Big Governance Research: Institutional Constraints, the Validity Gap and BIM

The pressing questions about governance today require research on a scale, and of a complexity, that the existing institutional environment for research has great difficulty supporting. This article identifies some of the current institutional constraints on governance research, and examines a set of institutional innovations that enable a form of 'big governance research' that begins to meet the information and knowledge requirements of contemporary governance questions. It presents the organisation and methodology of the multi-country study 'Modes of Service Delivery, Collective Action and Social Accountability in Brazil, India and Mexico' (henceforth BIM, for Brazil, India and Mexico). The authors argue that the organisational and funding model that this study has created permits the type of interdisciplinary, process-oriented, and multi-country or multi-region research needed to answer governance questions of international concern

The Movement of the Landless (MST) and the juridical field in Brazil

What modalities of legal change can social movements set in motion to diminish systemic and durable forms of social exclusion? This paper focuses on the Movement of the Landless (MST) in Brazil, which through a number of legal strategies has helped produce watershed high court rulings, contributed to the process of constitutionalising law, and made access to land more equitable in parts of Brazil by redefining property rights in practice. The paper explores legal change triggered by the strategic action through what Bourdieu (1987) calls the juridical field. The MST has been successful in pushing forward legal change through this field, I argue, for two broad reasons. First, it has a remarkable ability to concentrate the talents of diverse juridical actors – lawyers, judges, law school professors – on defending its claims. This ability has been built by mobilising across multiple fields, including the political, and not just in the juridical field. Second, the movement’s capacity for strategic legal action, and the impact of such action, has been contingent on substantial changes during the 1990s in both the social movement and juridical fields triggered by the unfolding of the country’s democratic transition and shifts in the transnational Catholic Church. Keywords: access to justice, social movement, Movement of the Landless (MST), Brazil, property right

Civil Society Innovation and Resilience in the Struggle for the Right to Food in India

India’s national network of social justice activists and civil society organisations helped achieve legal recognition for the Right to Food in the early 2000’s and are engaged in an ongoing struggle to implement the right to food in practice. The legal strategy of the Right to Food Campaign, and the shortcomings of India’s primary right to food vehicle, the Public Distribution System (PDS) are well documented. There is relatively little on the Campaign’s contribution to innovation and improvement in the PDS, and its role in blocking a rollback of both the Right to Food and the PDS. After a decade, following the trajectory of the RTF campaign and the activism to implement PDS effectively, we believe that the composition of the national activist network and, related, its multi-scalar strategy, have been vital to its ability to shape national political debate and government policy in a first period (2001–08), and subsequently to defend advances in reform of the Right to Food from rollback in a subsequent openly hostile political environment (2009–2015). Based on new research carried out in 2015 we explain what happens to a network when one of its members enters electoral politics, and the campaign’s resilience in a hostile political environment. In this paper we combine social network analysis, informant interviews, participant observation, and archival research to identify the formation of ties between individuals that connect diverse activist networks, and how, in different political environments these networks first helped generate new ideas and practices for the Right to Food, and then defended those from reversal

Who participates? : civil society and the new democratic politics in São Paulo, Brazil

This paper explores the participation of collective civil society actors in institutional spaces for direct citizen participation in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. The data was produced by a unique survey of civil society actors who work for, or with, sectors of the lower-middle class, the working class, and the urban poor. The paper identifies factors that influence the propensity of civil society actors to participate in three types of institutions: the participatory budget, the constitutionally mandated policy councils, and other local participatory councils and programmes. Many political leaders, policy-makers and researchers believe that such forms of direct citizen participation can help democratise and rationalise the state, as well as provide politically marginalised populations with a say in policy. Whether these hopes materialise depends in part on the answer(s) to a question the literatures on civil society, citizen participation and empowered participation have not addressed – Who Participates? Contrary to the focus on autonomy in much of the work on civil society, the statistical findings support the claim that collective actors with relations to institutional actors, and the Workers’ Party and State actors in particular, have the highest propensity to participate. The findings also support the idea that the institutional design of participatory policy-making spaces has a significant impact on who participates, and that this impact varies by type of civil society actor. Unlike what has been found in research on individual citizen participation, there is no evidence that the “wealth” of collective actors influences participation

In whose name? : political representation and civil organisations in Brazil

There is now considerable evidence that civil organisations have become de facto and de jure representatives of particular segments of the population and interests in the design, implementation, and monitoring of public policy. This paper explores two questions that are becoming increasingly important in the debate on the role of “civil society” in contemporary democracy: Who do civil organisations represent when they act as representatives in the polity; and, in what terms is this representation constructed? The role of civil organisations in political representation has received little or no attention in the research agendas on the reconfiguration of representation or on the democratising of democracy. Furthermore, there are no wellestablished theoretical models beyond the classic electoral or membership ones which set out how civil organisations could establish their representativeness. The vast majority of civil organisations in middleand low-income countries, however, are not membership based and few make use of electoral procedures to authorise a mandate or establish accountability. This paper examines which organisations define themselves as political representatives and the forms of representation they are constructing. It also explores some of the possible consequences of different forms of representation for democracy. The paper draws on findings of a survey of civil organisations – that is, neighbourhood or community associations, membership organisations, NGOs, and coordinators of networks of these organisations – in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. We find that organisations that publicly claim to be representatives of particular publics in fact do engage in extensive representation activities; and, that the dynamics of representation among civil organisations are closely related to those of traditional political channels of representation. Furthermore, we find that the congruency arguments civil organisations make publicly to support their representativeness are crystallising around a small number of notions of representation. The most common are mediation, proximity, and services. The least common are identity, electoral, and membership

