Movimentos sociais

This paper evaluates a technical assistance program for house self-builders in the region of the city of Campinas, Brazil. The assistance given is in the form of an individualized house design, distributed to selfbuilders, based on an automated computer aided design (CAD) generated design method. A case study is used to demonstrate the efficacy of the assistance program. The transfer process of a population from an environmental protection area to a new location and their need for rapid house construction is the specific case presented. Houses are evaluated as to satisfaction and environmental comfort conditions. As a result, lessons are learnt about assistance programs and their success in improving housing quality.

Experiences of state/community partnerships in the field of land and housing in developing countries have had mixed results in attaining their goals of improving access to shelter for low-income households. Drawing upon evidence from Porto Alegre, Brazil, this paper argues that partnerships may represent an opportunity when the relationship is based on accountability and transparency, on common goals and shared responsibilities, even when resources are scarce. The role of the public partner was to provide technical and organizational assistance and act as a mediator between coops and private interests. The role of the cooperatives was to mobilize as a cooperative and develop a savings and organizational capacity. The partners carried out these roles and developed new ones during the construction of the partnership. The partnership however was not exempt from difficulties. Besides frictions between state officials and cooperators and among types of cooperatives, external constraints jeopardized the development of the organizations. Land use restrictions, lack of access to construction finance and lack of a supportive legislative and policy framework still constitute shortcomings for the development of low-income housing cooperatives in Brazil.

The challenges inherent to urbanization, such as the densification of peripheral locations, promote precarious urban scenarios with several deficiencies in infrastructure and habitability, where neighbourhoods are formed without planning guidelines as in the vast majority of Brazilian cities. Given this scenario, how can these neighbourhoods become more sustainable? While cities strive to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN 2030 Agenda, some issues are not often discussed at the local level or with community participation. The objective of this study is to present and analyse the opinion of citizens regarding urban sustainability issues, focusing on a neighbourhood level. Exploratory descriptive research was developed, contemplating 42 questions based on assessment tools were presented to participants in order to determine their degree of agreement or disagreement with each statement using a five-point Likert scale. The dataset was subjected to principal component analysis to verify which indicators contribute most to sustainability from the perspective of the community. The results demonstrate synergy between observed urban problems and positive opinions of respondents, with emphasis on urban infrastructure, social well-being, education, security and urban space. The arguments extracted from this research aim to inform the development of an evaluation structure for existing peripheral neighbourhoods, applied to medium-sized cities in southern Brazil, based on the opinions of residents.

O que é um líder na percepção de um líder? Esta é a questão que a autora enfrenta, utilizando um instrumento psicossocial e psicanalítico em bairros populares de João Pessoa. A partir deste marco teórico de análise é possível perceber que as identidades assinaladas não são similares, mas contrastantes. De fato, as entrevistas realizadas permitem registrar uma clara contradição entre a identidade do líder no espaço individual-familiar e no espaço social-coletivo em que o sujeito se encontra inserido. Por sua vez, esta contradição parece emergir como elemento novo no estudo das relações entre os movimentos sociais e políticas públicas.

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.

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.

Waste pickers all over the world work innovatively to reduce the environmental footprint of cities as they struggle to meet their critical livelihood obligations. Informed by the case of waste picker organizations (WPOs) this article examines how grassroots initiatives and extreme-niche innovations are created and sustained by mobilizing resources, rationales and relations. The study is informed by a cross-national survey and in-depth interviews with WPOs in Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Kenya and Tanzania, and builds upon theories of grassroots innovation movements. The findings show how operating in contexts of extreme scarcity, these grassroots organisations tap into local resources, e.g. tacit knowledge, economies of affection and other socially embedded institutional resources. Blending material and environmental rationales, contributes to expanding their audiences and to gaining further support. In such deprived urban contexts, radical and cumulative crises and events hindering residents’ livelihoods can paradoxically also spark ingenuity out of necessity, and the transformation of these settings into extreme niches of innovation. Finally, the mobilization of relations through the formation of networks linking WPOs with supportive intermediaries and global circuits of solidarity becomes another fundamental resilience strategy by which WPOs can navigate contested environments and insert their extreme-niche innovations in governmental structures. By simultaneously adopting a broad repertoire of strategies of insertion, contention, and mobilization WPO and their innovations thrive in highly constrained environments. We conclude with reflecting on how ‘extreme’ niches of innovation − at the cracks of the formal city, economy and waste systems − can unleash the creative power of stigmatized, illiterate and neglected grassroots to experiment with new solutions in resource-poor environments.

Populism is a notoriously unstable phenomenon. This instability has been on full display in contemporary Latin America where the progressive gains of the Pink Tide have confronted a rightwing backlash. How do we understand the sudden shift of fortunes from left to right? What tilted the balance of power in the region? One familiar answer to these questions is the exploitation by rightwing actors of tough-on-crime or mano dura rhetoric, which scapegoats already vulnerable populations (minorities, the poor, the “deviant,” etc.) as the source of insecurity. In conversation with this collection of papers on revanchist populism in Brazil, I want to propose a subtle twist on the theme of security and its role in rightwing populist mobilization. It draws on my research in neighboring Venezuela. Specifically, it looks at the unraveling of the Bolivarian Revolution’s progressive promise to defend the urban popular sectors against death squads, torture, arbitrary detention and other oppressive forms of policing. Comparing Venezuela, the vanguard of Latin America’s left turn, to Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil may seem scandalous at first blush, but doing so asks us to confront an inconvenient truth about what I call the will to security. Rather than imagining security as something imposed from above, the will to security reframes it as an articulation of demands that resonate, at least in part, with the popular sectors. Adding this perspective to our analysis of rightwing populism provides an alternative spatial paradigm to the conversations about security that lends it historical depth and policy relevant positioning.