“Municipal Democratization in Rural Latin America: Methodological Insights from Ecuador”

Municipal Democratisation in RuralLatin America: MethodologicalInsights from Ecuador1

JOHN D. CAMERON

Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada

As municipal governments in Latin America acquire greater responsi-

bility for public goods and services and the promotion of economic and

social development, and play a greater role in local citizenship, questions

about the quality of municipal democracy also need to be taken much

more seriously. This article proposes a ‘relative power approach’ that

examines the distribution of social power at the microregional level and

its impact on municipal governance as the starting point for the analysis

of municipal democratisation in Latin America. The approach lays

particular emphasis on historical changes in the distribution of local

productive assets, the political organisation of local social actors, coali-

tions between and divisions within local social sectors and the ways in

which local power relations are shaped by global and national forces.

The article then explores the practical application of the relative power

approach to three municipalities in rural Ecuador.

Keywords: municipal governance, democracy, rural development,

Ecuador.

Over the course of the past two decades, decentralisation initiatives and struggles by

social movements to deepen democracy have made municipal governments in Latin

America much more important to the region’s development than they were in the past.

As municipal governments acquire greater responsibility for public goods, services and

the promotion of economic and social development, and play a greater role in local

citizenship, questions about the quality of municipal democracy also need to be taken

much more seriously. Academics and policy makers have drawn attention to the

increased importance of municipal governments in the region (Fox, 1994; Nickson,

1995; Abers, 2000; Myers and Dietz, 2002). However, questions about how municipal

1 The research on which this article is based was conducted from February to December1999 and in July 2002 with the support of a Social Sciences and Humanities ResearchCouncil of Canada (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship and an SSHRC post-doctoral fellow-ship. I wish to thank Liisa North and two anonymous BLAR referees for comments onearlier versions of this article.

# 2005 Society for Latin American Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing,9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 367

Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 367–390, 2005

democracy can be most effectively analysed have received relatively little explicit

attention. This article proposes a ‘relative power approach’ that examines the distribu-

tion of social power at the microregional level and its impact on municipal governance

as the starting point for the analysis of municipal democratisation in Latin America.

The approach lays particular emphasis on historical changes in the distribution of local

productive assets, the political organisation of local social actors and coalitions

between and divisions within local social sectors. It also draws attention to the ways

in which local power relations are shaped by global and national actors as well as by

municipal leadership strategies and the design of municipal institutions. The article

then explores the practical application of the relative power approach through an

analysis of efforts to deepen municipal democracy in three municipalities in rural

Ecuador.2

Three principal problems with the relative power approach to municipal democra-

tisation need to be highlighted from the outset. First, the approach yields no easily

applicable policy lessons for promoting municipal democracy in the contemporary

Latin American political context. Indeed, the approach points towards the need for

redistributive reforms to democratise social relations as the basis for improving muni-

cipal governance. Second, the relative power approach employs a qualitative metho-

dology that limits the number of cases to which it can be easily applied for comparative

purposes. Scholars working from quantitative or less holistic perspectives will argue

that there are too few cases and too many variables for the approach to yield any

broadly generalisable conclusions. There is much merit to this criticism. Nevertheless,

the relative power approach encourages scholars and policy makers to consider a series

of factors that have important implications for municipal democratisation in Latin

America, but which have been largely ignored to date. Finally, there is also a danger

that any efforts to explain contemporary political outcomes through reference to

historical changes may overemphasise certain elements of the past and miss the sig-

nificance of others and that interpretation of the past may be clouded by the ways in

which it has been recorded. However, despite these dangers, the attention to historical

changes in the relative power approach is crucial in order to confront the widespread

emphasis on contemporary factors, such as the strategies of political actors and the

design of political institutions, which currently dominate the analysis of municipal

governance in Latin America.

Approaches to Municipal Democratisation in Latin America

The methodological approach that currently prevails in research on Latin American

municipal democratisation privileges questions about the design of municipal institu-

tions and the administrative and political strategies of municipal leaders. Policy pro-

posals for deepening municipal democracy have emphasised good leadership (Rosales,

2 Research on municipal governance in Latin America has given much greater attentionto large urban centres than to small rural municipalities, which represent the vastmajority of the region’s approximately 14,000 municipal governments.

John D. Cameron

368 # 2005 Society for Latin American Studies

1994; Campbell, 2003), electoral reforms,3 the use of performance indicators, access to

information legislation and the creation of institutionalised fora for citizen participa-

tion in municipal decision-making, particularly in the allocation of municipal budgets

(Peterson, 1997: 14; Burki, Perry and Dillinger, 1999: 32; USAID, 2000: 37). Academic

analyses of municipal democracy also laid heavy emphasis on questions about the

design of municipal institutions, national decentralisation frameworks and municipal

leadership. For example, Campbell (2003: Chapter 8) proposed an explicit framework

for the analysis of Latin American municipal governance, prioritising municipal leader-

ship and the structure of incentives for good governance created by national decen-

tralisation laws. Both good municipal leadership and the types of institutional changes

mentioned above are urgently needed throughout Latin America. However, the analy-

sis and promotion of municipal democratisation must also look beyond these factors

and pay careful attention to the different patterns of local social and economic power

relations within which municipal institutions and leaders operate.

Some recent research has incorporated, at least implicitly, an analysis of the rela-

tionship between local level power relations and municipal governance. For example,

Abers’ (2000) study of the participatory budget in Porto Alegre, Brazil alludes to the

connections between changes in the balance of socioeconomic power in the city and the

relative success of the participatory budget. Most notably, she pointed out that muni-

cipal leaders were able to exploit divisions within the city’s business elite and to forge

an alliance between construction contractors and the city’s poor and working class

neighbourhood organisations against large-scale property owners. Goldfrank (2003)

also refers to the absence of a united opposition as an important factor behind the

success of the participatory budget in Porto Alegre. In her research on good governance

in the Brazilian state of Ceara, Tendler (1997) highlighted the efforts of the state

government to curb the power of elite-based municipal politicians in relation to local

popular sectors as a key condition for improved service delivery. By contrast, Campbell

(2003) drew attention to the ways in which national governments and international

agencies in Latin America used their power to limit experiments in democracy and

developmental governance at the municipal level during the 1990s in order to maintain

fiscal stability. Incorporating a clear analysis of social power relations into their

examination of the performance of anti-poverty programmes managed by Mexican

municipalities, Fox and Aranda (1996, 2000) drew attention to the strength of local

popular movements, municipal autonomy from higher levels of government and class

and ethnic polarisation between rural towns and outlying communities. Unfortunately,

their analysis stopped short of examining the historical forces behind these factors that

enhanced municipal service delivery.

Attention to local level social and economic power relations can be found in other

works on municipal governance (Mitlin, 2001; Baud and Post, 2002; Myers and Dietz,

2002). However, in order better to understand and promote municipal democratisa-

tion, a more integrated framework is needed that examines more explicitly and

3 Proposed reforms include ward-based electoral systems, the direct election of mayors,the separation of national and local elections and the elimination of systems of votingby closed party lists.

