This dissertation examines the process of transition to democratic governance in developing nations. In particular, it explores the role of civil society and of the progressive Catholic Church as a significant part of it in the democratization process at a sub-national level. The regional-temporal focus of this study is southern Mexico from the 1970s to the present, more specifically the predominantly indigenous state of Oaxaca. This dissertation fills a gap in the literature on the application of a concept, that of civil society, that arose in the context of the modernizing West to the democratization process of a Latin American and largely indigenous society. The choice of Oaxaca as an area for study allows for two main perspectives of analysis: first, it highlights the differences in state-society relationships that take place at a sub-national as compared to a national level, and the types of regimes resulting from these differences. Second, it emphasizes the way in which the highly indigenous character of Oaxaca's population shapes the nature and goals of this state's civil society. The central point of this dissertation is that civil society has been a significant factor in inducing democratization in Oaxaca by transforming the state-society relationship from co-optation to contestation, as well as in conveying the culturally determined political demands of the indigenous peoples to liberal political institutions. The success of civil society on this endeavor, however, depends not only on the composition of civil society itself but also on the complex array of rights, leaders, political opportunity for reform, and cultural environment in which civil society develops. More specifically, the processes of democratization and de-democratization in Oaxaca depend in large measure on the ways in which national and sub-national actors shape the balance between cooperative, confrontational, and radical forms of civil society. Where political opportunities for reform allow confrontational forces to gain great capacity to challenge categorical inequalities, the processes of democratization have greater chances of succeeding. Where national and sub-national elites are able to use cooperative and radical spaces in civil society to restrict contestation, de-democratization should be expected. / Political Science

This dissertation identifies and explores the dilemma of regional governance, namely how to address political and economic challenges which occur at the meso-, as opposed to local, national, or international scale. Drawing on a large body of theoretical work on decentralization and federalism, this dissertation addresses the question, how do different institutional arrangements for political, fiscal, and administrative decentralization influence the capacity of political systems to capture regional-scale externalities? It does so by examining the responses of four different political systems, two federal and two unitary, to the problem of capturing economic externalities through River Basin Management (RBM), a quintessential regional issue. RBM outcomes are operationalized in terms of efficacy of capture of both water quality and quantity externalities which occur within inter-jurisdictional river basins. Through close historical analysis of six paired case studies across the four country cases, the dissertation argues that the capacity of political systems to capture regional-scale externalities depends on the ability of sub-national jurisdictions to pursue localized preferences, which is in this dissertation referred to as sub-national territorial politics. These politics are most prevalent in federal systems, which typically accord sub-national territorial jurisdictions with greater political power and fiscal resources. These political systems feature fewer and weaker regional governance institutions, and generally less effective regional-scale externality capture, than their counterparts. This dissertation contributes to a growing "sub-national turn" in comparative politics in two ways. First, it identifies the geographically-rooted interests which often shape sub-national actor preferences, particularly with respect to natural resource issues. Second, the dissertation discerns the lack of political incentives for central governments to resolve disputes between sub-national administrative jurisdictions, particularly in the federal systems in which these units are the basis for political representation at the national level.