Associations and the exercise of citizenship in new democracies : evidence from São Paulo and Mexico City

A well-established body of democratic theory suggests that associations are the schools of democracy and, because they produce civic and active citizens, are vital to the quality of democracy. In this paper we find that this may not be the case in newer democracies with authoritarian legacies. Survey research in the large urban centers of São Paulo and Mexico City reveals that citizens who participate in associations are more likely to actively pursue a range of rights and entitlements, but this participation does not improve the quality of their relations with government. Participation in associations does not make it more likely that an individual has the type of direct relations to government that approximate the democratic ideal, and that suggests that public officials treat citizens as legal equals and carriers of rights and entitlements. Instead, associations are as likely to reinforce the detached, brokered, or contentious relations to government that are common in newer democracies and vary in their distance from the democratic ideal. Rather than focus on voting behaviour or partisan activities, we explore the civil component of active citizenship that operates when citizens’ seek access to the public goods necessary for enjoyment of the rights and entitlements constitutive of contemporary citizenship. Keywords: associations; citizenship; citizens; democratic theory; inequality; rule of law; political participatio

Big Governance Research: Institutional Constraints, the Validity Gap and BIM

The pressing questions about governance today require research on a scale, and of a complexity, that the existing institutional environment for research has great difficulty supporting. This article identifies some of the current institutional constraints on governance research, and examines a set of institutional innovations that enable a form of 'big governance research' that begins to meet the information and knowledge requirements of contemporary governance questions. It presents the organisation and methodology of the multi-country study 'Modes of Service Delivery, Collective Action and Social Accountability in Brazil, India and Mexico' (henceforth BIM, for Brazil, India and Mexico). The authors argue that the organisational and funding model that this study has created permits the type of interdisciplinary, process-oriented, and multi-country or multi-region research needed to answer governance questions of international concern

Social Accountability in Big Cities: Strategies and Institutions in Delhi and São Paulo

There are signs that public services can improve in big cities when the urban poor hold providers directly accountable – what we now call social accountability. We do not know, however, to what extent the urban poor, through their civil society groups, engage in forms of social accountability nor what strategies they use. We do not know what factors lead the poor to choose accountability as a way to secure access to essential services, rather than clientelism, electing representatives to public office or simply self-provisioning. We need to answer these questions in order to develop programmes that support accountability initiatives and understand the potential social accountability has to improve the basic public services. We designed a unique comparative study to take a step in this direction. The study compares activism by the urban poor to improve two essential types of services in the cities of Delhi and São Paulo, primary healthcare and social assistance. The unusual comparison between a South Asian and Latin American city, and across two very different types of services, gives us greater capacity to sort through different possible causes of accountability activism by the urban poor and explanations for the different types of strategies people use. In the two cities, we find, a substantial share of civil society groups attempt to improve health and welfare services by holding providers accountable. They seek to establish greater accountability as one of several types of engagement strategies with the state – that is, accountability is a part of a larger repertoire of activism. There is large variation, however, in the level of activity and type of strategies in the two cities, and across the two services. Surprisingly, accountability activism is most robust in health in São Paulo and welfare (Public Distribution System, PDS) in Delhi; and least in welfare (Family Minimum Income Guarantee) in São Paulo and health in Delhi. Understanding the sources of this variation is one of the challenges of our paper. We look at whether the type of organisation and sources of funding influence accountability activity, and whether it matters whether civil society groups are local or translocal, or active in several areas of the city. We look at whether the type of service, or how services are provided, shapes activism. And we explore whether institutional factors, such as the right to information legislation in India and participatory governance councils in Brazil, which create different kinds of incentives or opportunities for civil society actors, impact levels of activity and what strategies are adopted

‘We Make the Law and the Law Makes Us’:

Summaries How much does law really matter in the lives of the poor? The article develops a relational theory of law as a politically determined resource that emerges from the interactions between agents of the state and collective social actors. On the one hand, law is a tool of social regulation used principally but not exclusively by the state. On the other hand, it is a social institution which exists as a set of practices, constantly shaping and being reshaped in a context of power relations and opportunities. It is argued that the point of departure for research should be national or state law, insofar as it has empirical primacy over other regulatory orders. The state interacts with people's lives not just through its formal legal institutions but through a whole range of political and regulatory agencies which are subject to contestation and interpretation. These points are illustrated with cases concerning the legal regulation of social movements in the USA and Brazil