Международный семинар департамента социологии “Assembling Formal and Informal Urban Governance: Participation, Politics and Clientelism in Recife, Brazil”

            Совместный семинар департамента социологии и кафедры публичной политики


Докладчик: Martijn Koster (Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands) 

Тема доклада: “Assembling Formal and Informal Urban Governance: Participation, Politics and Clientelism in Recife, Brazil”

Время:  Понедельник 30 октября, 18:10. 
Место: Мясницкая улица 11, Аудитория 423.
Рабочий язык: английский.
Для заказа пропуска в НИУ ВШЭ необходимо написать Екатерине Соколовой (ksokolova@hse.ru).

Аннотация доклада:

Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork, this paper analyzes urban governance as an assemblage of formal and informal practices. While many studies on urban governance see it as a highly formalized domain, this paper demonstrates how it is comprised of official procedures and personal favors, of legal frameworks and private arrangements between bureaucrats and residents. It draws on ethnographic research among community leaders and other residents of low income neighbourhoods in the city of Recife, in the Northeast of Brazil. These community leaders are active as political brokers, operating between the state and their fellow residents. They work on a wide variety of issues, ranging from slum upgrading, tenure security and poverty alleviation to cultural expression, gender equality and crime prevention. They claim to ‘speak for’ and ‘act on behalf of’ their fellow residents vis-à-vis the state, both within and outside of participatory programmes. Within participatory programmes, for instance, on land tenure and public services, the community leaders bring residents’ ideas into policy design, translate local meanings to bureaucratic categories, and vice versa. Outside of such programmes, they engage in personalized and often clientelist exchanges with bureaucrats and politicians. Especially when elections are approaching, they use their clientelist channels to negotiate the distribution of resources in return for political support.

This paper argues that the community leaders connect the institutional with the personal and the official with the unofficial. It presents them as connective agents in wider governance assemblages. These assemblages – amalgams of different government, citizen and corporate actors, institutions and resources – constitute temporary power structures that contain both formal and informal practices. The community leaders are key actors in bringing together and forging alignments between the different elements of the assemblage by both formal (e.g. participatory structures) and informal means (e.g. clientelist votes-for-favours exchanges). As special ‘assemblers’, they are a valuable starting point for analyzing urban governance as a formal/informal assemblage. In so doing, this paper contributes to recent debates on the informal dimension of urban governance and, more generally, the interconnections between the formal and the informal.

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