De-Governmentalizing Public Management: The Case of Platforms for Local Development in Cabo Verde

Abstract

This paper introduces and explains the process of de-governmentalization of public policy, by focusing on a specific case, the Platforms for Local Development in Cabo Verde. The argument is that inclusive and integrated collaborative governance (ICG) structures enhance the government’s ability to trigger endogenous development and prosperity for all, as they engender synergies, resources, and a collective commitment among the collaborative actors to deliver quality public services. Thus, government is not the sole public manager of public policy, but simply a partner, along with non-government actors, including civil society organizations, the private sector, and international organizations, in a formal processes of policymaking and service delivery. The paper relies on qualitative data collected through official reports by government and international organizations based in Cabo Verde, legislations, and interviews with local governance stakeholders.

1. Introduction

Governments’ ultimate role, whether democratically elected or not, is to govern. This entails drafting and “enforcing rules”, and delivering services for the well-being of their citizens. Governments’ ability, however, to carry out such endeavors, has been the central issue of debates and research on public policy and public management. How can governments be efficient and effective? In other words, how can governments make intelligent use of available resources to deliver public services with success? Authoritative governments seek to achieve that goal by mounting rigid and hierarchically top-down bureaucratic machines, with policy decisions flowing from a nucleus-centralized and powerful political structure to lower-level administrative bureaus. On the other hand, democratic governments, due to the polyarchic nature of power, are more predisposed to include market and civil society actors in the policy decisions and implementation processes. Therefore, their policy bureaucratic machines, to some extent, are more inclusive.

What type of government is more successful, with regard to efficiency and effectiveness? History abounds of failed democratic states, but also of successful authoritative states, as well as successful democratic states, and failed authoritative ones. These cases occur because the central concern of any state is its governance, or its “ability to make and enforce rules and to deliver services, regardless of whether [its] government is democratic or not” ([1], p. 3). Any government, whether democratic or autocratic, develops and implements a set of administrative practices to achieve efficiency and efficacy in public policy management. How to achieve this goal is, however, a matter of debate among policymakers and policy researchers. Building on collaborative governance approach, this chapter focuses on the concept de-governmentalization of policymaking and public management process, understood here as a formal transfer of government power or responsibility to non-government actors, including market and civil society organizations, aiming at achieving efficiency and efficacy in policymaking and implementation. The analysis focuses on a case study of de-governmentalization of public policymaking and management in Cabo Verde, dissecting a specific government program to promote sustainable development in the country: Platforms for Local Development (PDL) in Cabo Verde, a collaborative governance project implemented from 2017 through 2020. The main objective of the chapter is to examine how this project contributed, first to the de-governmentalization process, and then, how, and the extent to which it led to local policy efficiency and efficacy. The analysis relies on qualitative data collected through official reports on the PDL by the government and international organizations based in Cabo Verde, legislations, and interviews with local governance stakeholders.

The chapter is organized into six sections. After this introduction, the second section presents the theoretical framework of de-governmentalization of public policies in the context of collaborative governance. Section 3 is about the homeostasis of Cabo Verde Public administration, describing its emergence and development over the years up to the present days. Section 4 approaches the power decentralization and de-governmentalization of public policies in Cabo Verde, by focusing on a specific case of collaborative governance project—the PDL. Part five explores the new trend of power decentralization and de-governmentalization in Cabo Verde. The last section concludes the chapter and makes recommendations.

2. De-governmentalization in collaborative governance process

In public policy process, collaborative governance refers to engagement of “public and private stakeholders” in a “consensus-oriented decision-making” process ([2], p. 1) of public policymaking and public service delivery. Market and civil society actors engage in “collective forums” with public agencies to elaborate and implement policies for the matter of policy inclusiveness [3], efficiency, and efficacy [4, 5]. As they work together, the diverse array of actors builds “synergistic relationships” [6] to foster their constituencies’ inclusivity and ownership, mutual “trust,” “commitment,” “understanding,” and their “shared motivation” [7], forming an institutional linking social capital, in collective problem-solving. This network of relationship of actors bounded together through collaborative institutional linkages, adds value to the public policymaking and implementation process [8].