Municipal Democratisation in Rural Latin America

# 2005 Society for Latin American Studies 369

systematically the connections between different patterns of power relations and

variations in the performance of municipal governments.4

A Relative Power Approach to Municipal Democratisation

Work by scholars who examine the political trajectories of Latin American states from

comparative historical political economy perspectives offers an important methodolo-

gical starting point for a more careful analysis of municipal governance in the region.

Included in this tradition are works by Collier (1999), Huber and Safford (1995), Paige

(1997), Roseberry, GudmUndson and Samper Kutschbach (1995), Rueschemeyer,

Huber Stephens and Stephens (1992), Huber, Rueschemeyer and Stephens (1997),

Therborn (1979), Williams (1994) and Yashar (1997), all of whom acknowledge the

influence of Moore (1966). These works draw attention to the ways in which the

evolution and functioning of states have been shaped by historical changes in social,

economic and political power relations, and understand democratisation as a process

of institutional change that results from increased equality in the balance of social,

economic and political power.5 To borrow from Rueschemeyer, Huber Stephens and

Stephens (1992), this body of work represents a relative power approach to

democratisation.6

To explain Latin America’s varied democratic and authoritarian trajectories, the

relative power approach emphasises the following factors, listed here in approximate

order of importance:

. historical changes in the distribution of productive assets and the balance of

social, economic and political power of different groups in national society;. the political organisation of subordinate groups;. divisions among dominant groups and coalitions among subordinate groups;. the relative autonomy of the state from social forces, especially elites;. the impact of global political and economic forces.

Within the context of these factors, scholars working within the relative power

approach also examine the impact of the design of state institutions and the strategies

of key political actors on national political trajectories.

Most of the works within the relative power tradition give analytical priority to

historical changes in the balance of power among different classes, that is, social sectors

4 Weyland’s (2002) analysis of variations in the implementation of neoliberal reforms inLatin America offers a useful methodological approach that combines the analysis ofhistorical structures, institutional constraints and incentives, ideology and the behaviourof individual actors.

5 Avritzer (2002) presents a different but complementary approach to the study of LatinAmerica’s democratisation based on the analysis of democratic practices in civil society.Avritzer emphasises ‘transformations at the public level as the starting point of demo-cratisation’ (2002: 166), but stresses cultural practices in the public sphere rather thansocial and economic power relations.

6 Rueschemeyer, Huber Stephens and Stephens propose a ‘relative class power approach’to democratisation (1992: 47).

John D. Cameron


defined in terms of their relationships to the means of economic production. However,

in order to understand the prospects for municipal democratisation, it is also essential

to examine changes in other social power relations and the ways in which they affect

municipal governance. In addition to class, social power in rural Latin America is also

often sharply divided along lines of ethnicity, gender, generation and religion as well as

between migrants and non-migrants and between the residents of rural towns and the

surrounding countryside. In many rural municipalities in highland Ecuador, the principal

cleavage of social, economic and political power is based on differences between town-

based, petit-bourgeois, white-mestizos and rural, indigenous, semi-proletarian peasants.

But within each of those groups, there are also other important inequalities of power

based on gender, generation, religion, migrancy and economic strata. As Korovkin points

out, ‘[in] the complexities of Andean politics . . . ethnicity, class, political ideology, and

religion intertwine, producing political outcomes not easily understood when any one of

these factors is considered in isolation from the others’ (1997: 31).

With these considerations in mind, the relative power approach can be adopted to help

explain variations in the quality of municipal democracy. The approach focuses attention

on historical changes in the following factors, again listed in relative order of importance,

as the key elements in the field of forces that influence municipal democratisation:

. Historical changes in the balance of local social, economic and political power.

This analysis in turn requires an examination of:

* changes in the distribution of productive assets (e.g. land, water, credit and

infrastructure);

* political organisation and the social construction of local class, gender and

ethnic identities (amongst others) among subordinate groups;

* coalitions between members of different social groups (e.g. between rural

indigenous peasants and town-based mestizo petite bourgeoisies, between

Catholic and Evangelical peasant organisations);

* divisions within local elites;

* the impact of global and national actors and forces (e.g. aid donors, NGOs

and political parties).. The municipal government’s degree of autonomy from local social forces (both

elite and popular) and the political strategies and administrative capacity of

municipal officials to promote municipal democratisation.. The jurisdiction of the municipal government over matters of local conflict.. The institutional design of the municipal government.

A final question about the impact of municipal democratisation is also necessary: to

what extent does it benefit traditionally excluded social sectors?

The Relative Power Approach in Practice: MunicipalDemocratisation in Rural Ecuador

An examination of three Ecuadorian municipalities viewed as important cases of

municipal democratisation in the late 1990s highlights the links between changes in



local social power relations and municipal democratisation.7 Over the course of the

1990s, local governments in the three municipalities examined here – Guamote

(Chimborazo Province), Cotacachi (Imbabura Province) and Bolıvar (Carchi

Province) – created institutions for citizen participation in municipal decision-making

and budget allocation, promoted the formation of autonomous popular organisations

and redistributed municipal revenues much more equitably than any other local gov-

ernments in the country.8 Lamentably, democratisation initiatives in the municipality

of Bolıvar collapsed in late 1999, and as a result became an important case study of the

breakdown of municipal democratisation.

Guamote, Cotacachi and Bolıvar (until 1999) represented a marked contrast to the

crisis of democracy and governance in the face of persistent clientelism, corruption,

racism and weak administrative capacity at all levels of government in Ecuador.

Decentralisation policies in Ecuador, which were still incipient in the early 2000s,

had almost no impact on municipal democratisation. Decentralisation legislation

lacked any clear requirements or incentives for municipal governments to operate

more transparently or to foster citizen participation. It did generate increased competi-

tion over the control of municipal power, but did little to support the democratic

management of that power.9 With few exceptions, municipal governance at the begin-

ning of the twenty-first century was still widely characterised by the clientelist manage-

ment of local political party networks. Only Pachakutik, the political party created in

1996 as an electoral branch of the country’s national indigenous movement, gave

genuine priority to the democratisation of municipal governments, largely in response

to the bottom-up struggles for municipal democracy in places like Guamote and

Cotacachi.10

7 In interviews conducted by the author in 1999, researchers at Ciudad, Comunidec,the Instituto de Estudios Ecuatorianos (IEE), Terranueva and the FacultadLatinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO, Quito) all pointed to the three muni-cipalities examined in this article (Guamote, Cotacachi and Bolıvar) as among the mostimportant cases of municipal democratisation in the country.

