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ABSTRACT
Inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) has increasingly become an important tool for local governments. This study aims to understand the role of IMC from the perspective of network management. We argue that IMCs create networks of horizontal interactions among local governments, facilitating collaboration and information exchange among them. By so doing, IMCs can promote local government performance even outside their main service domains. To evaluate the performance enhancing role of IMC networks, we analyze the case of municipal associations in El Salvador. Based on original surveys of Salvadorian mayors, we find that networks built on municipal associations positively correlate with electricity provision. By contrast, no effect exists on running water provision, perhaps because it requires no collaboration among municipalities. Our findings suggest that managerial networks built on IMCs can play an important role in local government performance in developing settings, but their effect seems contingent on the type of performance outcome.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Of course, actors other than municipalities, such as national government and private partners also get involved in IMCs (Citroni, Lippi, and Profeti Citation2013).
2. Other studies explore the determinants of IMC membership (Arntsen, Torjesen, and Karlsen Citation2018; Pano Puey, Magre Ferran and Puiggrós Mussons Citation2018).
3. Some studies also demonstrate that IMC can improve citizens’ satisfaction with government services (Holum and Jakobsen Citation2016) and public managers’ perceptions about institutional legitimacy (Giacomini, Sancino, and Simonetto Citation2018; Silva, Teles, and Ferreira Citation2018).
4. For example, suppose an IMC is created for waste collection. We may expect that municipalities belonging to this organisation start to share information that is unrelated to waste collection or engage in collaborative activities beyond waste collection.
5. Therefore, Salvadorian municipal associations may be most akin to what Hulst and van Montfort (Citation2012) call planning forums.
6. Data come from the Instituto Salvadoreño de Desarrollo Municipal (http://www.isdem.gob.sv/index.php?option=com_k2&view=itemlist&task=category&id=99:servicios-al-ciudadano&Itemid=64). The data are as of 2012. Membership in a municipal association is fairly stable over time.
7. We do not claim that the network through municipal associations is the only managerial network that matters in El Salvador. Other networks, such as a partisan network or networks with local businesses or civil society groups, may be equally important to understand local government performance.
8. Transforming a two-mode network to a single-mode network is known as ‘projection’ and is a common practice in the social network literature. For example, see Nyhan and Montgomery (Citation2015).
9. The density of the network is 0.027, and the average shortest path is 4.282.
10. Another important question is how municipalities’ positions in the networks influence their performance. This kind of question is more extensively studied in the network management literature (see Shrestha Citation2013; Siciliano Citation2017).
11. Time restrictions limited our interviews to 136 mayors. At the time of the survey, Salvadorian mayors had been in office for half of their three-year term.
12. This point was suggested by one of the mayors we interviewed. It is also consistent with the findings of Avellaneda (Citation2016) that mayors’ capacities and motivations are more relevant for running water provision than for electricity provision.
13. In fact, the outcome variables follow a Poisson distribution, meaning that the distribution of performance improvement is concentrated in the lower end and shows right skewness. See section B of the appendix.
14. This means that our model relies on two assumptions. First, the municipality’s performance is influenced by the weighted average performance of network neighbours. Second, network neighbours that belong to a larger number of the same municipal associations have a larger influence on the municipality’s performance than those that belong to a smaller number of associations. Our results are unaffected by different ways to construct adjacency matrices wij (e.g., Leenders Citation2002).
15. Observations whose Start-Up Electricity = 1 are omitted because they have no room for improvement. For the same reason, observations with Start-Up Water = 1 are excluded. Descriptive statistics are in section C of the appendix.
16. For example, a 6-unit increase in the number of cantons with electricity in four terms is not the same as a 6-unit increase in one term.
17. While we examine how network neighbours’ performance affects a municipality’s performance, it is also possible to argue that a well-performing municipality influences the performance of all of its neighbours (i.e., reverse causality). Yet, even in the presence of reversed causation, our claim that peer influence through networking is important may still hold.
18. Our results are robust even when we control for the effect of economies of scale (see section D of the appendix).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Taishi Muraoka
Taishi Muraoka is now a postdoctoral research fellow at the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on representation and political institutions.
Claudia N. Avellaneda
Claudia N. Avellaneda specialises in governance and public management in Latin American subnational governments. Her research explores the determinants of municipal performance by focusing on the local chief executive. She explores the effects of mayors’ education, experience, networking, and political support on social service delivery, public finances, and decision-making. She has extended this line of research to Brazilian, Chilean, Honduran, Mexican, Colombian, Guatemalan, Peruvian, Ecuadorian and Salvadorian municipalities.