The idea of collaborative governance is not new, however. States have always used some sort of human “private” organizations, either coercively or through institutionalized partnerships, to govern. Colonial states, for instance, collaborated with the church and traders to implement slavery trade policies across colonies or implemented other exclusive economic, racial, religious, and other sorts of policies. In the years following WW II, collaborative governance reemerged with big and centralized governments that cooperated with charity institutions and others to implement their expanding social welfare policies. However, a new concept of collaborative governance reemerged in the 1980s and 1990s, with the neoliberal rise to power in England and the United States of America, initiating the collapse of the socialist “big government” that had been reigning since the end of World War II. The central theme of the neoliberal credo was, and continues to be the “minimalist state”, famously characterized by its retrenchment on social policies. Such a move was not peaceful, however, as the announced welfare state retrenchment, for instance in England and the USA [9], ignited social unrests and “class” struggle in these two countries. Margaret Thatcher and Ronal Reagan in England and the USA, respectively, defended that the central issue of governance now is how to give the government back to the people, as they began a privatization campaign of public services, either to profit business and to charitable institutions.

In the aftermath of the aforementioned political changes, new ideas and practices of public administration resembling market logic and efficiency started being tried, as attempts to de-governmentalize the business of public policies, as a strategy to seek government efficiency and efficacy in the public service delivery. Neoliberal idealists saw the “big government” inherited from the socialist regimes as obstruction of voluntary and private initiatives. Thus, the term “governmentalization” refers to the government power concentration and widespread control over all the spheres of life. Government is the “liberty-violator but also a benefactor, permission-granter, employer, landlord, customer, creditor, educator, transporter, access-granter, grant-maker, prestige conferrer, agenda-setter, organizer, law-enforcer, prison-keeper, record-keeper, librarian, museum curator, park ranger, and owner of myriad massive properties and resources within the polity” ([10], p. 1). The concept of de-governmentalization of policy management refers exactly to the opposite of the government’s encompassing control over political, economic, cultural, and social affairs. It is about “giving the government back to the people”, a quote so much often cited by American political leaders.

De-governmentalization refers to both processes of collaborative political decision and the policy implementation. Policy decision process, though oriented by governments, is not solely, nor thoroughly controlled by them. Market and civil society actors engage with governments in genuine and institutionalized forums of policy agenda-setting and formulation processes. With regard to policy implementation, de-governmentalization of public management focuses on the institutional designs that allow non-government actors to produce and deliver public services, whether funded or not by public budget. De-governmentalization, therefore, is about government opening to the inclusion of non-government actors—private and civil society actors, in the policymaking and implementation processes, giving space for more governance and less government [11].

One theory of public administration that emerged and was widely spread to give corpse to the neoliberal creed is the New Public Management (NPM). The “big” socialists government, which was struggling with low economic growth in the late seventies due to cyclical phenomenon of fuel crises, had been too centralized, bureaucratic, “overloaded”, and rather ineffective [11]. To break up with this administrative status quo, the NPM was conceived on the belief that the practices, methods, and principles used in private sector management are superior and more efficient to those used in public sector management [12, 13, 14]. Rather than seeking to annihilate government’s role in the policymaking and implementation process, NPM enhances its ability to reach efficiency and efficacy. This is because managers are granted freedom to manage and not simply following narrowing political and administrative orientations on what to do or not to do. “Politicians exist to set goals but then get out of the way [and then] come back in when it comes to the final judgment of the performance of managers against the goals that have been set” ([8], p. 46). The inclusion of market and civil society actors adds expertise, innovation, and resources to policy administrative bodies which government alone may not be capable to provide.

NPM spread quickly with the waves of democratization in the 1990s, gained adherence across the Western countries, and then exported to the rest of the world through the mechanism of structural adjustments programs of the IMF and the WB in the developing countries. The new public management philosophy, oriented to performance rather than control, and the inclusion of market and civil society actors in policymaking and implementation processes soon became widely acknowledged as intrinsic elements of democratic consolidation. The same could be said in the global south countries, where non-state actors, though not often engaged through formal collaborative structures with governments, carry important work in complementing and supplementing government insufficiency and/or absence of service delivery. NPM’s advocators become over the years, not only neoliberal parties and governments, but also, actors of all political spectrum, including socialist governments [8, 12, 15].

