accountability mechanism working generally well at the municipal level (also recently strengthened by the creation of social councils in municipalities and states) which led to “rational” resource allocations where municipal capital and personnel expenditures were generally related to system needs (while competition between municipal and state delivery systems, which was also supposed to be promoted by the per-student subsidy, does not seem to have played a major role<sup>26</sup> ). Still, it was also found that some municipalities use resources more productively than others, depending on local skills and the effective implementation of “voice” (through the social councils). Finally, the reform was implemented within a consensual framework and also gave special emphasis to improving the salaries, qualifications, career prospects and performance of teachers, in particular in the municipal sector (among other interventions, 60% of FUNDEF resources have to be spent on the payment of teachers).

# **B. Available case studies on the “sub-national shared responsibility” model**

The reforms in Bolivia and Colombia were implemented within a generally consensual framework with an objective of promoting democratization and re-distributing political power among actors. As such, as we have seen above, they have attempted to involve several actors in the provision creating a complex system of accountability relationships.

There are generally no formal evaluations of these models, with the exception of the study of Faguet on Bolivia (Faguet, 2000), which is however only focused on intermediate quality indicators, but some qualitative/quantitative assessments that provide clear insights on the weaknesses/strengths of the reforms.

# **<u>Colombia</u>**

**Poor implementation of the compact relationship and the same shared nature of responsibilities for the provision of the services hampered the effectiveness of the decentralization process in Colombia. In spite of increasing spending, enrollment and its distribution across socio-economic classes stagnated during the 1990’s.**

## **Evidence:**

Evaluations made by Gomez and Vargas (1997) and Borjas and Acosta (2000), focused on intermediate quality, efficiency and equity indicators, make it clear that the Colombian service delivery model is a problematic one essentially because of the way the compact relationship between levels of delivery was designed and implemented and because of the same shared nature of responsibilities for the provision of the services which makes the creation of an effective accountability system particularly difficult. On the compact relationship, three central problems were: (a) the lack of an information/monitoring system at all levels to assess if the departments implement the national norms for the administration of teachers and the use of the financial resources transferred to the different levels; (b) the complexity and lack of transparency of the fund allocation formulas still too much focused on costs while at the same time trying to introduce indicators of efficiency and equity difficult to measure and monitor which ended up leading to inefficient and unequal resource allocation across geographic areas; and (c) the “accreditation” process which, while representing an innovatory way of addressing institutional constraints to service delivery, was implemented so as to leave too much leeway to the

> 26 Among the reasons for this is the scarce comparative information available on the quality of state and municipal systems and the fact that municipalities and states often divided the provision of primary education among themselves following the following pattern: 1-4 grades municipalities and 5-8 grades states.

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