departments, ending up being driven by political more than technical considerations. The dispersion of responsibilities across political actors, while it can make sense to suit broad democratization objectives and the specificities of each actor, complicates substantially the working of the accountability relationships because of the absence of a level clearly responsible for service delivery and the confusion that could arise from an unclear distribution of responsibilities among actors: in Colombia, for instance, the initial compact relationship was put under strain because the division of responsibilities brought the departments to be relatively uninterested in the final delivery of the service leading them to make unequal allocations of teachers across municipalities. This unequal allocation, together with soft budget constraints at the municipal level, would then bring these same municipalities to also hire teachers, at the cost of investment and/or running deficits, blurring the division of responsibilities and leading to inefficient allocation of resources. Additionally, under these circumstances, also the voice relationships at both levels were weakened as citizens found it difficult to express their preferences to actors which have only partial and/or unclear responsibility on the provision of the services. The only available evidence on outcomes, with no formal link made to the reform, however, suggests that while education spending increased substantially in Colombia over the 1990’s (from 3.2% of GDP in 1990 to 4.5% in 1997), enrollment rates tended to increase slightly between 1991 and 1994 and stagnate, or even decrease, between 1994 and 1998 (Borjas and Acosta, 2000). No convergence between enrollment rates of different socio-economic strata can be noticed.

We should note that, without a formal evaluation of the reform but with the elements provided by several partial assessments and, above all, a “learning by doing” type of experience, it was formally decided to introduce a substantial modification of the Colombian decentralization reform in 2001 (Law N. 715, December 2001) along two main lines: (a) the simplification of resource allocation, through the creation of a General Co-Sharing System ( _“Sistema General de Participaciones”_ ) which includes all funds directed to education and allocates them according to students enrolled; and (b) the unification of the responsibilities at the level of only one political actor (department or municipality), accompanied by the automatic “accreditation” of all municipalities with more than 100,000 habitants and a possible “accreditation” of all municipalities assuming they fulfill certain minimum institutional conditions. Doing so the country has decided to give up the shared responsibility model altogether taking the path, slowly but surely, of a “municipalization” model or at least of a “geographically” differentiated model where the department would have full responsibility on the delivery only when the municipality is too small or unprepared.

# **<u>Bolivia</u>**

**The shared responsibility model led municipalities to over-invest and the role of departments is still unclear. However, following the decentralization reform, investment in education became more progressively distributed and more responsive to local needs, due an effective use of “voice”.**

## **Evidence:**

A study made by Ruiz and Giussani (1997) on Bolivia, also largely focused on intermediate indicators, finds the same “potential” accountability problem in Bolivia (potential because the Bolivian reform was much less advanced than the Colombian one in 1997) and fears that, by being only responsible for school infrastructure, municipalities might over-invest, not taking into account recurrent needs. This is another possible outcome of the same initial division of responsibilities which might not be all negative if investment is low and voice is effectively 27