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

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

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

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

Polity qualities: how governance affects poverty

For a large sample of 61 developing countries, over the period 1980-95, we calculate a measure of the efficiency with which national political-economic systems convert a given volume of material resources (GNP per capita) into human development (longevity, education and literacy) for their citizens. This we label this RICE (relative income conversion efficiency). Four main variabls explain variations in RICE. The first, population density, that works largely in technical fashion. It is easier and cheaper to provide health and education services to densely-clustered populations. The second variable is geographical: all else being equal, location in West Africa lowers the rate at which material resources are converted into human development. This probably reflects West Africa's highly disease-prone natural environment. The third and fourth variables relate to governance. They however correlate with RICE in strikingly contrasting ways. A composite measure of the quality of government institutions, produced for international investors and leaders, turnns out to be significantly but negatively correlated with RICE. In other words, countries with governance institutions that are attractive to international investors tend to perform badly at converting material resources into human development. By contrast, a variable relating to state-society relations – the extent to which governing elites are financially independent on their own citizens – is significantly and negatively correlated with RICE. Governments that are dependent on their own citizens for critical resources appear neither to strengthen this particular accountability mechanism nor to play an independent rold in raising RICE scores: we could find no statistical connection between RICE and the degree of democracy.Poverty, developing countries, governance, human development, corruption