Gabbert, class has served as a self-defining category as much as ethnicity in the Yucatán, and although we think of caste wars as struggles between Mayas and Mexicans, he shows that each side possessed a sufficiently complex ethnic makeup to rule out such pat observations. Through this overview, Gabbert reveals that Maya ethnicity is upheld primarily by outsiders who simply assume that an ethnic Maya consciousness has always existed among the Maya-speaking people. Yet even language has been a misleading criterion, since many people not considered Indian are native speakers of Yucatec. By not taking ethnicity for granted, he demonstrates that the Maya-speaking population has never been a self-conscious community and that the criteria employed by others in categorizing Mayas has changed over time. Grounded in field studies and archival research and boasting an exhaustive bibliography, Becoming Maya is the first English-language study that examines the roles played by ethnicity and social inequality in Yucatán history. By revealing the highly nuanced complexities that underlie common stereotypes, it offers new insights not only into Mesoamerican peoples but also into the nature of interethnic relations in general.
Download or read book The Politics of Local Participatory Democracy in Latin America written by Françoise Montambeault and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-14 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Participatory democracy innovations aimed at bringing citizens back into local governance processes are now at the core of the international democratic development agenda. Municipalities around the world have adopted local participatory mechanisms of various types in the last two decades, including participatory budgeting, the flagship Brazilian program, and participatory planning, as it is the case in several Mexican municipalities. Yet, institutionalized participatory mechanisms have had mixed results in practice at the municipal level. So why and how does success vary? This book sets out to answer that question. Defining democratic success as a transformation of state-society relationships, the author goes beyond the clientelism/democracy dichotomy and reveals that four types of state-society relationships can be observed in practice: clientelism, disempowering co-option, fragmented inclusion, and democratic cooperation. Using this typology, and drawing on the comparative case study of four cities in Mexico and Brazil, the book demonstrates that the level of democratic success is best explained by an approach that accounts for institutional design, structural conditions of mobilization, and the configurations, strategies, behaviors, and perceptions of both state and societal actors. Thus, institutional change alone does not guarantee democratic success: the way these institutional changes are enacted by both political and social actors is even more important as it conditions the potential for an autonomous civil society to emerge and actively engage with the local state in the social construction of an inclusive citizenship.
Download or read book OECD Territorial Reviews Mexico 2003 written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2003-02-07 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This review of Mexico evaluates emerging territorial development strategies as well as relevant changes in governance, such as new horizontal and vertical co-ordination mechanisms, being introduced in conjunction with improved federal arrangements.
Download or read book Tecate Baja California Realidades Y Desaf os de Una Comunidad Mexicana Fronteriza written by Paul Ganster and published by SCERP and IRSC publications. This book was released on 2002 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Imperial Mexicali Valleys written by Kimberly Collins and published by SCERP and IRSC publications. This book was released on 2004 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
