Government Fragmentation, Administrative Capacity, and Public Goods: The Negative Consequences of Reform in Burkina Faso

• DOI: 10.1177/1065912918800820
• Published date: 01 September 2019
• Date: 01 September 2019
• Author: Trey Billing
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912918800820

Political Research Quarterly

2019, Vol. 72(3) 669 –685

© 2018 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912918800820

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Article

Introduction

The international development community has long

viewed decentralized governance as crucial for an effec-

tive provision of public goods and services. The World

Bank went as far as to designate decentralization as one

of only a few development priorities in the twenty-first

century (Yusuf et al. 1999). It is therefore unsurprising

that donors have recommended this type of reform across

several highly centralized countries throughout the devel-

oping world (Bardhan and Mookherjee 2006). In recent

decades, many developing countries have also experi-

mented with drastic increases in their number of subna-

tional administrative units. This process—known as

government fragmentation or administrative unit prolif-

eration—is often implemented in conjunction with

broader decentralization reforms under the guise of bring-

ing government “closer to the people.”1 However, as

argued by Resnick (2017, 48), “. . . progress on decentral-

ization is sometimes solely equated with the number of

subnational governments rather than how well those new

sub-units actually function.”

Although donor commitment to decentralization stems

from a motivation to improve the provision of public

goods within developing countries, I argue that a tendency

of reforming governments to respond with administrative

unit proliferation has consequences in opposition to the

ostensible purpose of decentralization. In short, newly

created subnational units lack sufficient administrative

capacity to deliver public goods to their constituents.

Drawing on recent work on state/organizational capacity

(Centeno, Kohli, and Yashar 2017) and administrative unit

proliferation (Grossman and Lewis 2014; Lewis 2014), I

conceptualize administrative capacity as a function of

access to resources from local taxation and central gov-

ernment transfers, and the quantity and quality of local

bureaucracy. Localities within administrative units that

are not affected by fragmentation are better able to both

tax their citizens and bargain for transfers from the center,

while also holding over their bureaucratic experience and

staff from the prefragmentation period. Mother units—

those carved to provide territory for the newly created

splinter units—have similar bureaucratic experience and

ability to tax, though their bargaining position in the com-

petition for centrally distributed resources is diminished

800820PRQXXX10.1177/1065912918800820Political Research QuarterlyBilling

research-article2018

1University of Maryland, College Park, USA

Corresponding Author:

Trey Billing, Department of Government and Politics, University of

Maryland, College Park, 3140 Tydings Hall, College Park, MD 20742,

USA.

Email: tbilling@umd.edu

Government Fragmentation,

Administrative Capacity, and Public

Goods: The Negative Consequences

of Reform in Burkina Faso

Trey Billing1

Abstract

Although countries throughout the developing world continue to increase their number of subnational administrative

units, the consequences of administrative unit creation remain poorly understood. This paper argues that newly

created administrative units face relative difficulty generating resources and staffing a full and competent bureaucracy,

and as a result, are less capable of providing public goods to their constituencies. These challenges to administrative

capacity are less consequential within mother units that were carved apart to create new splinter units and are entirely

absent in nonsplitting units. Proxying the local provision of public goods with a measure of nighttime light intensity

in Burkina Faso, the findings indicate that the public goods provision in newly created splinter provinces dropped

significantly relative to prefragmentation levels, while other administrative units remained largely unaffected.

Keywords

government fragmentation, decentralization, public goods, Africa

670 Political Research Quarterly 72(3)

by their shrunken territory. The newly created splinter

units, however, are placed in the most limited position to

derive resources and face severe bureaucratic constraints.

The argument in this paper implies a puzzling result:

the commitment of the donor community to decentraliza-

tion may spur developing countries to create administra-

tive units too weak to effectively provide public goods.

Thus, though donors may be motivated by developmental

goals when pushing decentralization, governments that

respond with premature administrative unit creation

likely face consequences antithetical to development.

