Economia

Nowadays there is an imperative for governments to be more responsive to community needs, and public sector modernisation programmes are introducing opportunities for citizen participation. We look at citizen participation initiatives through the lenses of institutional and stakeholder theories. Using survey data and exogenous variables we analyse experiences in thirty OECD and MERCOSUR local governments. We find that the possible gains in legitimacy and trust explain the efforts made towards citizen participation. In addition, the different levels of commitment towards meaningful citizen participation suggest that factors such as power and urgency can be complementary to legitimacy when analysing citizen participation.

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.

Recycling consists of a variety of everyday practices that involve a complex urban ecology of materialities, subjectivities, knowledges, organising practices, institutions, policies, communities. In this article, we look at self-organised collectives of catadores (waste pickers) in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. This research combines quantitative data from the 497 municipalities of Rio Grande do Sul with a set of interviews and ethnographic observations. The emergence of self-organized collectives of catadores shows the affirmation of creative and transformative practices that actively resist the precarious infrastructures in which they operate. This resistant attitude is displayed by their political and strategic positioning in relation to municipalities and low-level administrators, but also in relation to the social, economic and environmental inequalities that affect their lives and their communities. We propose to look at these practices of collective resistance as expansive and creative, establishing transversal alliances throughout the community. In this sense, resistance becomes an act of recycling: the transformation of urban ecologies into an ongoing and sustainable way of staying with waste. Resistant recycling transforms individual and collective existences.

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.

Data from the First Census of Homeless People in the City of São Paulo, carried out in 2000, show that the spatial distribution of this population is not random and points to a number of high-incidence districts. The authors estimated a regression model that related this distribution to a series of indicators. The values found appear to confirm, initially, the relationship between the spatial distribution of street people and the presence of verticalized premises for use by commercial establishments and services, the presence of people not living in the districts, and the per capita income of families living in the districts.

While Latin America is undergoing a process of metropolitanization, we argue that intermunicipal cooperation (IMC) arrangements may serve as a quality check of the region’s metropolitan governance. We also adhere to the notion that IMC in a metropolitan region is affected not only by constitutional variables embedded in federalist arrangements but also in different ways. We test this assumption by building on a series of hypotheses taken from the literature on IMC. We then compare results from Mexico and Brazil, both federal countries with metropolitan regions. In testing the same variables, we observe different outcomes and a different explanatory power of the theoretical premises underlying IMC. We assign these explanatory differences to features of federalism, an understudied variable. We conclude that, while municipal drivers constitute relevant factors in predicting IMC within a metropolitan region, federalist arrangements modify the weight attributed to these factors.

No caso da Divisão Regional Agrícola de Ribeirão Preto, região considerada como das mais desenvolvidas do Estado mais desenvolvido da Federação, portanto uma das áreas favorecidas ou de concentração de recursos, verifica-se que seu desenvolvimento vincula-se à agricultura voltada para a agroindústria e a exportação, em que, progressivamente, maiores proporções das terras cultiváveis são exploradas com produtos a elas destinados, favorecendo-se o aumento do número de grandes propriedades e reduzindo-se o número de trabalhadores permanentes e residentes nas unidades de produção, de um lado pelas próprias características dos produtos, e de outro pelo elevado nível de tecnologia empregado em tais culturas . A extensão desse tipo de agricultura às médias e mesmo pequenas unidades de produção (médios e pequenos fornecedores de cana por exemplo) reduz acentuadamente a produção de alimentos e de outros produtos para os quais exige-se grande quantidade de mão-de-obra. Configura-se assim com o determinante da migração rural- urbana, um tipo de produção que requer pouca mão-de-obra ou que a exige apenas sazonalmente, e que favorece o crescimento das grandes unidades de produção agrícola. Colocam-se assim aos pequenos produtores de alimentos, dispersos em meio às grandes áreas de canaviais ou laranjais e que enfrentam progressivamente maiores dificuldades para sua manutenção na atividade, duas alternativas: sua integração ao modelo agroindustrial e exportador ou o desaparecimento, seja numa primeira fase, pelo arrendamento de suas terras para essas atividades, seja afinal, cedo ou tarde, pela venda de sua propriedade.

O objetivo deste texto é apresentar a evolução demográfica e urbana re­cente no estado de São Paulo, a partir de transformações eco­nômicas que criaram novas territorialidades, tomando a rede urba­na paulista muito mais adensada e com­plexa. Encontra-se dividido em qua­tro partes, além desta sumária apre­sentação. Na primeira, são descritos aspectos do crescimento demográfico e urbano recente, destacando proces­sos de desconcentração demográfica, seja no sentido metrópole-interior, seja pela própria periferização das metró­poles estaduais (São Paulo, Santos e Campinas). Na segunda, discute-se a interiorização do desenvolvimento paulista; na terceira, as mudanças na distribuição espacial da indústria que impactaram a rede urbana estadual. Por fim, uma breve nota sobre a evo­lução recente da agropecuária que tam­bém promoveu um avanço na urbani­zação do interior.