Techniques of absence describe some of the potentially anti-deliberative practices that haunt recently widespread participation-based governance schemes. Techniques of absence remove certain kinds of people – on a spatialised basis – from crucial ‘democratic’ conversations. To illustrate these, I use ethnographic accounts from the implementation of a citywide participatory budgeting programme in three neighbourhoods across Buenos Aires, Argentina, modelled after the vaunted budgeting process pioneered in Porto Alegre, Brazil since 1989. I position absencing as part of an emergent urban governmentality related to participation. This allows for an analysis of the Buenos Aires participatory budget across very different areas of the city: Puerto Madero, Abasto, and La Boca. Discussion centres on dynamics of participation and non-participation observed during extensive fieldwork in 2004 and 2005. The research aimed to establish intense co-presence through participant-observation, yet instead yielded an ethnography of absences, entailing analysis of how, why and with what consequences there was lacking participation in this participatory experiment. The phenomenon of absencing points to an emergent governmentality that enables ironically pernicious, territorialised regulation of difference, which must be countered to fulfil the promise of such widespread experiments.
The participatory planning method called Plano Global Específico (PGE; Specific Global Plan) has been used in Belo Horizonte, Brazil since 1995 for interventions in favelas (spontaneous settlements). Although the responsible municipal agency describes it optimistically, inhabitants have manifested significant discontent. This article focuses on the reasons for this controversy, analysing the PGE method against the background of Brazilian re-democratisation and Belo Horizonte's public policies for favelas. The article argues that institutionalised participation does not favour the qualitative leap towards citizen control or autonomy, but is essentially attached to heteronomous planning structures.
This article discusses a model of local governance referred to here as ‘participatory security’, in which citizens are held responsible for maintaining urban security by participating in municipal programmes. I argue that the goals of universal ‘inclusion’ through democratic ‘participation’ are undermined by political ideologies espousing both rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Through ethnographic cases from highland Peru, in which city centre neighbourhoods and peripheral zones are expected to participate in markedly different fashions, I demonstrate how the discourse of responsibilities translates into differential participation and effectively institutionalises the layered imbalances of urban citizenship in new and highly consequential ways.
In 2003, the Government of El Salvador launched Plan Mano Dura to curb urban violence and homicides, most of which had been attributed to street gangs. Domestic non-governmental organisations (NGOs) criticised the measure for its repressive nature and the neglect of the wider policies for prevention and rehabilitation, and sought to promote the implementation of alternative gang control. Drawing on ethnographic research in Homies Unidos-El Salvador – founded and organised by pandilleros calmados (retired gang members) – the article considers how both the socio-political context and organisational characteristics shaped the agency's advocacy strategy and why its efforts remained largely ineffective.
In recent decades, problems with the provision of drinking water and sanitation services around the world have increasingly been addressed by attempts at privatisation, recasting clean water as an essentially economic, rather than public, good. This approach gained particular acceptance in Latin America, but with limited success. In order to address the full range of social, economic and environmental values necessary to sustain water resources over time, public and governmental involvement in establishing integrated water management, pursuing ‘soft path’ approaches, assuring stakeholder input and setting policy will be essential to the process.
An often overlooked issue in the discussion of sustainable development is that of municipal solid waste management. Yet solid waste management is pervasive in all sustainable development objectives: its management, or lack thereof, can have major implications for the health of the environment, economy and society. This article argues the need for a governance dimension in the sustainability model, taking into account implementation strategies, monitoring and institutional controls. This focus heavily relies on integrated public–private partnerships and deliberative democracy approaches in order to achieve sustainability within the solid waste management sector. In this article, national and local policies in Brazil are analysed, primarily focusing on the inclusion of informal waste collection into municipal solid waste management schemes. The city of Curitiba, in the state of Paraná, which is world-renowned for its innovative sustainable development policies, is used to frame and illustrate the case.
Editor: Society for Latin American Studies
Direção: University of Liverpool, Room 313a, Cypress Building, L69 7ZR Liverpool
Sistema Regional de Información en Línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina, el Caribe, España y Portugal. Recurso creado por una red internacional que reune y difunde información bibliográfica sobre las publicaciones científicas seriadas producidas en la región. El "Diretório" recoge las publicaciones académicas y científicas que superan un nivel mínimo de calidad editorial, mientras que en el "Catálogo" ingresan aquellas que alcanzan un nivel óptimo en los criterios de evaluación. REDIAL colabora suministrando información sobre las revistas latinoamericanistas europeas.