Скачать книгу

in Brazil, especially considering the policy systems created since the 1990s, combining centralization and decentralization (Arretche 2012). In some policy sectors, institutionalized social participation has played an important role, although more rarely in urban policies (Gurza Lavalle 2018). Finally, municipalities follow one single institutional format, as will be detailed through a comparative analysis in Chapter 1. They are governed by mayors and municipal councils, directly elected for four‐year terms since the mid‐1980s.16 Municipalities have access to a reasonable proportion of the nation's public budget, although, as we shall see in Chapter 3, only a small portion is available for discretionary allocation.

      In 2010, the metropolitan region of São Paulo was home to more than 20 million inhabitants. Like other Latin American metropolises, the city was expanded by the large‐scale migration of poor people from less developed regions of the country during the decades of intense industrialization between the 1940s and the 1980s. Housing policies were fragile and selective, and in fact, the State did not provide even primary urbanization conditions for this population, who had to develop several types of precarious housing solutions to settle in the city. Between 1964 and 1985, the country was under authoritarian military rule with various regressive social effects. The redemocratization process was completed only in 1988 with the promulgation of a new, democratic constitution.

      This book is organized in 3 parts and 11 chapters, plus this introduction and the conclusion. The first part discusses urban politics, with a chapter on the executive, a second on the council and a third on the municipal budget. Parts II and III discuss urban policies and the governance of each policy area, considering various actors, capacity building, policy instruments and institutions. Part II is devoted to urban services, while Part III investigates housing and land policies. In the end, the conclusion compares the findings and discusses theoretical lessons. The chapters are summarized below.

      Chapter 1 by Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques and Telma Hoyler introduces the political background of the period by discussing and comparing municipal governments, mayors and administrations. The period was marked by substantial swings in local government, with three governments of the left, two of the center‐right and another three of the right. The chapter summarizes the political environments and the characteristics of each government since the mid‐1980s.

      In the second chapter, Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques and Telma Hoyer complement the background history through a discussion of government formation, the council and executive‐legislative relations. Electoral results specify the formation of support coalitions under the influence of Brazilian multipartyism and coalition presidentialism. Locally, this leads to the formation of government and opposition blocks in which mayors started with just plurality support but in almost all cases created comfortable coalitions on the council. Coalition formation, however, came at the cost of pork‐barrel expenditures, changing policies for special interests and primarily appointing political brokers to government positions. On the other hand, local councilors were key political mobilizers for mayors through their territorialized political machines, during elections but also throughout government mandates.

      The second part of the book focuses on the primary urban services delivered through contracts or concessions with private companies such as mobility and waste management. For historical reasons, mobility policies in São Paulo are divided among several agencies, both municipal (buses and traffic control) and state‐owned (a public subway company), while successive municipal institutions managed waste collection.

      In Chapter 4, Carolina Requena studies traffic control policies since the 1970s. She argues that the insulation of the municipal traffic agency during its foundation period allowed it to establish and maintain an automobile priority paradigm that negatively impacted the performance of collective road transportation, run by a historically under‐empowered bureaucracy. This paradigm was consistent with mayoral priorities during the military period but became increasingly outdated under democracy. Recent administrations have confronted the highly regressive automobile paradigm and induced the traffic and bus control bureaucracies to interact and change, but not without intense intra‐ and inter‐organizational conflicts, giving rise to redistributive mobility policies that benefited mainly the poor, the majority of users of public transportation.

      Bus services are the subject of Chapter 5 by Marcos Campos. This policy is a municipal responsibility and has been assumed by private companies under contract or concession since the 1950s, with secondary direct public participation. The chapter focuses on the system's transformations since the 1980s, when private providers were increasingly regulated by a series of bureaucratic objects and public policy instruments. Operating as material references for representations of transported passengers and bus fare revenues, objects such as smart cards and GPS instruments occupy a central position in regulation. The main changes in redistributive policy occurred under left‐wing administrations, although sometimes using previous instruments created with other aims by right‐wing governments. The accumulation of these instruments over time reduced opacity and strengthened regulatory capacities, complementing the change of mobility paradigms mentioned earlier, with significant redistributive effects.

Скачать книгу