The democratic transformation of public policy through community activism in Brazil

Abstract

This article explores transformational change in public policy through community-based governance and the collective design of experience-oriented policy and action. Using a critical-interpretive theoretical perspective, we derived three key lessons in achieving this change from the experience of Paraisópolis, a Brazilian favela made famous for its COVID-19 successful response plan, despite historical state abandonment and overlapping vulnerabilities. The three lessons were (i) proximity coordination, (ii) collective learning, and (iii) affectionate relationality. All three underpinned the principle of ‘community activism’ and ‘deliberative empowerment’, which in turn were both crucial in effecting democratic transformations. Through our case study of Paraisópolis, we argue that transformational change crucially involved civil society engagement alongside inclusive deliberative forums. This reinforces the need to pursue a policy research agenda attentive to sociocentric experiences, ordinary actors and the emotions and values underlying public action.

Transformational change through Public Policy

“…Transformational scholarship needs the combination and collaboration of mainstream and critical scholarship that we called for in our previous special issue (Berglund et al, 2022). Similarly, this special issue draws on a diversity of scholarship, from interpretive approaches in Boullosa et al (2022) to more positivist scholarship in the case of Nohrstedt (2022). If the goal is to advance knowledge and promote action, we need to maintain the 'all-hands-on-deck' mentality promoted by Policy & Politics.…”

“…This special issue highlights such agency in the context of structure. Take for example Boullosa et al (2022) who identify lessons contributing to the Brazilian community of Paraisópolis' successful community-based governance in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, including proximity coordination, collective learning and affectionate rationality. Levac et al (2022) provide similar insights in their tips for engaged scholarship in improving policy processes, especially in disrupting existing community power distributions.…”

“…It is perhaps telling that three of our contributors to this special issue have indeed chosen to focus on various types of grassroots actors in analysing transformational change (Boullosa and Peres, 2022;Joy and Vogel, 2022;Levac et al, 2022). These contributions highlight how communities of engaged citizens can make their own (informal) public policies (Boullosa et al, 2022), social (urban) movements can be a force for change (Joy and Vogel, 2022), and people can (in collaboration with policy scholars) solve community problems (Levac et al, 2022). To put it differently, it is not that policy studies focuses on the wrong things, but rather that its ability to understand and foster changes in policy and society would be enhanced with a broader lens.…”

“…Thus, while policy scholars observe radical shifts in public attention and policy activity linked to social movements, the emphasis tends to be on the broad time scales necessary to justify such claims rather than on the mechanisms driving the change (for example, Baumgartner and Jones, 2016;. Boullosa et al (2022), Joy and Vogel (2022), and Levac et al (2022) all show how policy scholars can draw lessons from specific cases of citizen engagement and social movements to think more deeply about the drivers of transformational change.…”

“…Rather, their legitimacy comes from the people engaged in the policy issue. Boullosa et al's (2022) work exemplifies informal policy changes at the community level. What is important is that both of these concepts refer to characteristics of a policy change in and of itself, sometimes referred to as a policy output (Koontz and Thomas, 2006).…”