Estrutura econômica e mercado de trabalho

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, held in June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro, was probably the largest event in a long series of megasummits on environmental protection and sustainable development. Roughly 44000 participants descended on Rio de Janeiro to take part in ten days of preparatory committee meetings, informal consultations, side events, and the actual conference. Yet despite this unprecedented high attendance by participants from governments and civil society, the outcome of the conference is less than many had hoped for. In this paper I review the outcomes of the 2012 Rio conference in detail, with a special focus on its contributions towards the reform of the institutional framework for sustainable development. Following this review, I discuss the way ahead and options for structural reform to restrengthen earth system governance.

The idea of a group of developing countries with shared characteristics, challenges, and needs, distinct from those of developed countries, has been central to sustainable development discourse and policy for decades. However, in the years since the original Rio conference it has become increasingly apparent that it is difficult to sustain this notion of a single developing world. Within the context of unfolding diversity, a central claim of the present paper is that lumping all countries together under the expansive category of ‘developing’ risks obfuscating the complex challenges, solutions, and fragmented geopolitics of sustainable development. Instead, it is necessary to use the terms developing country, countries, or world far more selectively, mindful that they may conceal just about as much as they reveal. In the paper I proceed to consider a number of alternative national, subnational, and transnational spatial categorisations which might be deployed to better describe and/or analyse the evolving nature, effective governance, and politics of sustainable development challenges across space.

This paper seeks to illuminate the multiple ways in which South–South collaboration may reorganize knowledge production and learning processes across scales and beyond the unilateral transfer of expertise. Drawing on empirical evidence from a knowledge exchange partnership between water and sanitation operators in Salta, Argentina, and Brasılia, Brazil, we provide a grounded, contextual account of the partnership to examine what was learned, under what circumstances, and with what potential effects. We contend that common claims by proponents of South–South cooperation around the centrality of shared geopolitical history are not enough to understand South–South cooperation at the project level. At this scale, we find that other forms of proximity, including organizational, linguistic, technological, and cultural, also matter in shaping the constitution of collaborative partnerships and the forms of learning that occur through them. In the case that we examine, partners’ multiple shared proximities resulted in a subversion of traditional mentor–mentee relations and emergence of a process of mutual learning. Further, we suggest that flows of knowledge in the partnership can be characterized across a learning spectrum, from technical and processual learning to experiential understanding and self-reflection, each with different consequences for institutional and material change at different scales. Crucially, such forms of learning bolstered participants’ bargaining power for implementing improvements at home and fostered advances in operators’ tactical thinking.

This paper aims to understand the multiple strategies developed by frontline workers to deal with situations of violence in vulnerable territories. We analyze the micro-dynamics within which workers operate to understand how the State deals with violence. Empirically, we analyzed data from interviews with 140 frontline workers implementing different policies not directly related to violence in neighborhoods located in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, known for their populations’ precariousness and vulnerability. The results expand the understanding of the different ways in which violence expresses itself in these places and show that the reactions developed by frontline workers are more complex than those suggested by the existing literature. The multiple violence to which these workers are exposed is used and manipulated by them in various ways during policy implementation. Frontline workers can ignore, negotiate with, or combat violence. They use their agency to develop different reactions based on how they and the policies are embedded or disconnected to the territories.

The appropriation of the housing sector by global finance has transformed housing policies worldwide while leading to new opportunities for capital accumulation. Financialized models have also become increasingly prevalent in the Global South, promoting mortgage and household debt and stark housing commodification impacting lower-middle-income communities and residents. Yet, despite adversity, housing social movements have worked to challenge some of these trends in struggles for housing justice and de-financialization. This study examines the organizing work of such housing struggles in Mexico and Brazil in the face of varied commodification and financialization processes through the analytical framework of bridging. Bridging as a strategy entails social movements’ dynamic relationships and practices in challenging and altering housing commodification and financialization processes in relation to changing political environments. Housing movements integrate reactive responses to immediate threats with proactive strategies for long-term structural change, emphasizing the importance of multifaceted approaches in addressing housing financialization. Bridging between invented and invited spaces of action showcases how housing movements adjust to evolving circumstances and establish new counter-hegemonic arenas to advance their objectives and ideas. Bridging scales enables further reach of demands and visibility, creating the possibility of challenging the distances inherent to financialization networks. The accomplishments, constraints, and paths of housing organizing for de-financialization provide critical lessons about the co-constitutive nature of social mobilization, housing policies, and the financial market.

