LAUSR

Resumen En los contextos post-descentralizacion, las relaciones intergubernamentales (RIGs) central-locales adquieren gran relevancia para comprender los procesos de asignacion territorial de recursos publicos. La elevada autonomia local en la Provincia de Cordoba, Argentina, hace de esta un caso apropiado para examinar la complejidad de factores involucrados en la distribucion de recursos a municipios y, de este modo, generar aproximaciones heuristicas sobre estos procesos a nivel regional. Este estudio (a) da cuenta de la coexistencia de dos subsistemas de RIGs, a traves de los cuales los gobiernos locales procuran acceder a recursos publicos de decision discrecional, uno conformado por redes politicas formales y otro por una diversidad de redes politicas informales; (b) se observa un efecto sistematico de ambos tipos de redes sobre las chances de acceso de los gobiernos locales a recursos de decision discrecional del gobierno provincial; (c) se advierte que los gobiernos locales adoptan una estrategia combinada de vinculacion a ambos tipos de redes, priorizando el mecanismo de la cohesion en las redes formales y la intermediacion en las redes informales. Abstract In the post-decentralization context, the central-local intergovernmental relationships (IGRs) have acquired great relevance for understanding the process of distributing public resources. High local autonomy in the province of Cordoba, Argentina, makes it an appropriate case for examining the complexity of factors involved in the distribution of resources from provincial government to local government and, in this way, for developing a heuristic approximation of those processes at the regional level. In this article we (a) point out the coexistence of two IGR subsystems by which the local government tries to access public resources that are subject to discretion of the provincial government—one of which is formed by formal political networks and the other by a diversity of informal political networks—(b) find a systematic effect of the two networks on the likelihood of the local government getting the resources from the provincial government; and (c) report that the local governments implement a combined strategy that joins both networks, giving priority to the mechanism of cohesion in the formal networks and to the mechanism of intermediation in the informal networks.