PEER REVIEWED ARTICLE

Framing the Public Sphere: A Study of Print Media in Veracruz (Mexico)

How does the combination of democratization and violence shape the public sphere? This should entail an enlargement of the public sphere and an increase in public deliberation. Since framing is a powerful tool in determining the scope and contents of public debate, what role does framing play in democratizing public spheres? Taking the state of Veracruz (Mexico) as a case study, we explore to what extent do print media allow for an enlargement of the public sphere in terms of both admissible participants and issues. We argue that framing practices contribute to a paradoxical situation in which deliberation takes place, but whose democratic character is severely compromised by the systematic exclusion of certain actors and the subordinate framing of certain issues in the media. The result is a hybrid public sphere in which ostensibly democratic media help normalize violence, authoritarian practices and traditional domination patterns.

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Collectively Gardening the Urban Public Space in Mexico City: When Informal Practices Interact with the State

In recent years, a growing number of citizen-led gardens have appeared in the urban public spaces of large cities across the world. While many of these projects are initially launched informally without any support from the state, they gradually become integrated into the social fabric of the city. To understand the evolution of the formal–informal boundaries of the practice, we argue that we should be paying attention to the specific institutional contexts that frame gardeners’ interactions with public authorities. Drawing from a study of citizen-led gardens in Mexico City, we show that informal urban gardening becomes a disconnected-from-the-state practice. On the one hand, the Mexico City government has shown a growing interest in regulating urban agriculture. On the other hand, gardeners are increasingly trying to find their own ways to formalize and perennate their practice. We suggest that this disconnection between gardeners and the state is best explained by the weakness of the institutional context in which their interactions take place. A top-down policymaking process, along with the incapacity and unwillingness of the multi-leveled city government to implement policies effectively, reinforces norms of mistrust and generates low expectations among gardeners as they interact with local authorities.

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The Pandemic and Organized Crime in Urban Latin America: New Sovereignty Arrangements or Business as Usual?

Using a focus on the ways that Covid-19 has impacted everyday life in urban Latin America, this article examines the shifting activities of organized criminal groups in the context of a global pandemic. Using grounded ethnographic fieldwork drawn from Brazil, it asks whether a health crisis with direct life and death consequences has empowered illicit actors, and by so doing changed longstanding relationships between illicit actors and citizens on one hand, and/or illicit actors and local authorities on the other. Its larger aim is to understand whether and how the global pandemic has impacted governance by producing new scalar and sovereignty tensions between state and non-state actors at the scale of the city, and with what implications for the legitimacy of national authorities and democratic governance more generally.

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Tensions between the Middle Classes and the “New Middle Class” in Brazil: An Accidental Biographical Ethnography

This article constructs an understanding of the Brazilian middle classes using economic, sociological, and cultural factors. It argues that the so-called “new middle class” is actually an expanded vulnerable class and that the middle classes are simultaneously conscious and in denial of injustice toward the lower classes. The argument is based on an accidental biographical ethnography: re-interpretation of a field journal and the use of one person to understand broader trends. The resulting textual product juxtaposes biographical passages with theoretical analysis, deviating from traditional article structures to share the voice of the biographical participant while also critically examining the implications of this voice.

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Repoliticising indigenous participation: FPIC protocols in Canada and Brazil, in The International Journal of Human Rights,

Global activism led to the emergence of new international standards concerning state obligations to consult Indigenous peoples and, under certain circumstances, obtain their free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) when extractive projects impact their rights and traditional territories. However, a growing literature shows that the implementation of Indigenous peoples’ participatory rights remains uneven and inconsistent at best. This paper focuses on Indigenous peoples’ agency in operationalising their rights. We do so by focusing on an increasingly common yet overlooked Indigenous strategy: the development of community-based consultation and consent protocols. What role do unilateral Indigenous protocols play in shaping how participatory norms are implemented? How can protocols contribute to shaping Indigenous peoples’ relations with state and industry actors? We present the result of a systematic comparative analysis of thirty-five consultation and consent protocols adopted by Indigenous nations and communities in Canada and Brazil between 2005 and 2020. While they vary in their structure and content, protocols in both countries converge in their use of both programmatic and performative languages to recast participatory processes as spaces to assert Indigenous peoples’ status and legitimacy as self-determining polities. In doing so, protocols re-politicise and re-appropriate participatory processes and put forward an alternative interpretation of their participatory rights that challenges how state authorities and industry actors tend to operationalise consultation and FPIC standards.

