Latin America’s Resurgent Centre: National Government Strategies after Decentralisation

This article identifies the ‘menu of options’ available to national governments as they seek to re-assert the centre’s prerogatives in the aftermath of decentralisation. These include policy strategies, bureaucratic strategies, institutional strategies and societal strategies, each of which has afforded opportunities for the centre to reclaim the role of protagonist that it lost as a result of decentralisation. Illustrated through the use of examples from across Latin America, our survey of these options shows that, short of outright recentralisation, national politicians and bureaucrats have been highly creative in their search for strategies to re-centre politics.

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