Despite its success in de-governmentalizing public policy by employing market principles on public management for the concern of efficiency of policy delivery, NPM became also an object of waves of criticisms. Major criticisms focus on its over-proximity and submission to the logic of market and private business utilitarianism, due to its excessive concern with efficiency. Stoker [8] argues that “governing is not the same as shopping or more broadly buying and selling goods in a market economy” (p. 46). He proposes instead the Public Value Management (PVM) paradigm of public administration, which draws from the concept of network governance to advocate for the involvement of all relevant stakeholders in decision-making and policy implementation processes [8]. The major contribution this paradigm introduces is the “net benefit” the actions of public managers generate to the larger society. Rather than the “profit” logic of NPM, PVM stresses the society’s overall benefits gained with public policymaking process and implementation. It is believed that when all stakeholders in a political community engage in the governance structure, generating a social capital stock in the form of “trust,” “commitment,” “understanding,” and “shared motivation” [7], which impacts positively the policy outcomes [8]. The next section examines one case of de-governmentalization of public policies, inspiring in the paradigm of PVM.

3. The homeostasis of Cabo Verde PA

Cabo Verde is a volcanic archipelago comprising ten islands and eight islets located around 550 kilometers off the coast of Senegal on the northwestern African coast. It has a population of about 0.5 million people (INE-Census 2021), spread across nine inhabited islands. Despite covering 4033 km², only 10% of the land is arable and much remains undeveloped owing to rainfall constraints. After its discovery in 1420s by Chinese travelers [16] and then its claim by the Portuguese expansionists in 1460s, Cabo Verde, probably named after its green landscape encountered by Portuguese settlers), soon became a reference and a mandatory stopover during the transatlantic slavery trade. The colonial centralized and rigid administrative machinery implemented until the independence in 1975 would mold the country’s administrative ethos up to the present day. Despite the innumerous reforms implemented since the independence, some radicals, but others with mere incremental and/or aesthetical touches, public management in Cabo Verde faces the dilemma of leaving behind the burdens of its colonial past, while attempting modernizing practices. PA still conserves vestiges of its colonial past with regard to its centralization, extreme politicization, and political patronage. However, it also embraces modern practices like digital services, where any citizen, whether living in Cabo Verde or abroad, can request for a public service like a birth certificate and receive it instantaneously from the comfort of his couch.

Cabo Verde’s successful development path has in fact been largely attributed to its “good administration” erected and initiated in the colonial years, whose vestiges endure up to the present days. Cabo Verde’s geostrategic localization in the northern Atlantic Sea and its importance for the slavery and transatlantic trades, required an efficient PA, with “capable human resources [17] to design policies and deliver services to respond to slavery trade market demands. The colonialist developed in fact a “training hub” of public servants in Cabo Verde, who would be deployed to other colonies across Africa.

After its independence in 1975, Cabo Verde initiated an “endogenous” good governance [18] process rooted on mass democracy and a moral compromise of the new leaders with the people, swearing to make the country economically and viable despite the lack of resources. The newly independent administrative machinery becomes now a “tool”, not to serve the thirst of the Kings and colonialist for the “transfer” of growth dividend to the metropole [19], but to produce goods to satisfy the country and its population’s own needs. Therefore, the highly hierarchized and exclusive PA and bureaucracy inherited was transformed into a more inclusive machinery to serve the national interests. Nevertheless, despite the change in the policy goals, its design and administration were still centralized, as the single ruling party becomes the sole political force that “leads the society and the State” (Constitution, 1980). The implanted socialist and planned economy was the major challenges for a democratic and genuine collaborative governance. However, “despite its socialist rhetoric” the ruling party PAIGC was in fact “pragmatic in policy”, as it opened to political and economic liberalism, and to international policy ([18], p. 136). Such pragmatism was even verified through the collaborative practices of community hearings and the widespread use of “civic associations” to implement small-scale policies across the country [20]. The single-party regime pragmatism on policymaking and implementation, rather than ideological pragmatism, and its sensitiveness to the domestic and international changing conditions ([21], p. 158), convinced the PAICV leaders to rapidly abandon the one-party state and called for legislative elections for January 1991 and a presidential election for February in the same year ([18], p. 136). These embryonic collaborative practices would grow, over the years, into a more institutionalized collaborative governance in Cabo Verde in 1990s and forward.

Cabo Verde’s transition to democracy in 1991 inaugurated a new approach to policymaking and public management processes. Its opening to market economy, and the imposition of structural adjustment by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, reframed the institutional and economic practices, reducing the State’s intervention in the economic planning and social development inherited from the single-party regime. It is against this backdrop that the Cabo Verdean public administration was reoriented to the “panorama of values and principles for NPM”, in seeking to improve efficiency, results, performance, and control of expenses ([22], p. 87). This new trend of PA was pursued along with the decentralization process from central to local government structures.