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Political Stability and Subnational Media Systems: Comparing Bahia and the Federal District of Brazil

In this article, we argue that the degree of political stability is a critical element in the evolution of media systems. In our view, it is the causal mechanism allowing for the political parallelism of media systems. We argue that political stability has three main effects on media systems: it consolidates the operating principles and mechanisms of the public sphere; it gives clear and self-assumed political identities to media actors; and it allows for the establishment of predictable, long-term professional relationships within the media system as well as between journalists and their sources. To test this hypothesis, we compare Bahia and the Federal District, two Brazilian subnational units that differ essentially by the degree of political stability they experienced between 2003 and 2018.

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The Experience of the Political: Merleau-Ponty among the Landless Workers in Brazil

Inspired by the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this article proposes political phenomenology as an ethnographic method to analyze a community of landless workers in southern Brazil. More specifically, it mobilizes Merleau Ponty s concepts of institution, experience, expression, sign and style to describe the political experience of the landless. This analytical framework is applied in the field to illuminate the processes of political subjectivity and community formation as they developed in a group of individuals associated with the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) as they occupied land for survival.

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Gender, the World Bank, and conditional cash transfers in Latin America

Since the mid-1990s, nearly all of the countries in Latin America have adopted a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. These critical programs – which have become the standard poverty reduction policy across the region – provide subsidies to poor mothers on the condition that they enroll their children in school and take them for health check-ups. The first and norm leader program, Mexico’s Progresa, included gender equality and empowerment of women as part of its original design goals. However, since Progresa, no Latin American CCT program has been designed with reduction of gender inequalities in mind. Feminist scholars have critiqued these programs as “maternalist.” What happened to the goals of gender equality along the way? This article sheds light on the World Bank’s involvement in weakening the gender equality goals that were an integral part of the original policy design. In redesigning CCT programs, the World Bank has sidelined these goals in two significant ways. First, policy entrepreneurs, committed to evidence-based policies, have omitted the female empowerment argument in response to mixed results on the matter of gender and CCTs. Second, gender experts (and gender knowledge) at the World Bank have been marginalized in favor of their economist and development expert colleagues.

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Resistance to Chronic Violence in Informal Workplaces: The Strategies of Domestic Workers in Brazil (2003–2018)

This article analyses the repertoire of individual strategies utilised by domestic workers to resist routinised workplace violence in the cities of São Paulo and Ilhéus, Brazil. Findings suggest that domestic workers favour two strategies of resistance: exit (quitting work without prior notice) and voice (negotiating workplace conditions). The latter strategy is divided into two subtypes: voice-pleading (appealing to decency) and voice-confrontation (warning and rights-claiming). Voice strategies appear more effective than exit in ameliorating patterns of chronic workplace violence, particularly when they incorporate labour rights claims and when emotional ties exist between workers and employers.

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FPIC and Indigenous Consultation Protocols in Brazil: Comparative Trajectories

This article aims to document the phenomenon of Indigenous consultation protocols in Brazil by comparing two cases, the Juruna and the Munduruku protocols. This paper also intends to trace the emergence and uses of these protocols by the actors in place, in order to emphasize not only their legal but also political scope. The following comparison brings to light that, even though there are widespread advances and challenges regarding the Indigenous consultation protocols in Brazil and being the protocols theoretically similar, in fact, there is a significant variation in the trajectories of emergence and implementation of those protocols. In conclusion, the proposed comparison shows that a contextual and situated analysis that focuses on the strategies and practices of the actors may be more fruitful in order to understand, in practice, how the mechanisms of appropriation of the norm of FPIC and its implementation operate.

