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Arabica Robusta

Democracy experiments in the Latin American political lab | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...in-latin-american-political-la

social movements intervention development corporate theory geography

shared by Arabica Robusta on 07 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • But their action took on real strength from its territorial outreach. They managed to mobilize local communities, parents and teachers, neighbours and local organizations, into supporting the movement in the face of increasing pressure from the government and the police. Civil society responded, in short, to the embattled students.
  • Feeling the pressure, in December 2015, state governor Geraldo Alckmin finally announced the dismissal of his government’s education secretary, and the shelving of the school reorganization. His proposal, which was received with caution by students, consists in undertaking an extensive dialogue with students, parents, teachers and principals to understand the specific situation in each school and decide its future accordingly
  • We have witnessed numerous demonstrations where citizens have organized themselves to challenge government decisions, have used technology to liaise and social networks and independent media to convey their story. And they have occupied public spaces as a means to convey the message to politicians that politics is about people’s concerns, and that democracy must prevail not only in the formal access to power, but also in the way it is exercised. The political and democratic crises are not exclusively Latin American, but today there is an opportunity for Latin America to rethink its own democracy model, originally developed in the region. The political action in the making, shown by the student mobilization in Sao Paulo, is one of the ways to seize this opportunity.
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  • We know that democracy in Latin America is far from being consolidated. Not because there is a threat of military coups or openly autocratic regimes, but because of the weakening of institutions, the threats to fundamental rights, the curtailment of freedoms, and the hijacking of power by the economic and political elites and organized crime.
  • There are certainly positive and negative aspects to this social transformation, but what is important here is to recognize its inevitability, and the fact that current political systems have not yet discovered how to react to what is happening. The existing gap between government and society is evidenced in every political process, every protest, every decision made by the powers that be which are incapable of understanding the voices and complexities of public opinion.
  • The classical dynamics of representative democracy, where citizens choose their representatives democratically but the exercise of power is carried on behind closed doors, seems not to take into account the 21st century’s citizen.
  • Something is happening in Latin American politics. While the political system shows structural problems, we witness the emergence of a new field, a laboratory of political experimentation that allows us to imagine a next step forward for democracy in the region.
Arabica Robusta

Elites_transnational_policy.pdf - 0 views

shared by Arabica Robusta on 07 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • three distinctive theoretical lenses in their investigations: fields, hegemony, and institutions.
  • Our contributions include pieces on the Trump administration, the professional ecologies of transnational policy elites, the treatment of transboundary political problems, the characteristics of technocratic elites, the racial and gender composition of transnational elites, and professional competition over transnational policy issues.
  • In recent years there has been a resurgence of studies on elites (Davis 2017; Savage 2014; Young et al. 2016). Scholars are increasingly paying attention to the acceleration of inequality in the distribution of wealth and power around select groups.
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  • We highlight how fields, hegemony and institutions approaches to elites in transnational policy networks focus on different aspects of elite replication and policy influence; including where elite’s influence on policy comes from; how it can be identified; and its overall out c om e s.
  • The grand challenge of studying elites in transnational policy networks is twofold – opacity and complexity.
  • Transnational elites, in this terminology, are always field specific. Fields can be thought of as sector or domain specific, such as economic, political, cultural, scientific or administrative. Within these fields is always a struggle for field specific resources, or capitals
  • Second, elites affect transnational policy networks in institutionally complex ways. Transnational policy networks include actors from intergovernmental organizations like the World Bank, OECD, and others, but are not reducible to them. The library of work on intergovernmental organizations illuminates how public authorities are designed by states seeking to cooperate with or dominate each other, and how they have internal conflicts over political and technocratic interests (Kentikelenis and Seabrooke 2017).
  • In general, elites are actors who have disproportionately high levels of influence on their social structure.
  • Elites in transnational policy networks are those who have disproportionate influence over policy design and implementation on issues of global importance. This includes influence on agenda-setting, decisionmaking, and policy content. Policy includes explicit reform programmes, scripts for best practices, as well as regulatory norms and standards.
  • The first generation of this scholarship centred on moving ‘beyond reified entities (‘the State’) to analyse the role of elites, networks and agents’ at the transnational level (Cohen 2013: 103), including the formation of ‘transnational guilds’ (Bigo 2016).
  • A further complication in studying elites is identifying how they articulate power. Elite power is exercised through individual as well as organizational action that springs from micro- and meso-level processes (Scott 2008). T
  • Scholars adopting this approach have specified how national differences matter for elites, with specific career trajectories tied to national understandings of how fields are distinguished (Bühlmann et al. 2018; Gautier Morin and Rossier, this issue). These games are then played transnationally in respective fields, such as the legal, economic, and political fields, as shown in Figure 1. The outcomes of these games lead to policies that have an effect on wealthy states and especially on poorer states (Dezalay and Garth 2002).
  • A common approach in such scholarship is to investigate how capital used for positioning in domination games is transferred from individuals’ family backgrounds and expanded and reinforced through the acquisition of elite educational diplomas.
  • Harrington and Seabrooke 2020), as well as how organizations, such as global accounting firms, replicate professional practices (Spence and Carter 2014; Spence et al. 2016).
  • Most recently, field-theoretic scholars have started paying attention to ‘transnational power elites’ that have created some autonomy from national states through meta-institutions such as the European Union (Kauppi and Madsen 2013, 2014), as well as organization beyond the control of the state such as international commercial arbitration (Grisel 2017).
  • more computational methods to trace its subjects of analysis, including the mapping of social networks to assist the identification of fields (Larsen and Ellersgaard 2017) as well as content analysis to distinguish positions within fields (Ban and Patenaude 2018).
  • Van der Pijl (1984) and Cox (1987: 271) were among the first scholars to talk about what became known as a ‘transnational capitalist class’ (TCC) (Carroll 2013).
  • Sklair also identified four intersecting fractions of the transnational capitalist class (1) TNC executives; (2) globalizing bureaucrats; (3) globalizing politicians and professionals; (4) consumerist elites (merchants and media).
  • The role of networks has been addressed in more contemporary research. Carroll and Carson (2003) located five top transnational policy-planning groups in the ‘larger structure of corporate power that is constituted through interlocking directorates among the world’s largest corporations.’ They found that the network was tied together by a few select ‘cosmopolitan managers’ that, via policy groups, ‘pull the directorates of the world’s major corporations together, and collaterally integrate the lifeworld of the global corporate elite’ to promote neoliberalism (Carroll and Carson 2003: 29).
  • The institutions approach to elites in transnational policy networks draws from a Weberian premise: that actors seek to propel their political and economic interests through institutions and organizations
  • This includes: World Polity models of how world cultural norms spread through rationalization processes; recursive theories of how organizations interact to produce transnational policy scripts; and theories on how professionals exert influence through networks. In all cases elites are treated as important for decision-making processes. Elites typically refers to political elites within organizations and governments or, more commonly, policy elites who are regarded as the expert authority on policy issues.
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