News, Meetings and Events |
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Meeting Poverty, Democracy and Clientelism, at the Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation The Interamerican Development Bank presented The Politics of Policies. 2006 Economic and Social Progress Report in Latin America 11/17/2005 Joint Seminar of the IDB and the World Bank: Political Economy of Service Delivery 06/02/2005 - 06/03/2005
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Development pulse
Academic work on public good provision, particularly in what regards the fate of the poor, is sometimes disconnected from the experiences and tales that strike a powerful nerve in public awareness and debate. This space collects some expressions of the dilemmas of local public goods provision from practitioners and policy makers outside the academic world
Public health
PBS recently aired the six-part series Rx for Survival, that tells the history of public health. The series creators explain that: "Over the past 150 years, stunning breakthroughs in public health have enabled humans to live longer, healthier and more productive lives. Clean drinking water, modern sanitation and good nutrition, along with the development of highly effective vaccines and antibiotics have increased average western life expectancy by an astonishing 35 years.
The Zapatista uprising in Mexico
Frida Hartz, 1994
The dilemma of public good provision for development is expressed in a poignant remark by Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista uprising in Mexico in 1994. "Or shall we ask pardon from the dead, our dead, who died “natural” deaths of “natural causes” like measles, whooping cough, breakbone fever, cholera, typhus, mononucleosis, tetanus, pneumonia, malaria an other lovely gastrointestinal and pulmonary diseases? Our dead, so very dead, so democratically dead from sorrow because no one did anything, because the dead, our dead, went just like that, with no one keeping count, with no one saying, “ENOUGH!”."
The purpose of this site is to provide a forum where scholars and policy makers can keep abreast of the latest research on the political economy of local public good provision in developing countries. We are interested in questions of distributive politics in general, as well as the specific topics of clientelism, pork barrel politics, decentralization, and the use of public funds for political gain. Ultimately we hope to create a virtual network where ideas, debates and experiences can be fruitfully exchanged.
Sebastiao
Salgado - Drinking water bypasses a slum in
Bombay
The greatest failure of development is no longer the issue of “getting prices right” -as the prevailing mantra of the 1990s repeated over and over-, but rather to understand why the provision of essential public goods such as drinking water, sewage and basic health and education fail so miserably in developing countries. We believe this failure is primarily related to a misunderstanding of the role of politics in development. Politics and political incentives must be at center stage if one hopes to understand the conditions under which local public goods can be provided. Markets left on their own will not provide local public goods through private provision (although important strides have been made around the world looking for partnerships between the private and the public sector in the provision of local public goods). The challenge for development scholars and policy makers is to understand under what conditions efficient public good provision, particularly at the local level, is politically feasible and economically viable.
CONTENTS
A bibliography of recent papers dealing with local public good provision, decentralization and development
Book reviews of recent works that relate to topics of local public goods, development and the political economy of public services
News, meetings and events concerning the provision of local public goods and development
Datasets related to the political economy of local public good provision
Links to relevant institutions and organizations devoted to the provision or the study of local public goods
The webpage is co-sponsored by Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Beatriz Magaloni. Submissions of content deemed appropriate, including dissemination of workshops, meetings, recent research, reviews of books, or datasets are always welcome. Stanford University is in no way responsible for the opinions or materials contained in this site
Required Reading This section briefly reviews some recent books of interest to scholars and practitioners dealing with the impact of local public goods in development
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| Robert Fogel’s book, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100 (Cambridge University Press, 2004) raises crucial issues for those who are interested in understanding contemporary problems of development. Improved standards of living for the poor in the 20th century are the result of complex environmental factors in which improvements in nutrition interacted with greater resistance to disease, and improvements in sanitation led to better living conditions in urban centers through the introduction of safe drinking water, sewage, and the draining of swamps.
Other books (still to be reviewed): World Bank, World Development Report 2004 Werner Troesken, Water, Race and Disease Pranab Bardhan, Scarcity, Conflicts and Cooperation Kathleen O’Neill, Decentralizing the State Diana Evans, Greasing the Wheels Piattoni, Simona, Clientelism, Interests and Democratic Representation
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