Jurisdictional Size

I've posted about jurisdictional size at least once before--I think
probably twice, but by God, there it was again staring me in the face!

Got in two interviews today, which should be the last for the trip.
Kind of a shame in a way, because this municipality is turning out to be
a pretty fruitful place to do interviews, but the reason I'm spending so
little time here is that there are some legitimate questions here about
the comparability of this case to a number of other cases in the
project. If you've ever traveled in Guatemala, you're probably familiar
with Panajachel, because it's so heavily involved in tourism, an not
coincidentally, because it's in such a beautiful location on the shores
of Lago Atitlan. The heavy presence of tourism also means that there
are a large number of differences between "Pana" and most other
Guatemalan municipalities, including (a) a very high concentration of
service industry, (b) very dense population, (c) high foreign-born
population, (d) many people in town who aren't residents or voters, and
if you talk to the hippies around, (e) location in a cosmic vortex...

I'm pretty sure that the "cosmic vortex" dummy variable will turn up to
be statistically insignificant, however, the other ones are real concerns.

That said, I got in this great interview which really illustrates the
argument I'm hoping to make about jurisdictional size and shape. I was
talking to one of the employees of the "mancomunidad," or co-management
area, which has it's office in the municipal building here. The
mancomunidad--called Mancatitlan (the Latinos like the acronyms, if
anything, more than we Gringos do) is made up of four municipalities on
the Eastern shore to lake Atitlan. The organization was created just a
couple years ago, in order to deal with solid waste management
problems. Basically, San Andrés, a muni up on the hillside, was
discharging its waste into watercourses that run into Panajachel, Santa
Catarina, and San Antonio, down on the lake shore.

In order to find a solution, the four municipalities joined together to
form a larger jurisdiction with the idea of addressing the waste
problem. The three lower municipalities get the problem solved--and a
reduction in the costs of being downstream (literally) from San
Andrés--and San Andrés gets some of the funding that the mancomunidad
attracts into the area, meaning that it can spend its fungible resources
in other area.

In effect, the municipalities are of a size and shape which is
sub-optimal for addressing these environmental problems, but the
creation of a mancomunidad creates a jurisdiction which is much closer
to optimal for the waste management problem. The remarkable thing is
that the four municipalities, together, match the appropriate watershed
almost perfectly, and therefore, the jurisdictional size is, according
to the theory put forth by Ferejohn and Weingast (I think) in 1995 (I
think), is almost perfectly optimal, because it matches the costs of
addressing the problem to the benefits of doing so, leaving no
externalized costs to anyone outside the muni.