FIGURE 2 - uploaded by Edmund J. Malesky
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The number of provinces in Vietnam has grown 60% due to five sets of provincial divisions starting in 1990. I argue and test the theory that the phenomenon of provincial divisions is actually the only clear observable implication of the changing nature of competition between factions at the central level of the Vietnamese Communist Party, where ref...
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Context 1
... rhetorically it was easier to argue for new provinces based on efficiency, it would seem they were studying maps of district economic composition and creating new reform- oriented provinces out of SOE-dominated areas. Figure 2 demonstrates the gerrymandering strat- egy more vividly with an example of the division of the northern Vinh Phu province, returning Phu Tho, an SOE Province, and Vinh Phuc, its nonstate coun- terpart, to their pre-1965 entities. Of most interest, is the case of the provincial capital Viet Tri (see inset), which was awarded to Phu Tho after separation, even though the majority of the town is situated within the borders of Vinh Phuc. ...
Citations
... Decentralization in developing countries provides an opportunity for national and local elites to democratize the government by delegating administrative, fiscal and political power from the central government to lower-level administrative units (Falleti, 2005;Litvack et al., 1998;Nzouankeu, 1994), such as a new district and province. For example, splitting provinces in Vietnam is related to the national elites' interest in capturing the lion's share of profit through newly established state-owned enterprises in the new region (Malesky, 2006). A look at subdistrict data in Uganda reveals that local actors play a significant role in new district creation (Grossman & Lewis, 2014). ...
How do ethnic groups compete in a decentralized Indonesia? How do their political competitions to claim a new province lead to open conflict? The Indonesian government devised its massive territorial autonomy (TA) strategy—regional proliferation or pemekaran—as part of expansive decentralization reform in 1999. While scholarship is generally ambiguous regarding the relationship between regional proliferation and conflict, many districts still experience small-scale episodic conflict some of which may be fuelled by ethnic-group competition after pemekaran. This study aims to investigate ethnic groups’ political competition during the initiation stage of non-successful new province campaigns. Using four cases—two new province aspirations, one no-province claim and a null case—I argue that ethnic groups’ political competition can develop to the level of a localized small-scale episodic conflict. The evidence suggests that political competition among ethnic groups may temporarily escalate due issues of the location of the new province’s capital location and the future bid for a new gubernatorial position. This study fills a scholarly gap in the discussion of ethnic groups’ politics and conflict (e.g. Cederman, L.-E., Hug, S., Schädel, A., & Wucherpfennig, J. 2015; Cunningham, K. G. 2014). Furthermore, this study finds support for the effectiveness of a moratorium policy, such as buying-time tactics to reduce the conflict.
... In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and elsewhere in Asia, Europe and Latin America, governments have created new sub-national administrative units in the form of local government (LG) jurisdictions as part of their decentralisation policy process (Alesina, Baqir, and Hoxby 2004;Malesky 2005;Mawdsley 2002;Suberu 1991;Burki, Guillermo, and Dillinger 1999). Burki et al. report a shrinking in jurisdiction size, with the number of municipios in Brazil increasing from 3000 to nearly 5000 in the 15 years following the return to democracy in the country. ...
... These grants would be distributed across jurisdictions to win political support (Khemani 2008). In the Philippines, re-drawing of municipal boundaries and conversion of barangays into municipalities enabled local political families to gain access to grants from higher tiers of government (Khemani 2008, 12); in Vietnam, the government created new provinces in order to placate conservatives whose power was otherwise being whittled away by privatisation and other economic reforms (Malesky 2005). Studies in a range of countries as diverse as Albania, Brazil, India, Mexico, Peru, Kenya, Ghana and the Philippines provide evidence of significant political manipulation in targeting CG grants on the basis of local electoral characteristics (Khemani 2006(Khemani , 2010. ...
Creation of local government districts has become an enterprise in Uganda, with many stakeholders having diverse opinions about the government’s motives. This article examines the questions: What are the proclaimed and hidden or implicit intentions of the government? What evidence is available to provide reasonable interpretation of government action according to a particular rationale? By triangulating primary and secondary data and using a deductive approach, the study concludes that the initial intention of the government to create new districts to bring services and government closer to the people was consistent with the country’s constitution and decentralisation policy. However, since 1997, and especially since 2006, other rationales have come to the fore, though not communicated as such in public policy statements. While we do not exclude ethnic rationale, the article finds more evidence that points to political patronage and a variant of gerrymandering (namely, that of splitting up districts while not redrawing boundaries).
... To attract funding, many provincial leaders are often in a 'beg and give' relationship with central-level leaders. 22 National leaders can in some instances use clientelist relations with local leaders to have specific measures implemented in certain localities (see, e.g., Malesky, 2005). A top-down approach to policymaking tends to be more common in the north, where provinces were heavily collectivised for several decades under the centrally planned economy. ...