At the central level, the new constitution approved in 1992 formally included non-state actors in the policy process, as it rules in favor of the engagement of civic organizations, trade unions, and business associations in formal forums of social concertation and other policy platforms. The government adopted a package of legislative measures and a program for the emergence of civil society organizations, and a framework of public/private partnerships for the management of some economic and social welfare services like education, health, environment, culture, among others ([17], p. 35). Trade unions, for instance, are granted the rights to participate in social consultation bodies, in the definition of the policy of social security institutions and other institutions aimed at protecting and defending the interests of workers, and to draft labor legislation (Constitution 1992, Art. 66). The wave of privatization of State-Owned Enterprises inaugurated the transition from a socialist centrally planned economy into a capitalist and market economy in Cabo Verde, in force until the present days. Major companies in the sector of electricity, telecommunications, and banking were privatized. Civil society organizations became agents of market bargaining as they were being contracted as partners with the government to implement policies [23]. The digitalization process of PA initiated in the 2000s has been an important “opening mechanism” for the de-governmentalization, generating therefore values to the users.

4. The local government de-governmentalization process in Cabo Verde: the case of Platform of Local Development

The first local government elections in Cabo Verde were held in 1991, and it became the turning point for the democratic policy decentralization, as policy administration would become more territorially localized, directly managed by local elected officials. The decentralization of policy implementation in the post-independence period resembled to a certain extent, the hierarchical and unidimensional line of the colonial period, but with the single ruling party dictating policies now. The government delegations instituted in the islands were a vehicle of the single-party regime control of policy implementation across the dispersed territories. Local policy formulation initiatives emerged with the elections of local councils from 1991 onwards. However, to what extent these new governments are free, and have the capacity to formulate and implement their own policies? Alternatively, are they simply mere extensions of the central power?

It is undoubtedly true that central power decentralization to local government structures has been an important step toward de-governmentalization. However, policy power transfer to local government levels in Cabo Verde is often restricted to management roles, despite their financial and planning independence. Local council is somehow perceived as bureaucratic, lacking “intra-organizational management and transversal focus”, focusing almost exclusively “on the implementation of policies and not on products or results”, and “organizationally distant” from policymakers ([22], p. 101). Power and policy decentralization from the central government to local government structures is still governmentalization by other means, as local public officials, who are linked and accountable to the government and their supporting parties, while keeping the policy process distant from local stakeholders. The implementation of PLD aimed to change this policymaking status quo.

In 2017, the newly elected government in 2016, supported by the same party that had had a landslide victory in both legislative and municipal elections (Movement for Democracy- MPD), introduced an innovative approach to promote local governance in Cabo Verde, as part of its strategy to achieve inclusive and sustainable development goals (SDGs). This new governance approach, named Platform for Local Development (PLD), was implemented across 20 out of the 22 municipalities with technical assistance of UNDP and financed by the Luxembourg Development Cooperation Agency. Despite the focus is the de-governmentalisation at the municipality level (council), PDL is also de-governmentalization at the central level, as it increases councils’ capacity to trigger their own policies, rather than being mere implementers of central government policies. The PDL was conceived to be an institutional breakthrough of policy democratization at the local levels by engaging the residents in the councils’ policy and project planning.

The PDL’s focuses on the policy decentralization from the councils, as it takes an “all-of society approach” to governance, engaging all the key municipal stakeholders in the local policymaking and implementation processes. These stakeholders include local private businesses, decentralized government services, community associations, professional associations, civil society organizations (CSOs), international organizations, and the councils, which lead organizations of the PDL operationalization, crystalized the Municipal Strategic Plan for Sustainable Development (PEMDS). The PDL project was financed almost in its entirety by the Luxembourg Cooperation Development, in the ambit of “Decentralization fund”, and other smaller foreign partners mobilized the councils themselves (Figure 1). The UNDP office in Cabo Verde led and coordinated all the implementation process of the PLD in close articulation with the government, through the Municipal Coordination Unit. PLD is therefore a local policy forum where local stakeholders and communities raise and bring issues to the fore, as well as discuss solutions. All these interlinkages make PDL an “ecosystem for Local Development” as the network created favors the planning and implementation process of policies, harnessing on the resources and expertise of the wide variety of stakeholders involved. The council still holds greater control over the policy process, the novelty of the PDL is that all voices count, as long as the needs of the communities are the major criteria for policy choices.

