Search

This paper builds on and refines James Scott's argument about legibility (1998) by providing an in-depth, comparative analysis of how Brazil and Mexico rendered poor individuals visible in order to implement poverty-alleviation programs. In the mid-1990s, these two states implemented the same policy (conditional cash transfer programs, or CCTs), facing very similar political, organizational, and information challenges; yet they adopted different solutions for governing their respective CCT programs. Specifically, Brazil and Mexico implemented their CCTs by means of distinct governance structures, and they developed distinct information systems to see and monitor poor individuals. Looking comparatively at projects intended to make poverty visible and governable, I argue that the differences and consequences of these legibility projects depended on the symbolic strategies of political legitimation of state action, but had the unanticipated effect of rendering the state itself visible and thus subject to intense scrutiny. My findings are based on the analysis of a rich set of empirical data, including official documents, academic papers, media articles, and 90 in-depth interviews with top government actors and poverty experts in Brazil and Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite ubiquitous talk of "culture" as a way to explain both the problem and solution for various political problems, political sociologists have paid little attention to the meaning of 'culture' in specific state settings and what work reformers do, in practice, to change, reshape or introduce bureaucratic or administrative 'cultures'. As a corrective, we draw insights from cultural sociology, pragmatism and the sociology of organizations to examine how actors involved in state reform aimed at decreasing corruption and improving accountability deploy narratives of culture as a way to explain the challenges of introducing a new state practice, and craft meaningful practical strategies to bring about change. Examining the case of monitoring and evaluation reforms in Mexico and drawing on participant observation and 120 in-depth interviews we find three distinct ways in which culture is evoked by Mexican state reformers: i) to rescale and redistribute failure; ii) to enact jurisdictional and epistemological boundaries; iii) to promote bureaucratic enlightenment and stress the moral imperative of change in the absence of legal obligation. We argue that these are politically productive narratives that at once diagnose the object of reform, work to stabilize the meaning of evaluation as a solution and suggest practical courses of action to create a taste for change among state officials. This work takes two forms i) 'capacity building'; and ii) institutional celebrations that prefigure cultural change. We argue that although training state officials in the nuts and bolts of policy evaluation function as a way of creating an appreciation and taste for evaluation inside the state, rather than making the objects of these training agents of that reform these enhance the points of contact between policy evaluation "experts" and state officials, which helps experts maintain or expand their jurisdiction inside the government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings a historical perspective to understand the recent dissemination of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as the new "gold standard" method to assess the success (and failure) of poverty alleviation efforts. Although the buzz around RCT evaluations dates from the 2000s, we show that the experimental approach has a much longer pedigree in the field of development economics. Indeed, what we are witnessing now is a second wave of RCTs in international development, while a first wave took place in the 1970s and has ended by the early 1980s. In this paper, we contrast the first and second waves as cases of "reiterated problemsolving" (Haydu 1998) to analyze the practical, legal and methodological obstacles that made RCTs ultimately unviable in the 1970s, and thus highlight the transformations and strategies that made possible their resurgence in the 2000s. Our argument is that the contemporary expansion of RCTs can only be understood in a context of the privatization of foreign aid and the multiple new dynamics associated with it, which allowed randomistas to effectively change what it means to evaluate development policy. We rely on a rich set of archival data, policy documents and academic papers to show how differences in the network of actors, modes of presentation, scale of interventions and funding opportunities between the first and second waves explain the relative impracticality and consequent discontinuation of RCTs in the 1970s, in contrast to their rapid expansion now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical yet understudied element of Brazilian race relations is the perspective of those identified as pardos (brown or mixed race), the ethno-racial identification that has increased the most in Census surveys over time. Historically, Brazilian pardos share with blacks a lower socioeconomic status, but systematically perceive less racial discrimination when compared to them. By focusing on the perceptions of pardos, we are able to analyze two key issues for Brazilian race relations - racial identification and the measurement of discrimination - from an original perspective. Our argument relies on survey data as well as in-depth interviews with people who are identified as pardos according to Brazilian Census categories, exploring their perceptions, strategies and definitions of racial and symbolic boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]