8 For a much broader analysis, see Cameron (2003a, 2003b).9 Ecuadorian national legislation allows for municipal decentralisation but there has

been little genuine political will to support it. The most important decentralisationlaws in Ecuador are the 1997 ‘Law of Fifteen Percent’ which mandated that fifteen percent of national government budgets be transferred to municipal and provincial govern-ments; the 1997 Law of Decentralisation and Social Participation, which put a widevariety of state functions on the slate for decentralisation; Article 226 of the 1998Constitution which declared that all state functions could be decentralised except fornational security, foreign policy, international relations, macroeconomic policy anddebt negotiations; and the 2000 Law of Rural Parish Councils which allowed for thepopular election of these sub-municipal institutions. For analysis of Ecuador’s decen-tralisation framework, see Barrera, Gallegos and Rodrıguez (1999), Munoz (1999) andOjeda Segovia (1998, 2000).

10 It bears emphasising that struggles for municipal power began in Guamote andCotacachi long before Pachakutik was created and in fact contradicted the positionof most national-level indigenous leaders who opposed electoral participation until1993 (Macas, 1995).

John D. Cameron


The Balance of Social and Economic Power

Social and economic power relations in the three municipalities varied widely. In

Guamote, over 90 per cent of the population identified themselves as indigenous

(Municipalidad de Guamote, 2000: 33–34). Roughly 50 per cent of Cotacachi’s

population self-identified as indigenous (Garcıa, 1998: 5–7), while the population of

Bolıvar was predominantly mestizo with approximately fifteen per cent of residents

identifying as Afro-Ecuadorian (Rodrıguez, 1994: 19–36). Those differences in ethnic

composition had important implications for efforts to democratise local governance,

primarily because they were the principal form of identity around which local popula-

tions organised and contested control over municipal governance. As a result, differ-

ences in the ethnic composition of each municipality also shaped the need for, and the

possibilities of, cross-class and inter-ethnic coalitions in support of municipal demo-

cratisation. For example, in Guamote, leaders of the largely indigenous population did

not consider it necessary to forge alliances with local mestizos in order to gain control

of the local government. By contrast, in Cotacachi, leaders of the proportionately

smaller indigenous population realised that municipal democratisation required at

least the acquiescence if not the support of local mestizos. Ethnic differences were

also important because NGOs tend to concentrate their development efforts on indi-

genous rather than non-indigenous populations (Breton, 2001). This bias enabled

indigenous-peasant organisations and the indigenous-led municipal governments in

Guamote and Cotacachi to broker much more technical and financial support than

their non-indigenous counterparts in Bolıvar.

Class differences in the three municipalities also varied markedly and had impor-

tant but unexpected consequences for municipal democratisation. The microregional

variations in class composition reflected different patterns of local capitalist devel-

opment and corresponding variations in the distribution of agricultural land and

other productive assets. In Ecuador, the capitalist modernisation of agriculture of

the 1940s to 1970s largely followed a ‘Junker path’ in which large semifeudal

agricultural estates were transformed into large capitalist agricultural enterprises

(de Janvry, 1981; Barsky, 1984a). However, a more careful examination at the

microregional level reveals much greater diversity in the development of capitalist

agriculture that in turn reflects local variations in climate, ecology, market access,

state intervention and peasant organisation. Among the cases examined here,

Guamote was marked by an ecological and geographic setting that undermined the

productivity of local estates and facilitated a radical redistribution of agricultural

land in the favour of local (male) peasants in the context of peasant struggles to

implement Ecuador’s 1974 Agrarian Reform Law. By contrast, the distribution of

land in Cotacachi was largely unaffected by Agrarian Reform, and at the turn of the

twenty-first century land use and economic power were dominated by large-scale

agro-export enterprises. In a third pattern of capitalist agricultural development

based on private land sales and potato production, Bolıvar experienced a significant

growth in the number of capitalised family farms between the 1940s and 1970s which

resulted in the uncommon emergence of a substantial rural middle class (Barsky,

1984b; Lehmann, 1986).



These municipal differences in land distribution and class composition did not

predetermine possibilities for municipal democratisation. Nevertheless, the distribution

of assets did shape municipal democratisation efforts in important ways. In Guamote,

the redistribution of land through agrarian reform destroyed the power of local

agricultural elites in the 1970s, making the subsequent efforts of local indigenous-

peasant organisations to democratise municipal governance more straightforward than

in most Ecuadorian municipalities. In Bolıvar, the emergence of a relatively equitable

landowning structure and of a proportionately large rural middle class had a paradox-

ical impact on municipal democratisation. During the key period of peasant organising

leading up to and following the 1974 Agrarian Reform, the capacity of the zone’s

capitalised family farmers to progress on the basis of individual efforts created an

environment that was unreceptive to the initiatives of the few external actors that

attempted to promote peasant organisation in the area. In the 1990s, Bolıvar was still

characterised by a near total absence of politically oriented civil society organisations

that might have supported municipal democratisation efforts. A relatively equitable

distribution of land was thus an insufficient condition for municipal democratisation in

the context of a weakly organised peasant population and the lack of external support

for municipal democratisation.

In Cotacachi, municipal governance became more democratic despite a highly

inequitable distribution of land and other productive assets. However, municipal

democratisation in Cotacachi was effectively restricted to policy areas that did not

impinge upon the productive activities of large-scale landowners. Agricultural elites

actively resisted municipal efforts to implement rural property taxes and to regulate

their use of irrigation water and chemical pesticides, which were important health and

livelihood issues for the local population. The agricultural elite allowed the municipal

government autonomy only to the extent that it did not interfere with their key

interests. Cotacachi’s agrarian structure thus did not block municipal democratisation,

but it did effectively restrict it to certain areas of municipal jurisdiction.

Socioeconomic power relations based on the ownership of land and other produc-

tive assets in the three municipalities were further compounded by inequalities of

gender, generation and migration. The distribution of land and productive assets by

gender was highly unequal in all three municipalities, a legacy of male bias in agrarian

legislation and local cultural obstacles to female land ownership (Deere and Leon,

2001), which undermined women’s individual and collective political power in general

and indigenous-peasant women’s power in particular. The distribution of land by

generation in the three municipalities was also highly unequal. Even in Guamote,

where older generations had benefited from agrarian reform, the subsequent subdivi-

sion of peasant farms through inheritance left most of the generation born after 1960

with insufficient land to support families. As a result, labour migration was much

higher among this generation than among their parents, seriously reducing their capa-

city to participate in and influence municipal decision-making. Participation required

regular physical presence in the municipality, which in turn required ownership of

sufficient land or other productive assets to avoid frequent labour migration

(Bebbington, 1990). In both Guamote and Cotacachi, the involvement of (male)

indigenous peasants in municipal governance was thus concentrated among those

John D. Cameron


who had sufficient resources to live in the municipalities on a relatively permanent

basis.11

Political Organisation

Variations in the degree of political organisation among different social sectors had a

critical impact on local power relations and municipal democratisation. As a result of

decades of externally backed indigenous-peasant political struggles coupled with more

recent political support from national-level indigenous organisations, such as the

Confederacion de Nacionalidades Indıgenas del Ecuador (Confederation of

Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador – CONAIE) in Guamote and the Federacion

Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas, Indıgenas y Negras (National Federation

of Campesino, Indigenous and Black Organisations – FENOCIN) in Cotacachi, both

municipalities boasted politically powerful indigenous-peasant organisations with large

cadres of experienced and politically savvy leaders. By contrast, the historical absence

of organising efforts in Bolıvar coupled with a widespread resistance to collective

initiatives resulted in politically unorganised middle and peasant classes that did not

generally contest the exercise of authority by local petty elites and clientelist politicians

as long as they fulfilled traditional expectations for small-scale public works projects.

