Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Löffler, Gundula Katharina

Titel

The Politics of State-Building in Rwanda: Three Essays on the Role of Decentralization and Local Taxation in Rebuilding a Post-Conflict State with a Centralist Vision

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Since the devastation of the 1994 genocide, the Government of Rwanda has engaged in substantial state-building measures to put the poor and conflict-ridden country on a trajectory towards peace and prosperity. In this context, decentralization of functional responsibilities and finances to lower-level governments has been pursued as a core public sector reforms. This dissertation studies the role of decentralization and local taxation on state-building in Rwanda by examining three different relationships: the relationship between decentralization reform and post-conflict governance; the interaction between central and local governments in local tax administration; and the nature of the state-taxpayer relationship in terms of the beliefs and attitudes driving people’s tax compliance. The nature of these relationships and the factors and dynamics underlying them provide some insights into how successful Rwanda has been at rebuilding the state after conflict. The research employs elements of ethnographic and case study approaches, drawing on a multitude of qualitative and quantitative data collected during nine months of field work between 2012 and 2014. The first paper examines the ways in which the Rwandan government has used decentralization to attenuate the potential for renewed conflict following the genocide. The research reveals that the incumbent regime has been using decentralization in various ways to facilitate the reconciliation process and prevent renewed conflict from flaring up. It has instituted a broad decentralization discourse and formal structure focusing on community empowerment, which signals to the other conflict parties its willingness to be inclusive and share power. At the same time, it has implemented a local government system subject to heavy-handed central control, expanding the reach of the central government even to the remotest hills of the country. The regime views substantial central control over local authorities as necessary to ensure enduring stability, while improving living conditions and generating greater popular trust in the regime. To the extent that communities perceive this control as intrusive, coercive or harmful however, such a strategy might also result in further alienation from the regime, increasing the potential for conflict. The second paper explores the question of why Rwanda’s local governments, despite swift development of administrative capacities for service delivery, have lagged in increasing local own revenue yields. The research finds that the underperformance of districts in revenue generation can be attributed to two distinct dynamics that complement and mutually reinforce each other: On the one hand, the central government, while officially encouraging districts to increase their own revenue yields, holds back its otherwise ample support to the districts, hindering them from tackling this task in a strategic and effective manner. This behavior could be explained by central government concern about increasing spending autonomy for districts with high local own revenue growth, which might weaken their ties to the center and steer their activities away from central government priorities. The districts, on the other hand, might perceive the task of own revenue collection as incommensurate with their self-image as benevolent providers of goods and services paid for by the central government, which weakens their motivation to increase their yields. The third paper studies the question of whether the strategy of the Rwandan government to increase tax compliance by trying to affect people’s understanding of taxation is yielding the expected results. The research finds that even though a considerable share of taxpayers refers to the idea of contractual taxation to explain their motivation to pay taxes, this does not appear to affect their tax compliance in the anticipated way. This implies that the government efforts to influence people’s attitudes and behavior towards taxation have so far not yielded the expected result. Instead, people appear to pay lip service to the government-sanctioned rationale for paying taxes, while their actual compliance behavior might be driven by other considerations, such as uncertainty and skepticism about the use of tax proceeds, concerns about the fairness, or a feeling of being coerced into compliance.