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Security, Resilience and Participatory Urban Upgrading in Latin America and the Caribbean

In theory, security and resilience in contexts of violence and crime are improved by participatory urban upgrading. Yet, upgrading practices actually demonstrate how vulnerabilities to violence, insecurity and crime are reproduced by state–society and intra?community power hierarchies. On the one hand, the priorities and perspectives of politicians and bureaucrats continue to take precedence over the needs and demands of residents of marginalized communities, undermining participation. On the other hand, the internal socio?political structures of marginalized communities complicate the capacity and willingness of residents and external state actors to engage with each other. The result is that upgrading programmes are not particularly successful in ordering development and security or in creating resilience. Internal processes have a greater impact on residents’ choices in their daily struggles to survive and thrive, but the resilience they create is limited because power and resources tend to be centralized and sometimes linked to crime groups. This article uses the cases of Kingston (Jamaica) and São Paulo (Brazil) to highlight these power hierarchies and how they impede the resilience project of participatory urban upgrading processes in contexts of crime and violence.

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The ‘Pink Tide’ and the Labour Movement: Lessons from the Argentinean and Brazilian Experiences

This article offers a comparative analysis of Argentina and Brazil’s labour movement during and immediately after the “Pink Tide”, a period during which most South American countries elected progressive governments. We adopt an analytical framework combining critical political economy and historical neo-institutionalism that points to the resilience of corporatist dynamics but also to their domestic specificities, due to divergent political and legal legacies. The contrasting implementations of Argentinean and Brazilian unions in workplaces, as well as their relations to political parties and to organizational unity explain most of the differences observed after the fall of the progressive governments in their respective countries.

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Communauté et subjectivité politiques. La mística du Mouvement des travailleurs ruraux sans-terre (MST) et la phénoménologie politique de Maurice Merleau-Ponty

La mística du Mouvement des travailleurs ruraux sans-terre (MST) au Brésil peut être interprétée comme l’incarnation pratique d’idéaux politiques et existentiels ayant pour effet de faire communauté. Tout en considérant les analyses socio-anthropologiques du phénomène, le présent article met davantage l’accent sur les perceptions et les effets subjectifs à travers une analyse phénoménologico-politique, jusqu’ici très peu explorés.

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The Brazilian women's movement and the state under the PT national governments

Certain segments of the Brazilian Women s Movement (BWM) developed important strategic partnerships with the state under the PT federal government. This article demonstrates how these partnerships had both inclusionary and exclusionary effects on gender centric policy outcomes. Using a mix method approach which includes extensive in-depth interviews with BMW activists and archival data from governmental sources, the Brazilian experience illustrates that entering the state headed by a women ally president facilitates funnelling some of the women’s movement’s demands into the state. However, hierarchies within the movement itself, the congressional strength of the head of executive and the activism of some of its socially conservative legislative allies can severely temper that effect.

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Problèmes de la démocratie au Honduras

The present study on the characteristics of the Honduran political system tries to provide elements to understand why, over the last ten years, the Central American country has been the scene of numerous crises, whose consequences have favoured variations of political identities, and the development of authoritarian or neo-populist options. Following the reflections of professors Charles W. Anderson and Mario Posas, this text proposes the identification of the main “power contenders” and their interaction with each other, as the interpretive key to decipher the challenges Honduras is facing. The article can serve as a starting point to contextualise the recent “migrant caravans” and the recent conflicts between political parties and the different sectors of organized civil society.

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“It Was Once a Radical Democratic Proposal”: Theories of Gradual Institutional Change in Brazilian Participatory Budgeting

Because of its early positive assessments, participatory budgeting (PB) has been and continues to be praised by several policymakers, and the Brazilian model has become an institutional blueprint around the world. No one questions the way the model has evolved in Brazilian municipalities with a long tradition of PB, but it was institutionalized there through practice and not through state legislation. It is thus highly permeable to political will and evolving ideas.