It is important to emphasise that until the late 1990s, external organising agents

generally ignored rural women or organised them in ways that reinforced traditional

gender roles and unequal power relations. The combination of this gender bias with the

unequal gender distribution of productive assets meant there were no politically power-

ful women’s organisations in any of the three municipalities and municipal democra-

tisation processes were highly male biased (Radcliffe, Laurie and Andolina, 2002:

299–300). In Guamote and Cotacachi, mestizo residents also had low levels of political

organisation, a factor that facilitated the shift in the ethnic control of municipal

governance in the two locales.

Social Coalitions and Divisions

Coalitions between different social groups and divisions within them shaped the

balance of social power in ways that supported municipal democratisation efforts in

Guamote and Cotacachi, but undermined them in Bolıvar. Social coalitions and divi-

sions were based partly on the economic interests and ethnic and class identities of local

social sectors, but also resulted from strategic initiatives (and errors) made by the

mayors and other political leaders in each municipality. For example, deliberate

initiatives by Cotacachi’s indigenous mayor to build a base of political support

among mestizos in the town centre generated a tentative, but important de facto

alliance between the rural indigenous-peasant population and the town-based mestizo

11 In Cotacachi, relative proximity to labour markets in the capital, Quito, made itpossible for migrants to return home at weekends, enabling them to participate inlocal decision-making more actively than their counterparts in Guamote, who tra-velled further in search of work.



petty-bourgeoisie in support of reforms to make municipal administration more

democratic. By contrast, the collapse of democratisation efforts in Bolıvar was in many

ways a product of the mayor’s failure to build a strong cross-class, town-countryside,

mestizo-Afro Ecuadorian coalition in support of the administrative changes that he

sought to implement.

Global Forces and Local Power Relations

Two global forces had particularly important effects on the balance of social power

and the relative success and failure of democratisation efforts in the three municipa-

lities. The first was development aid from international donors channelled through

nationally based NGOs. In Guamote and Cotacachi, international and NGO aid

strengthened the capacity of indigenous-peasant organisations to influence local poli-

tics. Aid provided directly to the two municipal governments also enhanced their public

legitimacy by enabling them to complete larger numbers of public works. It also

bolstered their relative autonomy from both the central state and local populations

by making them less dependent on transfer payments and local taxes and enabling

them to hire professional staff, although at the expense of increasing dependency on aid

donors. By contrast, in Bolıvar, the relative absence of external technical and financial

support to either local popular organisations or the municipal government was an

important factor behind the weakness of popular support for democratisation efforts

and the inability of the mayor to generate legitimacy for democratic reforms through

public works projects.

Global economic forces coupled with neoliberal structural adjustment policies,

themselves the result of pressure from global actors such as the International

Monetary Fund, had almost universally negative economic impacts on the incomes of

small-scale agricultural and artisan producers in Ecuador, especially in relation to

large-scale producers (Martınez, 2003). In Guamote, Cotacachi and Bolıvar, the lea-

ders of local peasant and artisan organisations indicated in interviews that the incomes

of their members had fallen precipitously over the course of the late 1990s, a percep-

tion supported by official poverty statistics.12 The worsening economic crisis further

aggravated the already existing trends towards rural land concentration, increased

economic inequality and out-migration from rural areas triggered by structural adjust-

ment (Martınez, 2003), which would appear to bode poorly for municipal democrati-

sation. Nevertheless, in Guamote and Cotacachi, local peasant and artisan leaders

asserted that the crisis had also created incentives for small-scale producers, including

women, to organise more effectively, which they asserted had contributed to a relative

increase in their local level political power and their capacity to influence municipal

decision-making. However, they also pointed out that the increased rates of out-

migration and the corresponding loss of human capital from rural communities

posed serious challenges for the sustainability of local peasant organisations.

12 Official statistics indicated a rise in poverty from 75.8 per cent of the rural populationin 1995 to 82 per cent in 1998 (Larrea and Sanchez, 2002; cited in Martınez, 2003:104, note 1).

John D. Cameron


National Actors and Policies

National-level actors and policies, including specific state agencies, political parties, the

Catholic and Evangelical Churches, NGOs and national social movement organisa-

tions, had contradictory impacts on the democratisation of the three municipalities. For

example, from the 1940s, Guamote was the focus of multiple external interventions

that resulted in a radical re-shaping of local power relations. The first external actors

included the Ecuadorian Communist Party and its affiliated Federacion Ecuatoriana de

Indios (Ecuadorian Federation of Indians – FEI), which began to organise indigenous

peasants around class-based demands for labour rights and agrarian reform in

the 1940s. Those early interventions helped set in motion the struggles that led to the

unusually thorough application of agrarian reform laws in the municipality in

the 1970s and the democratisation of municipal governance in the 1990s. In the late

1960s, the Catholic Church in Guamote and throughout the province of Chimborazo

began to provide active support to indigenous-peasant struggles for land reform and

the revival of the Kichwa language and cultural traditions, unlike its conservative

counterparts in many other dioceses which discouraged peasant organisation.

Evangelical Churches arrived on the scene in Guamote in the 1980s, playing an

important role in boosting ethnic pride and collective identity among local indigenous

peasants, contributing to the overall shift in local power relations. While religious

differences did sometimes make Catholic–Evangelical collaboration difficult, they did

not block the emergence of a relatively cohesive indigenous identity and movement for

indigenous control of municipal governance.

In the 1970s, the role of the Ecuadorian state in Guamote changed substantially as it

shifted its support away from the semifeudal estate owners who had long dominated

local politics to the highly mobilised indigenous-peasant population pushing for land

reform. The particular combination of an intense indigenous-peasant mobilisation and

the economic inefficiency of Guamote’s agricultural estates (in the broader context of

United States government’s pressure and assistance for agrarian reform) made Guamote

one of the few municipalities in Ecuador where the state implemented its 1974 Agrarian

Reform Law thoroughly (Zevallos, 1989: 50; Bebbington, 1990: 80). In the early 1980s,

radical local staff of the national Secretariat for Integrated Rural Development (SEDRI)

also intervened in Guamote in atypical ways to support indigenous-peasant organising.

