The problems with telecentres are well documented.   Based on a participatory action research project that directly contributed to improved quality of life for 35% of participants and indirectly for another 41% of participants, this paper presents key factors affecting the use of telecentres by poorer people to empower themselves to improve their quality of life. Understanding the numerous interlinking problems surrounding the functionality and use of telecentres as factors of structure and agency as presented in Kleine’s Choice Framework (2011), provides a useful departure point to re-invent telecentres as active citizen development centres.

The project has made efforts to produce a baseline for the research linked to indicators on the following three broad dimensions of the local government reform: 1. Governance: local autonomy and citizen participation. 2. Finances and financial management: accountability, efficiency and local resource mobilisation. 3. Service delivery and poverty alleviation: criteria of success and operational constraints.

Brazil's recent social changes have been dramatic. Apart from the impressive reduction in poverty and seemingly inexhaustible economic growth of recent years, the country's politics seem like a testament to the possibilities of social-movement driven change. With the end of the military dictatorship (1964-85), social movements of all sorts emerged as protagonists of a new kind of politics. They were radical, yet democratic; they challenged the system, but were oriented towards a sense of the public good; militant, but also civic. The 'new trade union unionism', the urban movement, the health movement, the feminist movement, the black and student movements were some of the expressions of what Evelina Dagnino (2004) described as the 'new citizenship' of the time. In addition to imagining new democratic practices and institutions to challenge Brazil's deeply rooted social authoritarianism, these movements would largely find expression in the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), or the Workers Party. The election in 2002 of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, a former metal worker and strike leader with little in the way of formal education, was the end of a 'long march through institutions' for the party, after two decades of failed national

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Between 2010 and 2016, over 65,000 slum dwellers were forcibly evicted in Rio de Janeiro. This article compares three cases of anti-eviction resistance over this period. While the three case study communities were all relatively successful in contesting evictions, the outcomes (material, social, political-symbolic) of their mobilizations were different. To understand how and why, we examine and compare the structures and processes of mobilization in these three communities and show how they found different openings and limitations in the changing political opportunity structure. We distinguish three distinct 'moments' or opportunity structures in Rio de Janeiro's urban governance between 2010 and 2016. We term these the City of Exception, the City in Revolt and the City in Crisis. The analytical and theoretical framework of contentious politics helps us draw together and expand on two dominant narratives in scholars' approach to slum evictions: on the one hand a top-down perspective of the 'city against slum dwellers'; on the other a bottom-up perspective of 'slum dwellers against the city'. In this article we test the usefulness of our expanded framework--contentious politics of slums--for understanding the organization and outcomes of community resistance against evictions, and discuss its relevance for research on the politics of slums in the global South.

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