2001

The essays in this book trace the development of Joel S. Migdal's "state-insociety" approach. His process-oriented analysis illuminates how power is exercised around the world, and how and when patterns of power change. Despite the triumph of the concept of state in social science literature, actual states have demonstrated less coherence than their theoretical counterparts, and, despite their apparent resources, have had great difficulty in transforming public policies into successful social change. The state-in-society approach demonstrates both that states are fragmented and that they face a multitude of social organizations-families, clans, multinational corporations, domestic businesses, tribes, political parties, and patron-client dyads-that maintain and vie for the power to set the rules guiding people's behavior. These ongoing and overlapping struggles ally parts of the state with groups in society against other such coalitions. In the process, they determine how societies and states create and maintain distinct ways of structuring day-today life, including the nature of the rules that govern people's behavior, whom they benefit and whom they disadvantage, which sorts of elements unite people and which divide them, and what shared meanings people hold about their relations with others and their place in the world.

Studying individuals who move from civil society into government in an effort to pursue reform agendas provides important " bottom up " insights into the complexity of policy processes. Using a set of original life history data collected in the Philippines, this article analyses the experiences of such crossover reformist efforts in post-Marcos Philippines in the field of agrarian reform. Taking each of the four governments of the period in turn, a set of themes are discussed including entryism as a political strategy, political patronage, organizational culture, role transitions and activist identities. The article concludes with the idea that the boundary between state and civil society is an important, relatively unexplored area of political activity. By opening up this area as an arena of contentious politics, an ethnographic approach tells us more about the challenges and complexity encountered by those attempting to influence policy processes from the inside, and about the policy process itself as a non-linear phenomenon.

Latin American Research Review, 2018

Under new democratic regimes, civil society organizations (CSOs) alter their political strategies to better engage public officials and citizens as well as to influence broader political debates. In Brazil, between 1990 and 2010, CSOs gained access to a broad participatory architecture as well as a reconfigured state, inducing CSOs to employ a wider range of strategies. This article uses a political network approach to illuminate variation in CSOs' political strategies across four policy arenas and show how the role of the state, the broader configuration of civil society, the interests of elected officials, and the rules of participatory institutions interact to produce this variation. Data for this article's analysis come from a survey of three hundred CSO leaders in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte. The survey identified the strategies they employed to promote policy change and direct resource allocation in the arenas of participatory budgeting, health care, social services, and housing. Sociographs generated from survey results reveal a distinct clustering within each policy arena of the strategies employed by CSOs, providing further support to the usefulness of the analytical framework.

in Ruth Alsop, ed., Power, Rights and Poverty: Concepts and Connections, 2004

Handbook on Participatory Governance

Cadernos Gestão Pública e Cidadania, 2012

The municipalization of basic social service delivery in Brazil provides significant incentives for local public officials to have a better understanding of their constituents' needs and requirements both to govern and for political purposes. The broadening of participatory venues under the 1988 Constitution allowed for the establishment of a broad number of public venues that civil society leaders could use to represent their associations. Government officials and civil society leaders have constant contact with each other as each seek to promote polices that advance their narrow and broader concerns. This article focuses on the establishment of three governing principles of five successive governments in Belo Horizonte: Social justice, popular participation, and interlocking institutions. The government and its allies in civil society redesigned citizen access points into the state as means to clarifying the signals sent from citizens to government officials, to allow civil society organization (CSO) leaders to act as intermediaries between citizens and public officials and to allow government officials' to tap into CSO leaders and citizens' attitudes on a wide range of pressing political issues. These interlocking venues are a key moment of interest mediation, which partially accounts for how Belo Horizonte produces robust social policy change in a context of a highly fragmented party system. Participatory governance is now the key mechanism that allows for constant dialogue among citizens and government officials. This article is part of a larger research project seeking to understand how and why the local Brazilian state was restructured in the 1990s, how citizens are incorporated into state-sanctioned governance bodies, and importantly, how the new institutional environment has helped to transform state-society relations.

This paper provides a comprehensive analytical framework for a pluralistic response to the unresolved crises of public authority in weak states involved in contested democratic transitions. It identifies the institutional challenges that all societies must meet to sustain political order and public authority, and the different processes they adopt in authoritarian and modern liberal social systems. It accepts the normative and technical claims of liberal and social democratic institutions, but also the need to reconcile and harmonise them with neo-traditional institutions in societies that are still building modern states. It shows that this can only be done by using hybrid solutions that take account of the diverse historical legacies in different types of state, and uses the insights of classical development theorists to provide a comprehensive social-centric methodology to do so. It concludes by identifying the major changes that this implies for the neo-liberal good governance agenda, refers to several recent studies that address the ambiguous role played by modern traditional institutions in weak states, and reviews case studies that demonstrate the contribution that progressive hybrid programmes can make to the rehabilitation and reconstruction of weak and conflict states, and the serious costs of failing to adopt them.

2015

The 2011 uprisings came as a surprise to most observers and toppled seemingly impregnable regimes. As the heady optimism of the revolutions has waned, however, it seems like normal politics has resumed. What this neglects is how the protest movements of 2011 – and social movements more generally – are able to exercise power in multiple ways that extend beyond the state. Our central contention is that we are blind to the transformations that protest effects, because we are wedded to theories of power that are illequipped to explain processes of social change. Conventional analyses of power present individuals as internalizing social structures in ways that govern their actions, and negate their agency and resistance. We, therefore, critique leading theorists of power and highlight their inability to explain social upheavals. We then draw on more recent understandings of power that better explain and, thus, enable, social change.

2009