Infrastructures, processes of insertion and the everyday: towards a new dialogue in critical policy studies

This forum argues that the complex assemblages of infrastructures, and their reproduction in our everyday worlds, offer a privileged lens through which to explore the practices of much of what critical policy studies holds dear. It draws attention to processes of insertion that reproduce infrastructure in everyday lives, arguing that such processes cast new light on the work of the state, governance, and democratic struggles. It discerns three avenues as a means of exploring such infrastructural processes: first, an invitation to transcend the physical form and reflect on infrastructural temporalities; second on the transformation of spatial governance and policy through infrastructure; and third, a re-assessment in the relationship between infrastructures and the ‘modernist ideal’. Through these avenues, light can be shed on the often ‘hidden’ practices of policymaking. We conclude by calling for a dialogue across diverse disciplines, side-stepping embedded divides between academics-activists, cities-towns, and the global south-north

A trama da crítica democrática: da participação à representação e à accountability The conceptual web of democratic critique: from participation to representation and accountability

Este artigo atenta para deslocamentos conceituais ocorridos entre "representação política", "participação" e "accountability" na crítica interna à democracia ao longo das últimas décadas, bem como examina sua ressignificação recíproca na definição de nova trama conceitual da crítica democrática. O conceito de accountability parece oferecer, hoje, o registro normativo para lidar com as exigências de legitimidade nas experiências de representação política extraparlamentar. Argumenta-se também, que as circunstâncias históricas que propiciaram a polaridade negativa ou capacidade crítica à "participação", no campo da teoria democrática, não apenas mudaram, mas tornaram inadequada sua especifi cação analítica para a compreensão das experiências de inovação democrática em curso.<br>In the last decades there has been a surprising conceptual shift between the role of three concepts - political representation, participation and accountability - in the internal criticism of democracy. This article sheds light on that shift by examining the reciprocal redefi nition of meaning between those concepts and the shape of a new conceptual network for democratic critique. Nowadays, internal critique of democracy has been developed from the stand point of representation theories, which used to be traditionally related to the defense of democracy. Participatory democracy models, once the main stand point for criticizing democracy, either lost influence or where integrated to more sophisticated deliberative democratic models. We argue that this state of affairs is due to a conceptual worthy dissociation between representative government and political representation. This dissociation works under democratic and pluralistic assumptions, thus, it is sensible to legitimacy challenges faced by extra-parliamentary political representation. In this scenario, accountability appears as a normative concept useful for dealing with those challenges. We argue as well that the democratic critical leverage of the concept of participation relied on historical circumstances that are not longer in place, rendering standard defi nitions of participation inaccurate for the understanding of ongoing experiences of democratic innovation

Citizen security in Mexico: Examining municipal bureaucracy from the view of the intermediation-representation debate

The book stems from funding obtained by Latin American Sociaty Association (LASA)-Ford Foundation from October 2012 to October 2013 – US$10,000. This project aimed to construct a network of academics interested in developing the concept of intermediation used by citizens to access human rights and public services. A series of workshops with academics and practitioners were organised in Mexico City between 2013 and 2014. The discussions of those workshops led to the publication of an article by co-editors Gurza-Lavalle and Zaremberg (2014) in Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, a special panel in LASA Conference 2014 and the preparation of draft chapters in Spanish over 2015.The chapter examines citizen security in a south-eastern municipality in Mexico through the role of municipal front-line bureaucrats. The argument highlights that the degree of discretion of bureaucrats, the unequal power relations that they have in relation to citizen-users and their contribution to policy-making through service provision are characteristics that overlap with the three key dimensions of political intermediation addressed by the book. Bureaucrats make sense of their legitimacy (‘recognition dimension’); they negotiate with citizens to legitimize their job which is devalued in contexts of low levels of trust, corruption and violence (‘constraint dimension’); and they minimize conflict arisen from citizens’ attempts to achieve better quality of life (‘substantive-representation dimension’). With focus on the bureaucrat, juxtaposition is found between service implementation and electoral representation