Figure 1.

Visual repesentation of PDL. Source: Ref. [3].

PDL is then a true attempt to de-governmentalize local policymaking, including the agenda setting, formulation, and implementation of projects (Look at Box 1 for a picture of how actors work together). Local companies, for example, are being incentivized and given contracts to implement projects, despite accusations of political favoritism and other criticism of corruption. Actors like community association participated in the hearing meetings with Mayors and councilors to give their opinions about what needs to be done in their communities. Their concerns are then included in the “Plano de Atividades e Orçamento”, which should contribute to the implementation of the Municipal Strategic Plan for Sustainable Development (PEMDS). Local associations and business may get contracted to carry projects targeted specifically to tackle the issues that come out during the hearing sessions.

Boa Vista is one of the nine inhabited Cabo Verdean islands, located at the north-eastern side of the archipelago. It is also one the most tourist island along with Sal. Therefore, developing business activities related with tourism is one of the main focuses of the Boa Vista Council.; The council has taken a collaborative governance approach to developing entrepreneurship. The council, with the support of the Municipal Financing Fund, created an Entrepreneurship Office, called the Income Generating Activities Financing Fund - FAAGER, with the aim of facilitating young people’s access to rapid financing mechanisms to develop their business. This office emerged with the growing tourism activity on the island since the opening of the international airport in 2007. In this sense, the municipality identified not only an investment opportunity, but also an opportunity to create institutional mechanism to support young people and sectors of the population that were excluded from the economic circuit or in conditions of underemployment. Therefore, in partnership with local associations, banks, and Pro-Empresa, the council created FAAGER, a collaborative and specialized office to promote private business development on the island. FAAGER organizes training sessions aimed at project promoters, particularly in the areas of preparation, monitoring and evaluation, entrepreneurship, and small business management. Nevertheless, financing requests are made directly to banks, who have all the liberty to carry out their own assessment of the projects submitted. The City Council monitors all the FAAGER activities, including income-generating activities generated by their supported projects. In other words, this practice is not limited to providing financing, but monitors the monthly development of activities, taking into account the impact they have on the promoters’ individual or collective income. Throughout the year the office develops a series of activities in partnership with Highschool of da Boa Vista, local associations and Pro-Empresa (a State-Owned Enterprise with the mission to support private business initiatives), and other stakeholders on a genuine and continuous dialogue.; According to a report named “Catálogo de Boas Práticas de Desenvolvimento Local em Cabo Verde” by 2020, there were 37 direct beneficiaries of the FAAGER activities, 35 of whom are individuals and two small companies (a poultry farm and an electricity company). Among the beneficiaries are students from Escola Secundária da Boa Vista, young people who wanted to expand or have their own business, thus accessing the job market, women heads of families, the Boa Vista City Council itself, and one local bank agency that is partner of the project.; By promoting and supporting local employment initiatives and encouraging self-employment, FAAGER contributed to the promotion of the economic and social integration of unemployed people, at the same time revitalizing various sectors of the economy, showing how collaborative local governance solution can untangle barriers and boost local development. In this sense, PDL is giving its added-value contribution.; Source: Guide of Good Practices of Local Governance (XXXXX).

Box 1.

The local partners engagement on entrepreneurship promotion in Boa Vista Island.

For example, the design and implementation of one project by the Council of Mosteiros, entitled: “Integrated Project to Promote Socioeconomic Resilience of Vulnerable Families in Mosteiros”, all conception and implementation process is described as follow:

The preparation of the project involved the participation of technical staff from the City Council and the Mosteiros PLD. These staff obtained inputs from direct beneficiaries, namely directors of the Mosteiros Fishing Operators Association (AOPM), representatives of community associations and, during the execution of the last tranche, members of the Local Opinion Councils, and consultative bodies of the Municipal Council of Mosteiros (Fundo de Descentralização, w/d)

All actors are engaged in mainstreaming the SDGs across all policies or projects developed and implemented in the municipalities. Reports indicate that implementation of PLD from 2017 to 2020 contributes enormously to the country “national and local capacities for the mobilization, coordination and efficient management of partnerships and funding for development, including south-south, triangular, and decentralized cooperation”¹. The PLD outcomes are observed across four major fields:

Institutional capacity strengthening and ownership: PLD improved the capacities of the municipalities to mobilize the resources of their engaging partners in their development process. The Municipal Strategic Plan for Sustainable Development provides the municipalities a sense of autonomy and ownership and a guide to trigger their own development path, rather than being mere administrative agents of central government ministries.