In this paper, I examine the links between revanchist populism and the labor crisis in Brazil, a country with a stratified labor market where informality is prevalent among low-income, racialized groups. I analyze the struggles of street vendors for accessing urban space in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where the Worker’s Party (PT) played a key role in evicting vendors from public spaces and criminalizing their activity in the early 2000s. I focus on the connections between this initiative and a more recent “revitalization” policy that displaced street vendors from public spaces in the city center. In this context, I explore the political discourses of displaced workers during the 2018 elections that brought Bolsonaro to power. I show how the eviction stimulated antipetismo (anti-PT sentiment) among street vendors by triggering collective memories and rage against the party that “sold them out.” I argue that street vendors strongly identify as workers but are excluded from the unionized waged workingmen notion central to unions and Latin American left-wing parties. By discussing how street vendors reiterate their position as workers and not criminals, I highlight their identification with a moral notion of worker aligned with Bolsonaro’s conservative anti-crime agenda. I thus argue that support for Bolsonaro among street vendors was stimulated by the shortcomings of Brazil’s urban reform as well as the lack of appropriate policy responses to an increasingly heterogeneous and informalized workforce. I conclude by emphasizing the importance of supporting the collective struggles of non-waged workers as a path beyond revanchist populism.

This article examines the trafficking of Venezuelan truck drivers for labour exploitation in Brazil. The remilitarisation of politics is increasingly a hallmark of elite-driven strategies to manage the circulation of labour and goods from extractive zones. This article introduces the notion of logistics of unfreedom to explain the growing imbrication between techniques of control by the state and corporations that confine the reproduction of migrants within the realm of logistics processes. The analysis focuses on data from participatory observations and the narratives of 22 Venezuelan refugees who were trafficked from a militarised humanitarian zone in Brazil's Amazon to work for a freight road transport company in Southern Brazil. Findings show that a concerted logistic approach to refugee employment channelled mobility, constrained statutory protection and shaped the ethno-political differentiation of Venezuelans in the labour market. This forced Venezuelans to live in trucks where both productive and socially reproductive aspects of their daily lives were overdetermined by the rhythms of goods distribution. The article concludes that this logistic rationale has converged towards a self-contained regime of labour unfreedom that facilitates the labour trafficking of Venezuelan refugees.

Studies of financialization have highlighted how politics, particularly through the state, drives the increasing entanglement of financial actors and rationales in the production of urban space. This article shifts the angle to consider the challenges that uncertain politics pose for such entanglement. Looking beyond techno-calculative practices, it explores how finance works politically to sustain value extraction within fragmented regulatory landscapes. It does so through historical and ethnographic analysis of financial investment in urban water and sanitation provision in Brazil, drawing on fieldwork, interviews, and a new dataset on public-private contracts to interrogate how private water companies navigate politico-regulatory relations under financial investors like private equity. It shows that while these providers were quite engaged in local politics under their original owners (construction groups), under financial investors they sought to “escape” it by curbing ties to public officials, reducing the autonomy of local subsidiaries, and successfully lobbying for national standards on regulatory norms. It argues these centralizing efforts constituted forms of centripetal politics meant to enhance asset monitoring, increase regulatory legibility, and reduce political uncertainty. The findings illuminate how financial investors work across political scales to navigate political risk and sustain financial value, thus problematizing the conventional analytical focus on how finance capitalizes on local forms of entrepreneurial politics. Crucially, they reveal the need to treat institutional environments not simply as filters for financial investment but as objects of political contestation by financial actors. This allows for blurring the boundaries between finance and politics, and for politicizing finance.