This paper considers why the housing subsidy programme in South Africa has had so little impact on poverty reduction despite its scale and generous funding. It discusses how this was linked to the government’s conception of housing, the institutions involved and who controlled funding flows for housing. Most government funding went to contractors to build new units “for the poor”; it was assumed that these would replace homes in informal settlements that the poor developed themselves. Despite statements about the government’s commitment to the People’s Housing Process (PHP), informal settlements were only seen in negative terms and there was no support for incremental upgrading and very little support for low-income households to build their own homes. Meanwhile, the contractor-built houses were usually too small, of poor quality and in locations far from livelihoods and services. The paper ends with suggestions for how the formal institutions of government can learn to support and work with the poor. The incremental approaches of the poor to their own housing and livelihoods can serve as an alternative first principle for conceiving of the challenge of human settlements policy and practice. Furthermore, funding flows and their associated institutions should support people-centred development and institutionalize systems that make the informed participation of residents of informal settlements a pre-condition for state support.
Over the last several decades, dozens of dictatorships have become democracies. Yet while each has held free and fair elections, they have varied in the extent to which their citizens realize the ideal of self-rule. Why do some democracies distribute power to citizens while other democracies withhold it? Existing research is suggestive, but its implications are ambiguous. Cross-national studies have focused on democracy's formal dimensions, while work on substantive democracy is case-based. We find that one of the most consistent and powerful explanations of substantive democratization is the length of unarmed pro-democratic mobilization prior to a transition. Through a case study of Brazil, we illustrate that these movements matter in three ways: first, because practices of self-organizing model and enable democratic reforms; second, because movement veterans use state office to deepen democracy; and third, because long movements yield civil societies with the capacity to demand the continuous deepening of democracy.
Over the last several decades, dozens of dictatorships have become democracies. Yet while each has held free and fair elections, they have varied in the extent to which their citizens realize the ideal of self-rule. Why do some democracies distribute power to citizens while other democracies withhold it? Existing research is suggestive, but its implications are ambiguous. Cross-national studies have focused on democracy’s formal dimensions, while work on substantive democracy is case-based. We find that one of the most consistent and powerful explanations of substantive democratization is the length of unarmed pro-democratic mobilization prior to a transition. Through a case study of Brazil, we illustrate that these movements matter in three ways: first, because practices of self-organizing model and enable democratic reforms; second, because movement veterans use state office to deepen democracy; and third, because long movements yield civil societies with the capacity to demand the continuous deepening of democracy.
Why do some urban governing regimes realize a more equal distribution of public goods than others? Local government interventions in São Paulo, Brazil, have produced surprisingly effective redistribution of residential public goodshousing and sanitationbetween 1989 and 2016. I use original interviews and archival research for a comparative-historical analysis of variation across time in São Paulo's governance of housing and sanitation. I argue that sequential configurations of a) "embeddedness" of the local state in civil society and b) the "cohesion" of the institutional sphere of the local state, explain why and when urban governing regimes generate the coordinating capacity to distribute public goods on a programmatic basis. I further illustrate how these configurations can explain variation in urban governing regimes across the world. Keywords Bureaucracy . Governance . Housing . Movements . Sanitation . Urban inequality From a "new urban crisis" (Florida, 2017) in the United States, to a "planet of slums" (Davis, 2006) across the globe, unequal access to public goods pervades urban life. The scholarly tendency has been to explain urban exclusions as determined by the structural role of cities in the globalized integration of markets (Brenner & Theodore, 2002). Even so, democracy creates the possibility for alternative distributions of social power to address inequalities (Usmani, 2018). Explaining the distribution of public goods in democratic cities begs for variation-finding approaches. Why do some urban governing regimes realize a more equal distribution of public goods than others?This article proposes conceptual tools for answering this question through a comparative and historical study of a "least likely case" (Gerring, 2005) for improvements in including previously excluded residents into the built environment of public goods in the city. São Paulo, Brazil, the fourteenth most populous city in the world, grewTheory and Society
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