Social and economic welfare: The PDL implementation is very much performance-oriented, focused on practical outcomes on social and economic development of the municipalities. The “impact projects” financed and implemented during the execution of the PLD benefited directly more than 10,000 people with jobs, creation of generating income activities, training, and capacity development initiatives.

Policy governance: The inclusiveness of policy process introduced in the PLD provides not only transparency but also more accountability to all the engaging partners. Actors understand how the process works, and they are expected to accomplish the process to achieve the desired policy outcomes.

Social capital: The network created with the interlinkage among the actors engaged with the local governments in the policy process increases the level of trust among them, which keep them together in search for the solutions for the sustainable development of their.

5. Shortcomings and the new decision for the social concertation projects

The PDL experience during the 4 years of its implementation, despite its contribution to governance indicators across the 20 municipalities where they were implemented, still faces challenges. The first challenge to overcome is the local policymaking path-dependence itself. Local councils enjoy the democratic and institutional legitimacy to make and implement policies. Local governments are designed to “be mayor-centered”, as he is the only one “who decides which personal competences might be delegated to other executive board members” ([25], p. 869). This practice has become a governance habitus, since the enactment of Statutes of Municipalities in 1995. The councils themselves, individually or through the associative body, the National Association of Municipalities of Cabo Verde, often claim more power and resource decentralization from the central government. Nevertheless, they are extremely reluctant to decentralize their own power and resource to other local governance structures. As the lead technical advisor of PDL in Cabo Verde, Mr. Cristino Pedraza argues that changing “the way of working” and the “mindsets takes time”.²

The second challenge is the technical unpreparedness of local associations to engage qualitatively in the policy and project-making and implementation processes. These organizations, in general, lack financial and human resources, and the technical capabilities that allow them to intervene substantively and with vigor. Their participation is often restricted to the hearing committees, where their leaders voice their communities’ concern and agreed on the councils’ agenda, but they lack the argumentative and the bargaining capacity to advocate firmly for their own issues unto the agenda.

A third challenge is overcoming the politicization and political exploitation of community and other civic associations. Leaders of these organizations are often co-opted or conditioned by the ruling parties, limiting therefore their capacities to freely and genuinely engage in the collaborative governance.

The fourth one is the challenge of institutionalizing PDL, to avoid their use at the discretion of the mayors. Despite the technical tools made available to the municipalities throughout the PDL activities, their success depends on the leadership of the councils, who may decide to continue or not with an open process of dialogue with the actors in the territory. As the PDL lacks an independent governance structure, all the operations are monopolized and controlled by the council, and the mayor himself. As the lead technical coordinator affirms, “continuity always depends on the degree of maturity that a council has to continue with an open space” of dialogue with private sector and civic organizations, and the “logic of good governance” (idem), which is behind the platforms.

6. Lessons from PDL to strengthen de-governmentalization in Cabo Verde

The policy de-governmentalization process with PDL initiated in 2017 through 2020 set the ground for some key reforms of public management in Cabo Verde, both at the national and local levels. In June 2022, the government approved the National Decentralization Strategy (Resolution n° 73/2022, 30 June 2022), with focus on two main aspects: central administrative decentralization and the creation of Municipal Social Concertation.

The administrative decentralization foresees the transfer of competencies of policy implementation to local councils, private business, and civil society organizations, creating therefore a “third-party government” structure [26] as the government political strategy to improve policy efficiency and efficacy at reduced costs. That is because these local agents are closer to the population, and therefore, they know much better their needs and the ways to address them.

On the other hand, the “Municipal Social Concertation” resembles the PDL in many aspects. It is a governance institutional structure that brings together the “multiplicity of actors” and “their cultural diversity, their interests, and priorities”. The entity is a space for “a permanent dialogue between civil society structures and subnational authorities as a necessary condition for building a broad consensus on the trajectory of municipal development” (Resolution n° 73/2022, 30 June 2022). “Municipal Social Concertation” allows for a bottom-up governance, enabling the resolution of conflicts through dialogue and the construction of consensus around policy municipal policy issues.

