The Politics of Decentralization in Senegal

Abstract

The previous chapter introduced the historical driver of my argument about why we are seeing the emergence of disparate local redistributive strategies in rural Senegal: variation in exposure to precolonial statehood. Core to my argument, however, is the idea that these precolonial legacies interact in unforeseen ways with subsequent institutional reform. Accordingly, this chapter takes up the task of laying out the two remaining historical foundations of my argument. I begin by introducing Senegal’s system of decentralized local governance, which intersects with the country’s precolonial political geography to generate institutional congruence or incongruence. The second half of the chapter explores the third empirical building block that relates to the unit of analysis itself: how were the boundaries of Senegal’s local governments drawn? If what is critical is how elites relate to each other across villages, then the argument risks being endogenous to the very social relations that benefit local governance today if some communities were able to selfselect into a local state with their friends and family. Drawing on archival and interview data, I find scant evidence that boundaries were systematically driven by bottom-up social dynamics. In contrast, the material suggests that decentralization reforms were implemented from above, in some cases netting villages with shared social institutions of cooperation and reciprocity into new administrative units, while in others grouping together villages with no meaningful shared history. Taken together, this historical detail enables me to explain why Senegal’s decentralization scheme structures distinct cross-village social dilemmas across the country.