To be sure, the SEDRI and other state agencies often acted in a paternalist manner,

sometimes establishing clientelist political relations with indigenous-peasant organisa-

tions that moderated demands and delayed the development of autonomous political

capacity. However, Guamote was one of the few places in Ecuador where state agencies

intervened over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s to destroy the power of local

estate owners and to bolster the power of local indigenous-peasant organisations,

thereby helping to lay the groundwork for municipal democratisation.

The number of NGOs working in Guamote began to grow in the early 1980s, and

by the mid-1990s the municipality had one of the highest concentrations of NGOs in

Ecuador (Breton, 2001: 134). Representing many different ideological perspectives and

development methodologies, some of these NGOs worked to promote autonomous

indigenous-peasant political capacity while others, arguably the majority, worked in



ways that promoted a culture of dependence on external aid and an apolitical concep-

tion of organisation (Bebbington, 1990: 85). NGO interventions also contributed to

the splintering of the local indigenous-peasant movement into more than a dozen inter-

community federations that tended to guard jealously their spheres of geographic

influence and access to donor resources. As the programmatic demands of international

donors changed over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, NGOs working in Guamote

also shifted away from supporting the indigenous-peasant political activism to more

technical aspects of development, thereby contributing to the political moderation of

the local indigenous-peasant movement (Breton, 2001).

At the same time, the presence of NGOs in Guamote helped to develop the capacity

of local indigenous-peasant leaders to administer development projects as well as to use

donor discourse to their advantage when writing funding proposals. When the indi-

genous-peasant movement in Guamote eventually captured municipal power through

municipal elections in the early 1990s, some NGOs provided crucial technical assis-

tance that enabled neophyte municipal leaders to put in place new participatory

decision-making structures. NGO staff also gently prompted indigenous leaders to

open some political spaces for indigenous-peasant women to participate meaningfully

in municipal decision-making. More generally, direct NGO financial assistance to the

indigenous-led municipality enabled it to significantly expand service delivery to

previously neglected rural communities and thereby bolster its local legitimacy.

In Cotacachi, interventions by external actors failed to change the distribution of

productive assets, but did contribute to the gradual development of a powerful indi-

genous-peasant federation that was a principal player in municipal democratisation.

Neither the state nor leftist political parties nor peasant unions made any serious efforts

to promote agrarian reform in Cotacachi, largely because of the productivity of local

agricultural estates and the relative lack of indigenous-peasant mobilisation for land

redistribution (Martınez, 1985).13 As a result, less than four per cent of agricultural

land in Cotacachi was redistributed during the period of agrarian reform (Zamosc,

1995: 82). Moreover, until the late 1970s, both state and non-state actors were much

less active in the promotion of indigenous and peasant organisation in Cotacachi than

in other areas, such as Chimborazo province. In addition, the Catholic Church in

Imbabura province, where Cotacachi is located, remained conservative and actively

discouraged local indigenous peasants from organising until the mid-1980s.

Nevertheless, despite the lack of land reform and the absence of state and church

support for local organisation, over the course of the late 1970s through the 1990s, two

key outside actors – FENOC and the Centro Andino de Accion Popular (Andean

Centre for Popular Action – CAAP) – supported the development of a powerful

federation of indigenous-peasant communities in Cotacachi.14 By the mid-1990s, that

organisation, called the Union de Organizaciones Campesinas de Cotacachi (Union of

13 The Ecuadorian state did open up the subtropical Intag zone in the western lowlandsof Cotacachi for colonisation. However, because of Intag’s extreme geographic isola-tion, it had very little influence on municipal politics.

14 FENOC later added the categories of indıgena (indigenous) and negro (black) to itsname and organising efforts to become FENOCIN.

John D. Cameron


Campesino Organisations of Cotacachi – UNORCAC), had become one of the stron-

gest and most highly mobilised in the country, with a fifteen-year history of political

struggle to make municipal governance in Cotacachi more responsive to its members’

interests. In 1996, the national indigenous confederation CONAIE encouraged one of

its full-time staff members, a Cuban-trained economist and Cotacachi-born indigenous

leader, Auki Tituana, to run for the position of mayor in Cotacachi in that year’s

municipal elections. Although Tituana was not a member of UNORCAC, the organ-

isation actively supported his bid for the mayor’s office.

Once elected, Tituana succeeded in attracting financial and technical support for a

radical reform of Cotacachi’s municipal government from a series of national and

international actors, including CONAIE and the newly formed indigenous political

party, Pachakutik, but particularly from Ecuadorian NGOs and overseas aid donors.

The central actors in the process of municipal democratisation in Cotacachi were local,

but as in Guamote, it is very unlikely that their efforts to reform municipal governance

would have been successful without two decades of outside support for local indigen-

ous-peasant organisation and the external technical and financial assistance provided

directly to the municipal government following the election of indigenous mayors.

In Bolıvar, the national actors that most actively promoted peasant organisation in

other parts of the country were either not present at all or did not play those roles

effectively. The Catholic Church in Carchi province, where Bolıvar is located, remained

conservative and uninvolved in peasant organisation, while Evangelical Churches did

not encourage peasant political activity. Leftist political parties and peasant unions,

such as the Communist Party and FENOC, made little effort to organise peasants in

Bolıvar, and NGOs gave the province, as a whole, lower priority than regions with

higher poverty rates and larger indigenous populations (Breton, 2001). Without these

external organising agents, and with a widespread lack of interest in collective organ-

isation, the peasant population of Bolıvar had no history of sustained political organ-

isation. Moreover, when the municipal government made pioneering initiatives to

improve municipal service delivery, it not only failed to attract significant NGO

support, but also encountered deliberate attempts to undermine its efforts from central

government bureaucrats, particularly in the Ministry of Health, who presumably felt

threatened by the municipality’s incursions into their traditional jurisdiction. While

central government policy did not discourage municipal government reforms, central

government bureaucrats certainly did.

The Relative Autonomy of Municipal Governments from Local SocialForces

In municipalities where popular organisations have significant political power, it is

important to analyse the relative autonomy of municipal governments not only from

elite groups, but also from popular sector actors.15 Even when indigenous-peasant or

15 Research on the relative autonomy of nation states has traditionally focused on theautonomy of the state from elite actors (Miliband, 1969; Poulantzas, 1978; Evans,1995).



other popular sector groups have taken control of municipal power, municipal govern-

ments still require the autonomy to promote what they perceive as the long-term

interests of popular sectors as a whole rather than just their immediate, short-term

demands. This is particularly important in places where popular groups’ demands have

been shaped by decades of clientelist politics, and as a result generally focus on small-

scale public works projects that have relatively little developmental impact, such as the

volleyball courts that were prioritised by many rural communities in Cotacachi’s first

participatory budget in 2002. In other municipalities, such as Suscal in Canar province

and Villa Tunari and Chimore in the coca-growing region of the Chapare in Bolivia,

peasant federations gained total control of municipal governments, but as a result left

them little autonomy and weakened the lines of public accountability and transpar-

ency.16 In Cotacachi, the indigenous mayor was in fact able to maintain an important

degree of municipal autonomy from the local indigenous-peasant federation largely

because he had never belonged to the federation and also had a well-trained technical

staff that could resist popular political pressures on technical grounds. That autonomy

enabled the mayor to override rural community requests for volleyball courts and to

provide potable water and funding for teachers’ salaries instead, which the municipal

government perceived as more important needs. In Guamote, the leaders of local

indigenous-peasant organisations elected to the municipal council and appointed to

municipal administrative positions also struggled to develop autonomy from local

popular organisations, both in order to promote the long-term development of all

rural communities in the municipality and to resist pressures from the strongest peasant

organisations to direct services and public works projects to their member

communities.

