Contextualizing State Housing Programs in Latin America: Evidence from Leading Housing Agencies in Brazil, Ecuador, and Jamaica

1993 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 653-676 ◽  
Author(s):  
T Klak
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Final Section ◽  
The State ◽  
Economic Resources ◽  
Housing Programs ◽  
Agency Behavior ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Distorted Form

The policy literature offers many valid criticisms of government housing programs, but does not adequately trace housing-agency failures to their causes in the broader political and economic contexts of peripheral capitalist countries. The literature especially lacks an understanding of the role of interests within the state which benefit from housing programs in their current distorted form. In response to these analytical shortcomings, the author of this paper adapts a geographically hierarchical and comparative framework from locality studies that is capable of revealing both structural commonalities and contextual particularities of housing-agency behavior. The research is an examination and comparison of the performance of the major housing agencies in Brazil, Ecuador, and Jamaica. The diversity of economic resources and political regimes in these countries during the last three decades provides a spectrum of regional experiences. The investigation unfolds with the setting of the context of dependent capitalism, without which it is not possible to understand either the prominence or the incapacity of Latin American housing agencies. Next, the research adopts an historical vantage point to reveal key actors and events in housing-agency institutionalization. Having set the structural and historical contexts, the author then examines motives related to the state and its agents that help to explain why working-class housing programs have become self-centered patronage bureaucracies, to the neglect of their socially progressive goals. The author then explains how housing agencies have primarily used rhetoric, plans, and images, not material investment, to legitimize themselves to the disenfranchised working class. The final section synthesizes the paper's main points thereby establishing a political economic context for understanding Latin American housing programs.

scholarly journals The Urban Worlds of Latin and Anglo America: PrefatoryThoughts

2013 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Richard M. Morse
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Growth And Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
European Settlement ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Introductory Paper

This introductory paper examines some of the main questions raised by the papers presented to the urbanization symposium in Vancouver. Comparisons between the Latin American urban experience and that of the United States and Canada revealed basic contrasts in spite of some broad hemispheric similarities. Differences were particularly apparent in the residual influence of native society on later European settlement, in the role of the state versus private commerce in growth and development, and in the differing class structures.

Party plenum strengthens Xi’s grip on China

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Senior Leaders ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Political Economic

Subject The Communist Party's recent Fourth Plenum meeting. Significance The Communist Party concluded a five-day meeting of senior leaders on October 31. The meeting, called the ‘Fourth Plenum’, focused on institutional and intra-Party affairs. Press statements that followed were short on policy detail, but the meeting appears to have reaffirmed President Xi Jinping's efforts to place the Party and its ideology at the centre of China's political, economic and social life. Impacts Xi’s grip on the Party appears unassailable. There are no signs of Xi lining up a successor; he looks likely to remain leader for a third term. There are no indications that Beijing will compromise on US demands to reduce the role of the state in industry.

A Second-Rate Navy, 1714-1795

2011 ◽  
pp. 127-190
Author(s):  
Jaap R. Bruijn
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
The State ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Roles And Responsibilities ◽  
Naval Officers

The final section investigates the decline of the Dutch navy in the years following the financially devastating War of the Spanish Succession, and the various attempts to reinvigorate the Dutch economy through overseas shipping. It is divided into five parts: convoys and the containment of Barbary corsairs; favouritism, innovation, and malpractice within the navy; the restructuring of the roles and responsibilities of naval officers; the role of naval seamen; and a final part concerning the aftermath of the overthrowing of the Dutch Republic in 1795 by the French Revolutionary Army. It concludes by summarising the state of the navy in 1795 - naval administration had become centralised; officers undertook institutionalised education; the fleet undertook new duties; and the advent of steamship technology was beginning to transform the navy with more vigor than ever before.

scholarly journals Crise politique et transnationalisation de l’État en Amérique latine : une interprétation théorique

2005 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Nef
Keyword(s):  
Central America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
National Development ◽  
The State ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
State Terrorism ◽  
Structural Relationships ◽  
Acute Crisis

If the crisis of the state has been a common trait in Latin America, its manifestations have not been the same throughout the continent. This article examines two general and apparently contraditory trends : the trend toward authoritarian capitalism resulting from the crisis of hegemony in South America and the trend towards popularly-based insurgency resulting from a crisis of domination in most of Central America. The author bases his general interpretation of these trends on the analysis of the historical and structural relationships between four factors identified as responsible for the drastic change in the role of the state, from "national development" to "national security" : the crisis in the model of accumulation, the growing polarization of political alliance, the transnationalization of the civil society and the state, and the interplay between relative autonomy of the state and transnationalization. He finds that the combination of transnational integration of the Latin American elites into one U.S.-centered project with hegemonic pretensions, and a growing marginalization and alienation on the part of the bulk of the internal constituencies has brought about an acute crisis of both legitimation and domination. As violence becomes the most common political currency -with repression and plain state terrorism evolving into a distinct style of politics - and the prospects towards redemocratization being very fragile, the author concludes that revolutionary struggles may be the only possibility for an indigenous redefinition of development, national self-determination and democracy.

scholarly journals Performing Agency Theory and the Neoliberalization of the State

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-411
Author(s):  
Tim Christiaens
Keyword(s):  
Financial Markets ◽  
Agency Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
Main Task ◽  
Corporate Managers ◽  
State Dependent ◽  
Economic Developments ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Bondholder Value

According to Streeck and Vogl, the neoliberalization of the state has been the result of political-economic developments that render the state dependent on financial markets. However, they do not explain the discursive shifts that would have been required for demoting the state to the role of an agent to bondholders. I propose to explain this shift via the performative effect of neoliberal agency theory. In 1976, Michael Jensen and William Meckling claimed that corporate managers are agents to shareholding principals, which implied that their main task was the procurement of shareholder value. Agency theory subsequently prescribes a series of measures to ensure the alignment of principal and agent interests in corporations. The diffusion of agency theory, however, moved beyond corporate governance to reconfigure the state. Due to its reliance on capital markets, the state supposedly likewise becomes an agent of the investment public and should procure bondholder value.

Not Really Single: The Deportation to Welfare Pathway for U.S. Citizen Mothers in Mixed-Status Marriage

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 1075-1092 ◽  
Author(s):  
April M. Schueths
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Single Parent ◽  
Global Market ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Market Driven ◽  
Mixed Status

Working-class, Latin American men are increasingly removed from their families and exploited by the global market-driven for-profit detention system and then deported from the United States. Using gendered and racialized deportation regimes and neoliberal paternalism this research qualitatively analyzes the financial and emotional consequences of deportation for 17 U.S. citizen mothers who are part of a mixed-status marriage (primarily white non-Latina citizens, married to undocumented Latin American men). The state uses strict deportation policies as a mechanism to “protect” citizens from so-called dangerous criminals, most who have not committed a crime. This supposed safeguard suggests that citizens need to be protected from their own husbands and fathers. Citizens are suddenly cast into the role of single parent and sole provider and often rely on public assistance to replace their husband’s income, in what I call the deportation to welfare pathway.

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