This study provides an analysis of decision-making processes and the role of knowledge in
relation to economic policy in Vietnam. We define economic policy-making to include a
wide variety of measures to improve economic productivity. Drawing on a documentary
analysis and in person interviews, the findings included the following five key messages:
Power across the Vietnamese state is scattered; but formal knowledge is still relatively centralised
Despite pressure to sustain rapid economic growth, liberal inspired research findings tend to face obstacles in the form of economic interests, ideology and informality
The way in which civil servants are recruited, trained, managed, promoted and remunerated continues to be highly politicised, constraining the quality of policy-making
Genuine local-level authority to formulate policy varies depends on a range of informal factors, with some localities drawing on a wider pool of knowledge to adopt more locally specific policy
Development partners could improve their policy work by keeping a close eye on the context, working with government to highlight problems and enabling different stakeholder groups to discuss possible solutions
... This has been an especially prominent trend in the developing world, where the governments of such countries as Benin, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and Vietnam, among many others, have created a slew of new units since the 1990s. Yet there has been very few attempts at explaining this trend, especially in Africa, and those that exist have ascribed it to a variety of factors such as gerrymandering, the desire to improve service delivery, ethnicity and electoral calculations among others (Fitrani, Hofman, & Kaiser, 2005;Malesky, 2005;Mawdsley, 2002;Suberu, 1991). Furthermore, none of these studies have attempted to draw wider inferences from their case studies that may apply elsewhere. ...
... The standard reason for creating new sub-national units in developing countries is to improve service delivery and developmental outcomes, as seen in the rhetoric from Nigeria and Vietnam, among 7 The districts were created in two sets, with thirteen new ones inaugurated in 2005 and another ten in 2006. others (Akinyele, 1996;Malesky, 2005). In Uganda Article 179 of the 1995 constitution allows for the creation of new districts based on 'effective administration and the need to bring services closer to the people.' ...
... In his analysis of province creation in Vietnam, (Malesky, 2005) posits that the central government created new provinces in order to placate conservatives whose power was otherwise being whittled away by privatization and other economic reforms. As suggested by (Malesky, 2005), this process was very similar to the old American practice of gerrymandering, whereby sub-national political units are altered in size or shape in order to alter the majority/minority status of certain political, racial or ethnic groups; in the Vietnamese case, the boundaries of the new provinces were drawn as to make them less dominated by state-owned enterprises than their predecessors. ...
In recent years many countries across the world, especially in Africa, have created large numbers of new local administrative units. This trend has largely gone unnoticed in the scholarly community, with no attempts to understand the underlying processes at work. To examine this phenomenon I take the case study of Uganda, one of the more prominent 'donor darlings' of the 1990s. Alongside large-scale economic and political reforms Uganda has also experienced a near explosion in the number of districts (the highest level of local government), going from 39 to 79 in less than a decade. I examine a variety of potential reasons why these districts might have been created, and argue, through the use of both qualitative and quantitative analysis, that district creation has been primarily a source of patronage in the ongoing need for Museveni to win elections. I conclude with reflections on the relationship between economic and political reforms and patronage in the developing world.
Not many countries have experienced as fast a growth in the number of local governments as has present day Indonesia. This study examines how territorial splits under new decentralisation policy have effected local development. The paper also critically discusses what needs to change and improve in decentralisation policy to encourage local development. Territorial splits have reinforced spatial fragmentation and ‘local selfishness’, hindering rather than driving local development. Territorial splits have also been a substantial additional burden to the national budget, and have resulted in many conflicts, disputes and tensions at the local level. This paper recommends that there should be a comprehensive review into the practice of territorial splits and suggests that there is a need to make regional mergers a more attractive option for the efficient and effective provision of public services at the local level.
Using evidence from the Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam tourism industry, this study critiques the entrepreneurial city model on the grounds that it posits a normative argument separating the governance practices of the urban state from the for-profit activities of the private sector. This division masks the long-standing encroachment of the public (or state) sector into "private" (or nonstate) arenas, and limits the nonstate sector's role in forging entrepreneurial schemes. Using interview data that illustrate the ambiguous relationships between the state and nonstate, I will analyze entrepreneurial cities based on the blurriness of the boundaries between the state and nonstate sectors as they negotiate their charges and collaborate for purposes entrepreneurial.
What explains the recent internal territorial changes in the Indonesian archipelago? Given the relatively constant number of provinces and districts during the New Order period, the sudden rise of new districts and provinces in post-authoritarian Indonesia is puzzling. This article argues that the phenomenon is driven by multilevel alliances across different territorial administrative levels, or territorial coalitions. It suggests that national level institutional changes explain the timing of provincial proliferation and that the triggers can vary, depending on historical and cultural contexts.
