AMÉRIQUE LATINE

Relations between theory and empirical reality, Latin America: enough similarities and differences to compare; Gender and social policies; Media and democracies.

This special issue emerged from the seminar of the same name in which took place at the Université du Québec en Outaouais in Gatineau, Quebec in June 2019. It focused on two interrelated political and economic dynamics currently taking place in Latin America. First, the decline of the wave of Left and Centre-Left governments that emerged in the region in the early 2000s, known as the Pink Tide. Second is the recent emergence of the region’s new right-wing political and social movements, which picked up in intensity and influence around 2015.

Regional integration is not only about trade agreements and economic cooperation, but also about the social and political processes that member states aim to integrate into a single common dynamic. The success of regional integration thus depends on public engagement in an open and informed debate that examines and fully exploits the opportunities offered by the changes arising from integration and globalization. Moreover, this open and inclusive approach, to which this book aims to contribute, is a guarantee of the democratic and consensual nature of the process. This book is the result of collaboration between the University of Cape Verde (Uni-CV) and the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM). It presents original research articles that represent a collective, systematic and comprehensive effort aimed at an innovative analysis of regional integration, while seeking to understand in depth its challenges and the solution to its problems.

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.

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.

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.

Legacies of the Left Turn in Latin America: The Promise of Inclusive Citizenship contains original essays by a diverse group of leading and emerging scholars from North America, Europe, and Latin America.

As components of the epistemologies of the South, decolonial thought and theories offer us a major challenge to hegemonic knowledge and the production of scientific knowledge. This article provides an overview of Latin American writings in order to highlight the proposals of decolonial authors and feminists.

Ce collectif d’auteurs met en commun des visions complémentaires sur les changements politiques, sociaux et économiques du «?virage à gauche?» en Amérique latine.

Late one night in Quito, Ecuador, two women were held in the office of a jail. One, a pregnant local woman with dark hair and skin, had been found in possession of a drawer full of watches.

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

Este livro é resultado do workshop “Clientelismo e Violência na América Latina e no Caribe”, realizado em dezembro de 2013, na Universidade de Carleton, Ottawa, Canadá.

Participatory democracy innovations aimed at bringing citizens back into local governance processes are now at the core of the international democratic development agenda. Municipalities around the world have adopted local participatory mechanisms of various types in the last two decades, including participatory budgeting, the flagship Brazilian program, and participatory planning, as it is the case in several Mexican municipalities. Yet, institutionalized participatory mechanisms have had mixed results in practice at the municipal level. So why and how does success vary? This book sets out to answer that question.