Municipal Jurisdiction and the Scope for Democratisation

Municipal governments’ relative autonomy from elite groups, which were still strong in

Cotacachi and Bolıvar, was conditioned by the policy jurisdiction and scope of demo-

cratisation efforts. Municipal autonomy from elite intervention rested on municipal

non-interference in the local elites’ economic interests. In Cotacachi, highly unequal

relations of economic power between the local landowning elite and indigenous pea-

santry did not stand in the way of initiatives to democratise municipal decision-making

about education, health care or public works. However, when in 2001 the municipal

government tried to exercise its legal authority to regulate the use of irrigation water

and chemical pesticides and called for an environmental impact assessment of the

highly capitalised agro-export operations in the municipality, the unequal relations of

economic power became much more apparent. The large-scale landowners refused to

cooperate with municipal initiatives in these policy areas and local decision-making

about irrigation management and pesticide use remained beyond democratic control.

16 Comments on Suscal are based on personal interviews with the mayor, municipalofficials and leaders of the local indigenous-peasant federation (27 October 1999).On Villa Tunari and Chimore, see Coca (2002), Herbas (2002) and Kohl (1999:189–193).

John D. Cameron


Similarly, the local petty elite in Bolıvar made no efforts to block some aspects of

municipal democratisation, such as education and health care administration, but

intervened forcefully to undermine democratisation efforts when they felt that their

discretion over municipal budget allocations was threatened. The distribution of social

and economic power relations thus had more impact on those areas of municipal

jurisdiction in which class, ethnic and other interests collided – such as environmental

regulation or important budget decisions – than on other, less contentious issues.

Institutional Design and Municipal Democratisation

In Guamote, Cotacachi and Bolıvar, municipal leaders put in place new institutions to

promote citizen participation in local decision-making and better to coordinate local

development efforts. However, not all of those institutions functioned as they were

intended to. The critical question was whether the design of new institutions fit the

local social context and the distribution of socioeconomic power within which they

were put into practice. In Guamote, the municipal government created two new local

institutions to give community leaders a voice in municipal decision-making and to

coordinate local development initiatives. The first institution, the Indigenous and

Popular Parliament, was created to facilitate the participation of community leaders

in municipal planning. It was locally designed and, in the eyes of its members, func-

tioned relatively well. By contrast, the second institution, called the Local Development

Committee, failed completely to serve its intended purpose of bringing the twelve

different peasant federations in the municipality together as one decision-making

body to coordinate local development initiatives. The design for the Committee had

been imposed by well-meaning NGO staff who did not fully understand the tensions

between the local federations. The institution which they created required a level of

cooperation among the peasant federations that was unviable in the local context. As a

result, the institution was completely dysfunctional.

In Cotacachi, municipal leaders created formal mechanisms for citizen participation

in municipal budget allocation that drew from the model established in the munici-

pality of Porto Alegre, Brazil, but with important local variations. Most significantly,

municipal leaders recognised that although desirable from a social justice perspective,

to allocate municipal investment funds to neighbourhoods and rural communities on

the basis of their population size or their levels of unmet basic needs would have

generated a backlash against the budget process from the politically powerful town

centre. To move in the direction of a more equitable municipal resource distribution,

local leaders recognised the need to design an institution that would be tolerated by

town-centre residents. Although the budget process resulting from these calculations

was less redistributive than other possible arrangements, it had the undeniable advan-

tage of being accepted by local political actors who could have blocked its operation.17

In Bolıvar, municipal leaders created an institution called the Municipal Assembly

to bring together local residents on an annual basis to set the municipal agenda.

17 Baiocchi (2003: 215) also points to the flexible application of participatory budgetmethods in Brazil as an important factor in their success outside Porto Alegre.



However, the Assembly was never reconvened after its inaugural meeting in 1995,

largely because local political elites felt threatened by it and the local population did

not mobilise to defend it. A different design for the Assembly that did not threaten the

power of local elites so directly from the outset might have survived to generate a

culture of popular participation in municipal planning and to expand popular influence

over municipal governance.

The short history of Bolıvar’s Municipal Assembly as well as experiences of

Guamote’s Local Development Committee and Cotacachi’s participatory budget

clearly demonstrate that the design of institutions intended to promote local participa-

tion and development needs to reflect very careful consideration of the social settings

and distributions of socioeconomic power in which they are to function. Institutions

that operate well in one setting may not be able to function at all in other social

contexts. This is an important consideration given many governments’ and NGOs’

contemporary emphasis on the creation of participatory institutions as the primary

mechanism for promoting municipal democracy in Latin America.18

Political Strategies for Municipal Democratisation

Leadership strategies to make municipal governance more democratic have been dis-

cussed extensively elsewhere (Rosales, 1994; Campbell, 2003). Here I want to empha-

sise that within the context of specific patterns of local power relations in Guamote,

Cotacachi and Bolıvar, the most important role for municipal leaders was to forge

cross-class, inter-ethnic and town-countryside alliances to support municipal democra-

tisation. The opportunities to create alliances were partly structured by the distribution

of economic power and the class and ethnic identities of different social sectors in each

municipality. However, there was considerable leeway in all three cases for strategic

efforts to forge inter-ethnic and cross-class coalitions in support of municipal demo-

cratisation. For example, in Cotacachi, the mayor invested large amounts of energy and

resources into efforts to gain the support (or at least acquiescence) of local town-based

mestizo petty-bourgeoisie. By contrast, municipal democratisation in Bolıvar failed in

large part because the highly idealistic mayor refused to mollify the local town-based

petty elite and also failed to forge a mestizo-Afro Ecuadorian coalition supportive of

his democratisation efforts.

Does Municipal Democracy Benefit the Excluded?

In Guamote and Cotacachi, municipal democratisation represented important shifts in

class, ethnic and town-countryside power relations. The town-based, petit-bourgeois,

mestizo elites that had previously dominated local politics in the two municipalities

experienced sharp declines in their political power as the leaders of previously

marginalised rural indigenous-peasant groups were elected as mayors and municipal

18 For example, the Government of Peru passed national legislation in 2003 requiring allmunicipal governments to establish participatory budgeting procedures by October2004 (Grupo Propuesta Ciudadana, 2004: 14–15).

