Representation by Design? Variations on Participatory Reforms in Brazilian Municipios

Abstract

If the 1980s were widely considered a lost decade for some parts of the developing world, a retrospective look at the 1990s finds much less consensus in the literature. Scholars looking to the Global South find contradictory patterns of economic globalisation, the deregulation and liberalisation of national economies, the decentralisation of national states, and tentative steps toward democratic consolidation. Particularly contested is the understanding of decentralisation that nearly universally occurred in the developing world. For some it is proof of the positive impacts of globalisation, as bloated and corrupt national-level bureaucracies were dismantled in favour of presumably more responsive local units. For others, the weakening of national states meant the erosion of their regulatory capacity to ensure the minimum conditions for democracy. A third position is held by those who focus on the way that globalisation has altered the sociospatial scales of the functioning of states. As the state ‘hollows out’, it does not just ‘wither away’, but its functions are displaced into newer or altered lower- or upper-level state institutions, creating new arenas for potential political contestation. In many settings, the local urban state has emerged as an especially important site, because it is more porous than national states and is situated ‘in the confluence of globalisation dynamics and increased local political action based in civil society’.¹