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Politiques de sécurité et unités de police pacificatrice à Rio de Janeiro: Pratiques et représentations chez les policiers militaires de Mangueira

Since the early 2000s, public security has been a recurrent issue for the city of Rio de Janeiro. However, within the context of mega-events in the city, Rio further accelerated its public security policy reform process. In 2008, the State of Rio de Janeiro’s Governor, Sergio Filho Cabral, decided to establish a «pacification» policy in the city.

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Incomplete Universalization? Peruvian Social Policy Reform, Universalism, and Gendered Outcomes

This article analyzes Peruvian social reforms of the early 2000s, in relation to the stated goal of increasing universality as well as to their gendered impacts. It argues that three principal limitations inhibited the move to universality and did little to promote gender equality. First, the quality of public service is weak and this has had a particularly adverse impact on women. Second, the reforms have not limited the historical fragmentation of the Peruvian social policy architecture. Finally, social program implementation is still coercive, limiting the reinforcement of social rights based on citizenship for women.

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Hall of Mirrors: Media, Democratization, and the Public Sphere in Maranhão, Brazil

Freedom of expression and access to diverse sources of information are seen as critical elements of democracy, although their concretization on the ground is subject to strong interference. Recent regime change in Maranhão, one of Brazil’s poorest states, has led to the emergence of new media and some expansion of the public sphere.

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Uma Constituição cidadã? Sucessos e limites da institucionalização de um sistema de participação cidadã no Brasil democrático

A adoção da Constituição democrática de 1988 foi marcada pela vontade de romper com o período autoritário e de incluir a participação ampla dos cidadãos brasileiros nos processos decisórios locais, estaduais e nacionais. Após 30 anos a linguagem da inclusão dos cidadãos e da Constituição cidadã foi retomada pelos políticos de todos os níveis de governos para marcar a ambição democrática e inclusive de suas ambições particulares.

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Cartography of disputes in the public arena of electoral corruption in Brazil

This article explores the debate in the public arena of electoral corruption in Brazil, from a pragmatic sociology perspective, to map and unfold its main disputes.

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Civil society organizations and social innovation. How and to what extent are they influencing social and political change?

This study aims to understand how civil society organizations (CSOs) perform and influence public arenas.

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Civil society and social innovation in the public sphere: a pragmatic perspective

This article proposes a new theoretical approach for the study of social innovation processes promoted by civil society actors in the public sphere, based on French pragmatic sociology.

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Civil Society and Social Innovation in Public Arenas in Brazil: Trajectory and Experience of the Movement Against Electoral Corruption (MCCE)

In recent decades, the Brazilian Movement Against Electoral Corruption (MCCE) has been promoting social innovation in the public sphere, which led to mobilization towards the creation of two popular initiatives in Brazil

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América Latina en el Internacionalismo Sindical

Actas de las Terceras Jornadas de Estudios sobre América Latina y el Caribe, Instituto de Estudios sobre América Latina y el Caribe, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2017

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Social Policy Instruments in Motion. Conditional Cash Transfers from Mexico to Peru

Social policy prescriptions for Latin America have shifted significantly over recent decades. This article tracks a process by which a conditional cash transfer (CCT) to mothers, begun in a Mexican programme with some pretensions to promoting gender equality, was standardized by international organizations, becoming a policy instrument characterized by gender sensitivity, but having little attention to equality.

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Desapropriações, Resistências e o Megaevento da Copa do Mundo: tempo, poder e projetos de desenvolvimento

Dando ênfase à especificidade de megaeventos, em contraste com outros projetos e polos de desenvolvimento, este trabalho analisa impactos da Copa do Mundo de Futebol de 2014, na Região Metropolitana do Recife, Pernambuco.

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Accountability, social control and co-production of public goods: the action of twenty Brazilian social observatories aimed at citizenship and fiscal education

Amidst the political and institutional maturing of Brazilian democracy, one of the ways in which society takes part in public administration affairs is through involvement in social observatories.

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Social observatories as promoters of social control and accountability: reflections on the Itajaí social observatory experience

This article discusses the potentialities and limitations of social observatories that focus on citizenship audit in promoting social control and accountability, starting with the experience of the Itajaí Social Observatory

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