Unbalanced multilevel governance in Colombia: fiscal federalism and political bargaining with weak administrative decentralization

This chapter explores the evolution of Colombia’s decentralization over the last four decades. The Colombian decentralization process epitomizes one of the most ambitious efforts to create a hybrid system of intergovernmental relationships. However, as we show, the Colombian model of decentralization has eventually prioritized the political and fiscal aspects of the process, in detriment of administrative capacity, particularly at the local level. Most implementation duties rely on the divergent institutional capacity of the subnational units, whereas the national government centralizes decision making and focuses its role on monitoring implementation. As a result, the national government does not exercise a clear role in capacity building at the subnational level thus lacking effective checks on the actions of subnational political patrons. We refer to this situation as Weak Administrative Decentralization. This model, which national political actors have strengthened during the last 20 years, has deepened the territorial unevenness of policy making and service delivery in the country.