John D. Cameron


councillors and implemented policies to promote the interests of local indigenous-

peasant populations. In both municipalities, local indigenous residents identified

three significant changes brought about by the shifts in local political power: an end

to the class and ethnic discrimination against indigenous-peasant residents; improved

service delivery and increased numbers of public works projects in rural communities;

and increased influence in municipal decision-making for some sectors of the pre-

viously excluded population, particularly middle-aged, indigenous men with the eco-

nomic resources to live in their communities on a relatively permanent basis.

It bears emphasising that the democratisation of the two municipal governments did

not embody any substantial changes in power relations between genders, generations

or migrants and non-migrants. Although municipal democratisation did generate some

important benefits for rural women, youth and regular migrants (such as improved

municipal services in rural communities and better treatment by municipal officials),

the capacity of these groups to influence municipal decision-making did not increase

substantially in relation to the above-mentioned group of men. Moreover, the gains

that derived from municipal democratisation, even for the principal beneficiaries, were

more symbolic than material. Increased influence over municipal decision-making and

improvements in municipal services and public works in rural communities had not yet

translated into local economic development, the reduction of poverty or reduced out-

migration from rural communities.19 In the context of centuries of neglect and dis-

crimination, it may still be premature to expect such results. However, the material

impact of municipal democratisation was also constrained by other factors, such as the

small size of municipal budgets in relation to the unmet basic needs of local popula-

tions, the unequal distribution of land in Cotacachi and the poor quality of land in

Guamote and the marginalisation of indigenous peasants by broader national forces,

such as ethnic and class discrimination in regional markets and other levels of govern-

ment and national-level macroeconomic and agricultural policies that failed to support

small-scale agriculture (Grinspun, 2003; Martınez, 2003). The local benefits brought

about by municipal democratisation in Ecuador and the rest of Latin America thus

need to be evaluated against a broader national context that continues to be highly

exclusionary (Table 1).

Conclusion

As decentralisation initiatives and popular struggles for municipal power increase the

importance of municipal governments in Latin America, methodological questions

about how municipal democratisation can be most effectively analysed need to be

19 A comparison of data from Ecuador’s 1990 and 2001 census reports indicates amodest decline in poverty in Cotacachi from 84 per cent to 78 per cent and anincrease in poverty in Guamote from 89 per cent to 96 per cent. More alarming,between 1990 and 2001 extreme poverty in Guamote increased from 68 per cent to88 per cent of the population. No local-level data on migration is available but anecdotalevidence from both municipalities indicated a significant increase in out-migration,particularly after Ecuador’s 1999 financial crisis (ODEPLAN, 1999; SIISE, 2001).



Table

1.

The

Rel

ati

ve

Pow

erA

ppro

ach

toM

unic

ipal

Dem

ocr

ati

sati

on

Rel

ati

ve

pow

erappro

ach

and

Munic

ipali

ty

impact

on

loca

ldem

ocr

acy

Guam

ote

Cota

cach

iB

olıvar

Dis

trib

uti

on

of

pro

duct

ive

ass

ets

Egali

tari

an

–lo

cal

elit

edes

troyed

by

agra

rian

refo

rmH

ighly

uneq

ual

Rel

ati

vel

yeq

ual

Posi

tive

impact

Neg

ati

ve

but

not

pro

hib

itiv

eim

pact

Neu

tral

impact

Poli

tica

lorg

anis

ati

on

of

subord

inate

gro

ups

Pow

erfu

lin

dig

enous-

pea

sant

movem

ent

(spli

tin

totw

elve

feder

ati

ons)

Pow

erfu

lin

dig

enous-

pea

sant

movem

ent

No

stro

ng

pea

sant

org

anis

ati

ons

Posi

tive

impact

des

pit

ediv

isio

ns

Posi

tive

impact

Neg

ati

ve

impact

Soci

al

coali

tions

insu

pport

of

munic

ipal

dem

ocr

acy

Dem

ogra

phic

sm

ake

indig

enous-

mes

tizo

coali

tion

unnec

essa

ryE

vangel

ical

and

Cath

oli

cpea

sant

org

anis

ati

ons

cooper

ati

ve

Care

full

yco

nst

ruct

edco

ali

tion

bet

wee

nto

wn-

base

d,

mes

tizo

pet

it-

bourg

eois

ieand

rura

lin

dig

enous

pea

sants

No

soci

al

coali

tions

insu

pport

of

munic

ipal

dem

ocr

ati

sati

on

effo

rts

Posi

tive

impact

Posi

tive

impact

Neg

ati

ve

impact

Soci

al

div

isio

ns

Mes

tizo

elit

eunorg

anis

edand

poli

tica

lly

div

ided

No

all

iance

bet

wee

nlo

cal

agri

-busi

nes

sel

ite

and

mes

tizo

tow

ndw

elle

rs

Pea

sant

class

unorg

anis

edand

poli

tica

lly

div

ided

Posi

tive

impact

Posi

tive

impact

Neg

ati

ve

impact

Impact

of

glo

bal

forc

es[a

id,

stru

ctura

ladju

stm

ent

poli

cies

(SA

Ps)

]

