The Bureaucratic Politics of Environmental Decentralisation Outcomes

Environmental decentralisation has become a central feature of contemporary governance reforms, premised on the expectation that devolving authority to subnational governments improves environmental performance by enhancing accountability, information use, and policy responsiveness. Yet decades of empirical research have produced sharply mixed results. While some studies associate decentralisation with improved environmental management, others document race-to-the-bottom dynamics, regulatory under-enforcement, and intensified cross-jurisdictional spillovers. This paper argues that an important factor missing from these debates is the politicisation of the bureaucracy, which conditions how decentralised authority is exercised and how coordination problems are managed across government tiers. The paper advances a political economy account of environmental decentralisation that places bureaucratic recruitment systems at the centre of coordination capacity. Decentralisation does not merely redistribute fiscal or regulatory authority; it also shifts control over bureaucratic appointments, often transferring discretion from central ministries to local political incumbents. I argue that higher levels of political control over bureaucratic recruitment—commonly manifested through patronage—exacerbate the vertical and horizontal coordination challenges of decentralisation by increasing the risks of local capture, weakening technical capacity, and undermining governments’ ability to make credible long-term commitments. Conversely, more meritocratic bureaucracies can mitigate these coordination failures by insulating administrators from local political pressures, strengthening professional expertise, and stabilising policy implementation across electoral cycles. To test these arguments, I assemble a new cross-national panel of 91 countries over 18 years (2005–2022), combining multiple international datasets to capture different dimensions of decentralisation, bureaucratic politicisation, and environmental performance. Environmental outcomes are measured using the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) and its core components—ecosystem vitality, environmental health, and climate change mitigation—allowing the analysis to move beyond emissions-only measures. Decentralisation is operationalised along three distinct dimensions: fiscal decentralisation, political decentralisation, and a novel measure of environmental policy decentralisation based on the share of environmental policy instruments adopted by subnational governments. Bureaucratic politicisation is measured using V-Dem's indicators of political versus merit-based recruitment in the state administration. Methodologically, the paper employs within-between random-effects models, complemented by hierarchical GMM estimators, to control for endogeneity and distinguish short-run changes from long-run structural differences across countries. This approach addresses a key limitation of existing studies by separating the immediate adjustment costs of decentralisation from its longer-term institutional effects. The findings show a consistent pattern: In the short run, increases in fiscal and political decentralisation are associated with declines in environmental performance, consistent with coordination failures and race-to-the-bottom dynamics. However, countries that are structurally more decentralised perform better environmentally in the long run, particularly in domains with diffused costs and benefits such as ecosystem protection. Crucially, bureaucratic politicisation plays a conditioning role: countries with more meritocratic bureaucracies achieve higher environmental performance overall and are better able to offset the short-term environmental costs of decentralisation, especially for ecosystem vitality and climate mitigation. By integrating insights from environmental governance, decentralisation theory, and bureaucratic politics, this paper stresses that decentralisation outcomes depend not only on the distribution of authority but also on the administrative institutions that implement it.