Along with the National Decentralization Strategy, the government also adopted the National Strategy for Regional and Local Development (Resolution n° 87/2022). The main goal of this strategy is to combat inter- and intra-regional economic asymmetries, creating equitable development opportunities across all the regions, islands, and municipalities. To accomplish this overarching goal, the resolution foresees the creation of two subnational-level public entities, regional development agencies, and municipal and inter-municipal technical offices for local development.

The Regional Development Agency shall be installed across different administrative (to be defined according to government’s own administrative criteria, knowing that the regionalization bill in Cabo Verde has been kept in the drawer since it was rejected in the parliament in 2017). The agency is an independent body, but publicly funded, with the main function of promoting economic development at regional levels, in coordination with central government and local/regional entities.

The municipal and inter-municipal technical offices for local development, on the other hand, are more of the initiative of the local governments (councils) and their representative bodies. Nevertheless, with the support of central government. These offices should be responsible for developing, at municipal and inter-municipal level, policies for business promotion, employment and attraction of new investments, as well as licensing and local business, commercial, and tourist promotion. While regional development agencies are broader, and more central government directed, municipal, and inter-municipal offices are bottom-up created and operationalized by the partner municipalities. Figure 2 below illustrates how these two entities are placed within the policy decentralization flow from the central government to regional, municipal, and civil society entities.

Figure 2.

Flowchart of policy transfer within the ambit of decentralization. Source: (copied and adapted from the Resolution n° 73/2022, 30 June de 2022, p. 1564).

The figure demonstrates clearly that government public management decentralization is a tout court top-down process. The central government delegates administrative competencies (with resources) either to municipal governments or to civil society organization (including business) to execute policies. The municipal governments can also delegate competencies to civil society organizations. The red arrows show that both central and local government can delegate policy implementation powers to regional administrative bodies when they are set up. These bodies are also expected to collaborate with civil society organizations in the policy implementations. The green rectangles and arrows were added to the original diagram from the National Strategy of Decentralization, to include two public bodies foreseen in the document: the regional development agencies and the municipal social concertation. The former like the regional administrative bodies are directly under the tutelage of central government, even though they are depicted as independent. The municipal social concertation bodies shall function very much like the PDL. It is a policy dialogue forum where issues are addressed and consensus built at the municipal level, but with no implementation competencies.

The collaborative governance embedded in the government decentralization process sought by the government is based on the value of linking social capital (XXXX) to promote policy efficiency and efficacy. Nevertheless, the de-governmentalization through the decentralization process, focused primarily on the territorialization of public management, may not be enough to guarantee policy efficiency and effectiveness, if the territorial governance structures are not fully and meaningfully engaged in the policymaking process they are required to implement.

7. Conclusion

In July 2025, Cabo Verde will celebrate its 50th anniversary as an independent state. As a young and archipelagic state, added to its limited natural and financial resources, Cabo Verde has over the years, faced the challenge of designing and implementing a public administration machine that caters for the needs and interests of all segments of population across the territory. Power and administrative centralization in the capital city in Praia, has been and continues to be criticised by local political elites in other islands, as the key factor for the country’s development asymmetry. Movements of political regionalization of the islands carried out intense public campaigns between 2010 and 2017, to advocate for the state’s administrative reform and power decentralization. They see power decentralization as the way to increase local governance and the harmonious development across all the islands. As the political regionalization failed to be implemented, other governance attempts are tried. The PLD described in this chapter provides a clear example of that attempt. As a local governance ecosystem, PDL caters for an inclusive policymaking process, as the PA blueprint to promote economic and social developments of communities. The inclusive entrepreneurship project design and implementation in Boa Vista highlighted in Box 1 provides a clear example of how the PDL ecosystem works in practice. Local governments, the Town Councils, “trigger” the collaborative governance process as they are “likely to have larger potential to contribute to system’s innovation” ([27], pp. 1734-1735). They engage local, national, and even international stakeholders as partners and vehicles for resource mobilization for their policy or project implementation. The potential success of PDL to deliver public services is widely recognized by the “Decentralization Fund” established in 2019, and sponsored by the Luxembourg Development Cooperation Agency. The fund just announced a new financial package to support the refinement and the continuation of local governance program in Governo de Cabo Verde [28].