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Inventing Local Democracy
Abers (political science, Center for Public Policy Research, U. of Brasília, Brazil) provides a close study of innovative city government in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Led by the Workers' Party, the city implemented a participatory budget program in which residents meet in their neighborhoods to determine budget priorities. Taking place in a city long dominated by patronage politics and elite rule, the story is both a sociopolitical study of the impact that state- sponsored participatory forums can have on civil society and a contribution to the theory and practical possibilities of participatory democracy.--
Governance on the Ground
Governance on the Ground describes people at a local level working through municipal institutions to take more responsibility for their own lives and environment. This study reports what social scientists in eight local networks found when they chose their own subjects for a worldwide comparative study of institutional reform at the local level. Governance on the Ground is the culminating product of the Global Urban Research Initiative, a major 10-year research effort that created a worldwide network of some 400 social scientists. The topics these scholars cover include fiscal innovation, infrastructure projects, social development, housing, harbor development, and political party participat...
Practical Authority
This book looks at what actors in complex policy environments actually do to get new institutions off the ground. The story told has a multiplicity of protagonists, many of whom are normally invisible in political studies, such as the state officials and university professors who struggled to move water reform forward. The book explores the interaction between their efforts to influence the design and passage of new legislation and the hard labor of creating the new water management organizations the laws called for.
Social Sciences
"The one source that sets reference collections on Latin American studies apart from all other geographic areas of the world.... The Handbook has provided scholars interested in Latin America with a bibliographical source of a quality unavailable to scholars in most other branches of area studies." —Latin American Research Review Beginning with volume 41 (1979), the University of Texas Press became the publisher of the Handbook of Latin American Studies, the most comprehensive annual bibliography in the field. Compiled by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress and annotated by a corps of more than 130 specialists in various disciplines, the Handbook alternates from year to year b...
Civil Society and Participatory Governance
Democratic institutions should promote accountability of government officials to the needs of citizens. Civil society plays a role in exposing corruption as well as in communicating the needs of low-income residents to officials. Neither the institutions of representative democracy nor the presence of civil society, however, appears to automatically guarantee adoption of social benefits for the poor. Can democratic institutions be created to address social challenges? Scholars, development practitioners, donors, and activists propose participatory governance institutions as mechanisms to create accountability and responsiveness through a public forum incorporating civil society. To date, how...
Deepening Local Democracy in Latin America
The resurgence of the Left in Latin America over the past decade has been so notable that it has been called “the Pink Tide.” In recent years, regimes with leftist leaders have risen to power in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela. What does this trend portend for the deepening of democracy in the region? Benjamin Goldfrank has been studying the development of participatory democracy in Latin America for many years, and this book represents the culmination of his empirical investigations in Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In order to understand why participatory democracy has succeeded better in some countries than in others, he examines the efforts in urban areas that have been undertaken in the cities of Porto Alegre, Montevideo, and Caracas. His findings suggest that success is related, most crucially, to how nationally centralized political authority is and how strongly institutionalized the opposition parties are in the local arenas.
Governing the Urban in China and India
What is urban about urban China and India? -- Land grabs and protests from Wukan to Singur -- Urban redevelopment in Guangzhou and Mumbai -- Airpocalypse in Beijing and Delhi -- Territorial and associational politics in historical perspective.
Urban Warfare
In Urban Warfare, Rolnik charts how the financialisation of housing has become a global crisis, as models of home ownership, originating in the US and UK, are being exported around the world. These developments were largely organised by htosw who benefit the most: construction companies and banks, supported by government-facilitated schemes, such as 'the right to buy', subsidies, and micro-financing. Using examples ranging from Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Chile, Israel, Haiti, the UK and especially Brazil, Rolnik shows how our homes and neighbourhoods have effectively become the "last subprime frontiers of capitalism". This neoliberal colonialism is experienced on the scale of the city but also w...
Never Meant to Survive
Never Meant to Survive presents a historical, political, and social assessment of anti-black genocide and liberatory struggles that arose to resist it. Based on fine-grained accounts of community life at the street level, Costa Vargas's work presents crucial examples of political resistance and community activism. By examining two cities linked by common experiences of Blackness, Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro, this book identifies a prevailing genocidal force that organizes individuals and groups across society. The 1965 and 1992 riots in Los Angeles, the work of the Black Panther Party and favela activists in Brazil, and police brutality in struggles between black communities and the state in both L.A. and Rio de Janeiro all figure importantly in Costa Vargas's compelling account. What emerges from this analysis is a call for the destruction of the conditions that foster the marginalization of black communities and a halt to the internal conflicts between black social groups themselves.
Local Government and Metropolitan Regions in Federal Countries
While local government is found in all federal countries, its place and role in the governance of these countries varies considerably. In some countries, local government is considered an essential part of the federal nature of the state and recognized in the constitution as such, whereas in others it is simply a creature of the subnational states/provinces. When referring to local government it is more correct to refer to local governments (plural), as these institutions come in all shapes and sizes, performing widely divergent functions. They range from metropolitan municipalities of mega-cities to counties, small town councils, and villages. Their focus is either multi-purpose in the case...
