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The Semi-Arid region of Brazil (SAB) has been periodically affected by moderate to extreme droughts, jeopardizing livelihoods and severely impacting the life standards of millions of family farmers. In the early 1990s the Human Coexistence with Semi-Aridity (HCSA) emerged as a development approach. The debate on HCSA is limited to Brazilian literature but as a technological and a bottom-up governance experience, researches on the topic could add some insights to international debate on living with drought. The present paper adopts an historical perspective on HCSA before discussing the main HCSA's rainwater-harvesting methods found in two case studies in the SAB as a local appropriate and advanced technological package for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Qualitative analysis of 32 semi-structured interviews with key local stakeholders, 29 unstructured interviews with family farmers, and surveys in 499 family farms are used. The results show that regardless the highly adaptive potential, the technologies are adopted in differ rates among them and in between case studies chosen, influenced by non-technological factors and interacting the broader public policies context. Scaling up the HCSA's technologies in the rural SAB is a development path towards the SDGs.

This article aims to consider conceptions of the Brazilian conditional cash transfer Bolsa Família Program as elaborated by both those responsible for its implementation and its beneficiaries in Northeast Brazil. Most innovative in this study is the adoption of the program's municipal social workers, who are responsible for the implementation of the program, as the main observation point, by conceptualizing them as street-level bureaucrats. The research is based on ethnographic fieldwork that took place between 2013 and 2015, for a total of six months, combined with in-depth interviews with the program's beneficiaries in a middle-sized municipality of the State of Ceará. Social workers enjoy a range of discretion that directly affects the distribution of benefits. Their efforts to better apply what they see as scarce resources are embedded in their representations of poverty-separating "deserving" from "undeserving" poor-generating insecurity among beneficiaries. By doing so, beneficiaries' understanding of the program as a social right is compromised, which is reinforced by a fragile legal status enjoyed by the Bolsa Família and ambiguous bureaucratic procedures.

ResumoEste artigo tem por objetivos testar a aplicabilidade da teoria da sociedade de risco de Ulrich Beck para a sociedade brasileira contemporânea e analisar a distribuição social da percepção de risco associada às mudanças climáticas e ao aquecimento global. Para tanto, é feita uma revisão de teorias de risco, além de uma discussão crítica de sua aplicação ao caso das mudanças climáticas. Em seguida são apresentados resultados de pesquisa, verificando o efeito de diferentes variáveis sociodemográficas na percepção de risco. Os dados advêm de pesquisa de opinião pública em território nacional, com amostra estratificada por conglomerados. O principal resultado alcançado diz respeito à homogeneidade da percepção de risco, por meio de diferentes categorias sociais ou contextos geográficos. As únicas categorias que apresentaram influências significativas na avaliação da percepção de risco foram renda familiar e escolaridade, ambas com relação positiva.

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How is policy implementation affected by increased polarisation and extreme shifts in politics? In order to address this question, the paper focuses on frontline workers’ (street-level bureaucrats’) interpretations of political shifts and how these are then translated into practice. Building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among social workers in Northeast Brazil, the paper proposes a theoretical framework for analysing the influence of political landscapes on policy implementation by foregrounding the political processes in which these agents play a critical role. Drawing on empirical data, the paper proposes ideal types of possible outcomes of translation practices – counterbalance, collaboration, resistance – that function as a guiding framework for future research.

In scholarship on informal politics in Brazil, clientelism is a wellstudied phenomenon. While studies of clientelism generally concentrate on elections, campaigning and vote buying, clientelist practices and their impact extend well beyond this temporal and thematic focus. This article develops an approach that builds on theories of brokerage in anthropology and social network studies. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in low-income neighbourhoods in Recife, Brazil, it shows how clientelism is based on informal exchanges both within and outside election periods. Through a study of community leaders, their projects and their search for resources, the article advances a more comprehensive understanding of how clientelism works as a social mechanism in the ordering of life in these neighbourhoods.

Clientelism is often analyzed along lines of moral values and reciprocity or an economic rationality. This article, instead, moves beyond this dichotomy and shows how both frameworks coexist and become entwined. Based on ethnographic research in a city in the Brazilian Northeast, it analyzes how the anti-poverty Bolsa Família Program and its bureaucracy are entangled with electoral politics and clientelism. We show how the program’s beneficiaries engage in clientelist relationships and exchanges to deal with structural precariousness and bureaucratic uncertainty. Contributing to understanding the complexity of clientelism, our analysis demonstrates how they, in their assessment of and dealing with political candidates, employ the frames of reference of both reciprocity and economic rationality in such a way that they act as a “counterpoint” to each other.