Da alternância do poder local à descontinuidade político- administrativa na gestão municipal: o caso do Município de Quelimane 2011 – 202

Abstract

Although the political alternation has represented a gain for the decentralization process in the country, it has been used by political parties, among others, as a form of partisanship in municipal management induced by clientelism embodied in the reproduction of institutional arrangements capable of causing situations of organizational instability and consequent disruption of certain services and activities. On the other hand, local governments suffer from institutional mimicry, stemming from the management logic of a clientelist state: corruption and nepotism, practices in the functioning of public administration directly linked to the influence and trajectory of the Frelimo-State. Firstly, his study seeks to understand the influence of political alternation for political-administrative discontinuity in municipal management. Secondly, the study analyzes how changes in municipal management impact the organizational stability of the municipality in a political environment rooted in a political culture of party solidarity, path dependence and mimicry. This work has as a case study the municipality of Quelimane through an analysis that comprises the time horizon 2011-2021. The data that inform the analysis were collected through the triangulation of different techniques, from bibliographic research, documental research and semi-structured interviews. Based on the theory of historical institutionalism and isomorphic mimicry, the study showed, for the concrete case of the municipality of Quelimane, that in both moments of government transition, the alternation served above all to accommodate a system of solidarities typical of the “now it's our turn” that opposition parties have served themselves as a form of historical reward and legitimacy. It was concluded, therefore, that the political alternation in that municipality, instead of effectively representing an alternative to the Frelimo administration, represented above all a vehicle for reproducing the pattern of functioning of the central administration. In other words, the alternation in this municipality meant the replacement of one bad form of governance by another, to the detriment of private and party interests, and in both cases, internal historical cleavages called into question the municipal management and the continuity of provision certain services and activities.