Maria Isabel Patiño recounts her experiences as director of the Urban Development Institute in Bogotá, Colombia. She recalls some of the technical, legal, and political issues surrounding the implementation of the Transmilenio system. She highlights problems the city had with the administration of public resources and strategies for overcoming them. She details the process for designing and completing major infrastructure projects with an emphasis on the system of contracting. There was also a clause that imposed stiff penalties if a contractor failed to fulfill its responsibilities. Patiño describes the loan structure and how road construction helped strengthen relations between the local and national governments. She discusses some of the difficulties in establishing a good working relationship with the City Council in order to put in place valorization contributions. She describes how the institute designed a methodology to allocate scarce resources for the repair of local roads. She also talks about the challenges of communicating distribution policies to the public and stresses the importance of involving people and explaining decisions in non-technical ways. She describes how the institute used universities as impartial arbiters for conflict resolution. According to Patiño, Bogotá was equipped to institute the reforms it did because of its independence from the national government.

Case Study: Conjuring and Consolidating a Turnaround: Government in Bogotá, 1992-2003