In an era in which fragmentation is commonplace in

the developing world, understanding how administrative

capacity mediates the effectiveness of the provision of

public goods is of clear importance. However, absent

experimentally assigning communities to different frag-

mentation types, it is very difficult to tease out the effects

of fragmentation on the public goods provision absent

confounding factors. This paper offers a second-best

alternative research design to this experimental ideal by

presenting evidence from the substantial increase in prov-

inces in Burkina Faso, a case that has received very lim-

ited attention in the study of the politics of development

in Africa (Briggs 2017). I compile data on the local provi-

sion of public goods—proxied by a measure of nighttime

light intensity—within departments, the administrative

unit that falls just below the province. Because depart-

ments remain fixed before and after provincial fragmen-

tation, I am able to compare patterns of the public goods

provision over time within departments under different

provincial configurations, implying that changes in pub-

lic goods outcomes can be attributed to falling into an

alternative provincial state. Difference-in-differences

estimates strongly suggest that departments within the

entirely new splinter provinces are significantly worse-

off relative to those within nonsplitting provinces than

they were prior to splitting. Departments within mother

provinces, however, appear only slightly worse-off than

nonsplitters. Communities within splinter provinces

appear to experience a worse public goods provision

from fragmentation across different specifications of the

postfragmentation period, an effect that is unrelated to

endogenous selection into fragmentation types.

This paper is one of only a few studies to rigorously

estimate the effects of fragmentation on the provision of

public goods (see Asher and Novosad 2015; Grossman,

Pierskalla, and Dean 2017), and, to my knowledge, con-

stitutes the first evidence of robust and negative distribu-

tional consequences. This evidence therefore also

contributes to the broader literature on the limitations of

political and economic reform in sub-Saharan Africa

(e.g., van de Walle 2001) and the literature on the limita-

tions of administrative unit creation specifically, which

has to date noted that fragmentation may be exploited for

political reasons and may lead to recentralization (see

Green 2010; Grossman and Lewis 2014; Lewis 2014;

Malesky 2009, among others), but has yet to show the

negative consequences for the provision of public goods.

Although existing perspectives have noted the potential

for distributional effects from an altered political land-

scape (Grossman, Pierskalla, and Dean 2017), I propose

an alternative theoretical framework that prioritizes the

unique challenges of governance in the developing world

that stem from limited administrative capacity. These

challenges have been previously described in the context

of decentralization in general (e.g., Bardhan 2002) and

government fragmentation in particular (e.g., Lewis

2014), but have yet to be explicitly linked to the provision

of public goods after reform.

Related Work

Contemporary work has primarily focused on explaining

the implementation of government fragmentation, center-

ing broadly on two categories of causes. Arguments

within the first category view administrative unit creation

as stemming from demands for political autonomy and

improved access to state resources from below. In

Indonesia, for example, Pierskalla (2016) shows that dis-

trict splits were largely a function of demand for more

ethnically homogeneous districts. Kimura (2010) argues

that alliances in Indonesia formed across multiple territo-

rial levels, creating coalitions demanding new districts

and provinces. Similarly, the territorial structure of

Nigeria was altered to better capture the distribution of

ethnic groups (Akinyele 1996).

The second category of causes focuses on top–down

mechanisms driving fragmentation, highlighting the

political incentives of a survival-driven central govern-

ment. For example, in Vietnam, new provinces were cre-

ated to secure sufficient political support for previously

untenable economic reforms (Malesky 2009). Resnick

(2017) shows that incumbents in Ghana created addi-

tional units out of noncompetitive districts to secure a

larger share of legislative seats in future elections.

Evidence also suggests that central governments in some

cases, including Nigeria (Kraxberger 2004) and Senegal

(Resnick 2014), have used fragmentation as a “divide and

rule” strategy to weaken the political opposition. An

additional top–down explanation sees new units as a

vehicle for maintaining and expanding patronage net-

works. According to this logic, the creation of a new

administrative unit increases access to centrally distrib-

uted resources, spurs local construction projects neces-

sary for a functioning regional government, and

substantially increases the number of local government

jobs. Green (2010) argues that President Museveni relied

on district splitting to fuel patronage in Uganda as other