Interacting Capacities: The Indirect National Contribution to Subnational Service Provision

• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Author: Ricardo A. Bello‐Gomez
• Date: 01 November 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13192

Interacting Capacities 1011

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 80, Iss. 6, pp. 1011–1023. © 2020 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13192.

Ricardo A. Bello-Gomez

Indiana University, USA

Interacting Capacities: The Indirect National Contribution to

Subnational Service Provision

Abstract: Different levels of government often interact on the ground, providing closely related services. While

multilevel governance arrangements have been studied broadly, scarce literature has explored the contribution of

national governments to achieving subnational policy goals. By reconceptualizing administrative decentralization as

coexisting devolution (to subnational governments) and deconcentration (through field units), this research explores

the indirect national contribution to subnational performance by delivering associated services. This article tests the

following hypotheses: (1) there is a positive effect of national deconcentrated capacity on subnational policy outputs,

and (2) under policy overlap, this contribution diminishes with increasing levels of subnational capacity. While

Colombian schooling is decentralized, the national government indirectly contributes to education through a national

agency that administers child protection services. Analyzing data for Colombian subnational governments over a

decade reveals that national capacity boosts education provision while the least endowed regions benefit the most, thus

providing evidence supporting both hypotheses.

Evidence for Practice

• Beyond mechanisms such as transfers, preemption, monitoring, or guidance, national governments can

indirectly contribute to subnational provision of social services by providing closely related services on the

ground.

• Because of overlapping policy boundaries, low-capacity regions might benefit the most from the additional

contribution of national governments.

• National governments should consider the potential substitution between levels of government due to policy

overlap when distributing their infrastructural capacity across the territory to boost overall performance in

service provision.

This article explores the indirect contribution

of national governments to subnational

performance, understood as social service

provision, through the delivery of closely related

services on the ground. As decentralization of power,

resources, and responsibilities has advanced around

the globe, understanding spaces of subnational

governance has become ever more salient for both

scholars (Hooghe and Marks 2016) and government

practitioners (Eguino and Radics 2018). In most

countries, service provision often configures

governance systems of shared or overlapped policy

responsibility among several levels of government.

In this context, research on fiscal federalism,

intergovernmental relations, and decentralization has

aimed to understand the performance and interactions

between these different governments.

Meanwhile, administrative mechanisms for the

interaction between levels of government have

received substantially less attention in decentralization

studies (Ahmad et al. 2005). Consequently, very little

is known, for example, about the interaction between

a national government providing services through

its own bureaucracy on the ground and subnational

governments operating in closely related policy areas.

In decentralized systems, central bureaucracies do

not necessarily disappear at the subnational level.

Instead, they might provide assistance (Brown 2001),

guidance (Carley, Nicholson-Crotty, and Fisher

2015), and monitoring (Rich and Gómez 2012) to

subnational governments and even continue operating

on the ground through deconcentrated field units.

In this context, organizational capacity, understood

as a stock of internal human and financial resources

(Christensen and Gazley 2008; Ingraham, Joyce, and

Donahue 2003), serves to assess the ability of the

national bureaucracy and subnational governments to

perform.

This study’s main proposition is that deconcentrated

capacity of the national government to provide related

Ricardo A. Bello-Gomez is a PhD

candidate in public affairs in the O’Neill

School of Public and Environmental Affairs,

Indiana University, and incoming assistant

professor in the Department of Political

Science at Texas Tech University in the fall

of 2020. He studies public management,

intergovernmental relations, and

organization theory. His research agenda

explores the institutional, organizational,

and managerial factors affecting

government performance, often focusing on

subnational governments and the provision

of social services.

Email: rabellog@indiana.edu

Research

Symposium:

Advancing

Government

Quality through

Capacity and

Competitiveness