Structuring decentralization: Hybrid institutions in Tanzanian public health and financial management interventions

Tanzania represents a Sub-Saharan African leader in various good governance reforms, including that of decentralization. Despite extensive efforts on the part of both government and international donor agencies, the decentralization process initiated in the 1980s and reinvigorated with devolution measures in 1998 is stalled if not shifting to recentralization. The divergence between the discursive portrayal of decentralization and the actual implementation of pro-decentralization activities at the local level can be explained by the emergence of a new category of institutions lying between the authority of donors and the state. Specifically, donor interventions created to realize the government's discourses of decentralization led to the emergence of new institutions---or hybrid institutions---to assist local government authorities in essential service delivery, technical advice, and policy formation.;This dissertation hypothesizes that the presence of these hybrids affects the distribution of power and authority between national and local government authorities. They do so by means of the structural relationships (integration, interface, and hub) they establish between the primary decentralization stakeholder institutions: the national government, donor agencies, and local government authorities. The dissertation argues that the hybrid's institutional characteristics determine the type of structure it supports between the primary decentralization institutional stakeholders. It also argues that these hybrids support the emergence of a new Tanzanian technocratic elite cadre that affect the extent to which their institutions exercise voice or exit in regards to ideational and discursive interactions influencing Tanzanian decentralization.;The dissertation applies the method of difference in association with historical and discursive new institutionalism to four sets of hybrid case studies maintaining health sector strengthening (HSS) and public financial management (PFM) initiatives. The analysis contributes to the literature in two ways. First, it offers an alternative explanation for the failure of the process of decentralization in Tanzania. Second, it contributes to the political development literature's explanation of institutional change in least developed countries, especially in regards to discursive elements supported in part by the new technocratic elite that conceal these institutions' political influence.