Inte

rnati

onal

aid

pro

mote

dm

unic

ipal

dem

ocr

ati

sati

on

Inte

rnati

onal

aid

pro

mote

dm

unic

ipal

dem

ocr

ati

sati

on

Lack

of

inte

rnati

onal

aid

wea

ken

eddem

ocr

ati

sati

on

effo

rtSA

Ps

incr

ease

din

equali

tybut

moti

vate

dpea

sant

org

anis

ing

effo

rts

SA

Ps

incr

ease

din

equali

tybut

moti

vate

dpea

sant

org

anis

ing

effo

rts

SA

Ps

incr

ease

ineq

uali

tybut

do

not

moti

vate

org

anis

ati

on

Posi

tive

impact

on

dem

ocr

ati

sati

on

Posi

tive

impact

Neg

ati

ve

impact

John D. Cameron


Impact

of

nati

onal

forc

esSta

te,

Churc

hes

,N

GO

sand

som

epoli

tica

lpart

ies

pro

mote

pea

sant

org

anis

ati

on,

agra

rian

refo

rmand

munic

ipal

dem

ocr

ati

sati

on

NG

Os

and

som

epoli

tica

lpart

ies

pro

mote

pea

sant

org

anis

ati

on

and

munic

ipal

dem

ocr

ati

sati

on

Pauci

tyof

effo

rts

by

nati

onal

act

ors

toorg

anis

epea

sant

popula

tion

and

topro

mote

munic

ipal

dem

ocr

ati

sati

on

Posi

tive

impact

Posi

tive

impact

Neg

ati

ve

impact

Munic

ipal

gover

nm

ent

auto

nom

yfr

om

loca

lso

cial

forc

es

Som

eauto

nom

yfr

om

loca

lso

cial

forc

esIn

dig

enous

mayor

isem

bed

ded

inlo

cal

soci

ety

but

als

oauto

nom

ous

from

loca

lin

dig

enous-

pea

sant

org

anis

ati

on

Wea

kauto

nom

yfr

om

loca

lpet

tyel

ites

Posi

tive

impact

(lim

ited

)Posi

tive

impact

Neg

ati

ve

impact

Munic

ipal

juri

sdic

tion

over

class

and

oth

erfo

rms

of

confl

ict

Rel

ati

vel

yli

ttle

confl

ict,

but

munic

ipal

gover

nm

ent

pre

sides

over

ecolo

gic

all

ydif

ficu

ltagri

cult

ura

lse

ttin

g

Loca

lagri

cult

ura

lel

ite

refu

ses

toco

mply

wit

hm

unic

ipal

envir

onm

enta

lre

gula

tions

and

pro

per

tyta

xes

Loca

lel

ite

under

min

esef

fort

sto

crea

tepart

icip

ato

rydec

isio

n-m

akin

gin

stit

uti

ons

Neu

tral

impact

Neg

ati

ve

impact

Neg

ati

ve

impact

Inst

ituti

onal

des

ign

Indig

enous

and

Popula

rParl

iam

ent

islo

call

ydes

igned

and

funct

ions

effe

ctiv

ely

(posi

tive

impact

)

Loca

ldes

ign

for

part

icip

ato

ryin

stit

uti

ons

care

full

yco

nsi

der

edlo

cal

soci

al

conte

xt,

inst

ituti

ons

funct

ion

wel

l

Des

ign

for

part

icip

ato

ryin

stit

uti

ons

does

not

adeq

uate

lyco

nsi

der

loca

lso

cial

conte

xt,

inst

ituti

on

isunder

min

edby

loca

lel

ite

Des

ign

for

Loca

lD

evel

opm

ent

Com

mit

tee

isex

tern

all

yim

pose

d(n

egati

ve

impact

)

Posi

tive

impact

Neg

ati

ve

impact



Table

1.

(Continued)

Rel

ati

ve

pow

erappro

ach

and

Munic

ipali

ty

impact

on

loca

ldem

ocr

acy

Guam

ote

Cota

cach

iB

olıvar

Poli

tica

lst

rate

gie

sof

munic

ipal

off

icia

lsL

ong-t

erm

stru

ggle

for

munic

ipal

dem

ocr

acy

by

loca

lin

dig

enous-

pea

sant

movem

ent

Long-t

erm

stru

ggle

for

munic

ipal

dem

ocr

acy

by

loca

lin

dig

enous-

pea

sant

movem

ent

Indig

enous

mayor

forg

esde

fact

oall

iance

wit

hlo

cal

mes

tizo

s

No

his

tory

of

stru

ggle

for

munic

ipal

dem

ocr

acy

Top-d

ow

nef

fort

sby

mayor

todem

ocr

ati

sem

unic

ipal

gover

nance

Fail

ure

tofo

rge

soci

al

coali

tions

Posi

tive

impact

Posi

tive

impact

Neg

ati

ve

impact

Impact

of

munic

ipal

dem

ocr

ati

-sa

tion

on

the

excl

uded

Loca

lpoli

tica

lem

pow

erm

ent

for

som

e(e

.g.

male

pea

sants

)L

oca

lpoli

tica

lem

pow

erm

ent

for

som

e(e

.g.

male

pea

sants

)

Lit

tle

poli

tica

lem

pow

erm

ent

Som

eim

pro

ved

soci

al

serv

ices

and

infr

ast

ruct

ure

Som

eim

pro

ved

soci

al

serv

ices

and

infr

ast

ruct

ure

Som

eim

pro

ved

soci

al

serv

ices

and

infr

ast

ruct

ure

Lit

tle

econom

icim

pro

vem

ent

Lit

tle

econom

icim

pro

vem

ent

Lit

tle

econom

icim

pro

vem

ent

Posi

tive

impact

(lim

ited

)Posi

tive

impact

(lim

ited

)V

ery

lim

ited

impact

John D. Cameron


addressed much more carefully. The efforts to democratise municipal governments in

rural Ecuador examined here suggest that municipal democratisation cannot be under-

stood solely through the focus on the design of municipal institutions and leadership

strategies that prevails in contemporary research in the region. While these factors

proved to be important elements of the relative success and failure of municipal

democratisation efforts in rural Ecuador, they operated in the broader context of

historically structured relations of local social and economic power that shaped the

opportunities for contemporary actors to democratise their local governments.

This article proposes instead a relative power approach that emphasises the impli-

cations for municipal governance of local social and economic power relations and the

national and global forces that shape them. Among the factors highlighted by this

approach, the varied histories of agrarian change and external intervention to promote

popular sector organisation had particularly important impacts on the distributions of

local social and economic power and the possibilities for democratisation in each of the

three municipalities. The relative power approach also drew attention to the ways in

which the design of municipal institutions and leadership strategies both shaped and

were shaped by local level power relations. One of the most important roles of leaders

was to negotiate cross-class and inter-ethnic social coalitions to support democratisa-

tion efforts. Similarly, the success of institutions created to deepen popular participa-

tion in governance was partly conditioned by the extent to which their design reflected

local social power relations. The relative power approach also highlighted the impor-

tance of donor support to municipal governments not simply in order to increase their

capacity to deliver public works projects and municipal services, but also to bolster

their legitimacy in the eyes of local residents who might have opposed municipal

democratisation and to expand their relative autonomy from both local elite and

popular social forces.

Attention to the distribution of local socioeconomic power also helped to explain

the limited material benefits of municipal democratisation for traditionally excluded

social sectors. In the case of Cotacachi, the possible benefits of municipal democratisa-

tion were limited by the highly unequal distribution of agricultural land; in Guamote,

the poor quality of local land had facilitated a shift in power relations but severely

constrained opportunities for economic development. Moreover, even highly demo-

cratic municipal governments function in the broader context of regional and national

power relations that can seriously limit their ability to bring about benefits for the

excluded. Discrimination in regional markets and by other levels of government as well

as anti-peasant macroeconomic policies undermines the potential for municipal demo-

cratisation to improve the lives of Ecuador’s rural poor.

From a policy perspective, the promotion of municipal democracy in Latin America

requires more than just good leadership and participatory institutions, but also serious

efforts to confront the unequal balance of social and economic power that prevails in

many municipalities. However, if the benefits of democratisation are to extend beyond

symbolic gains, changes in power relations and the operation of municipal govern-

ments also need to be scaled-up to the national level. Municipal democracy is impor-

tant, but on its own cannot stop the tide of broader national and global forces that

contribute to poverty and out-migration and undermine local economic development.



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“Municipal Democratization in Rural Latin America: Methodological Insights from Ecuador”

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