Content area
Full text
This paper explores why Afghanistan's centralized planning and budgeting policies, despite consistent failure to improve local participation and allocative efficiency, remained stable. Based on policy feedback theory, there are two explanations. First, policy actors, given their interests, often tend to keep the status quo unchanged; and second, policymaking processes play a facilitative role for policy actors. This paper explains how centralized policymaking processes enable policy actors to bypass specific constraints of institutional environment such as agenda setting, principalagent dynamics, information symmetry, and credible commitment to keep certain policies unchanged. With the recent collapse of Afghan state, the Taliban would most likely continue the centralized planning and budgeting policies given their past governance approach and their recent performance.
Keywords policy stability, lock-in effect, political economy, centralized policy process, Afghanistan
Introduction
Afghanistan's centralized planning and budgeting policies, during the last twenty years of US state building, did consistently fail to improve local participation and allocative efficiency. These centralized policies did not facilitate meaningful local participation in the planning and budgeting processes; thus, only a small percentage of annual budget reflects local preferences and needs. The data on the percentage of locally proposed projects in annual budgets show a declining trend: 33.5% in 2016-17, 11% in 2017-18, and 14.2% in 2018-2019 (Afghanistan's National Budgets). Instead, the annual budgets mostly reflected the Afghan central government's tactical use of public funds to purchase political capital (Qadam Shah 2021). Despite such failure, efforts to decentralize planning and budgeting processes to improve local participation and allocative efficiency were not successful in Afghanistan; thus, leading to the stability of the status quo, undermining the capacity of local administrations to provide public goods, and ultimately wasting huge amounts of international funding to reform planning and budgeting processes. This paper explains why these policies, despite their disappointing outcomes, remained stable in Afghanistan. Such a centralized planning and budgeting regimes undermined the very essence of governance: providing effective and efficient public goods and enhancing political legitimacy.
In doing so, this paper relies on the lock-in effect mechanism of policy feedback theory, which suggests policies, once enacted, would shape, and constrain the political behaviour and attitudes of a range of actors that in turn would affect future policymaking and policy alternatives (Patashnik 2008; Mettler and SoRelle...