After decentralization: Federal constraints, local oversight, and municipal school systems in Brazil

During the 1990s, the federal government in Brazil enacted measures to remedy various policy failures in one of the most decentralized political systems in the world. Included among the measures were reforms in the administration and financing of public schools. The federal reforms sought to improve both state and civic capacity at the municipal level, and thus insulate the provision of primary education from the control of entrenched political elites.;This dissertation seeks to explain the variation in the initial implementation of these reforms. It finds that the reforms produced divergent outcomes depending upon the degree of elite coherence and the legacy of community participation. The study argues that the reforms produced more positive outcomes in those cities that both possessed a higher degree of elite coherence and lacked a legacy of community-based management in their school system.;The story told here, based on fieldwork, archival research, and interviews in four cities, forces us to rethink much of our common wisdom related to elite strength and community involvement. The improved delivery of public services at the local level depended less on the design of reforms that aimed to constrain local politicians and to organize the user public, and more on the constraints of the political relationship between these two groups. Centralized efforts to bypass these relationships need to pay close attention to local conditions. At the municipal level, these conditions are controlled by an electoral context and a political party system that have sustained the continuity of subnational elites and have restricted the significance of citizen participation.