An Alternative Performativity: The Rise of Human Development in Brazil.

This paper uses original research conducted in the cities of Belo Horizonte and Brazilia on the rise of human development in Brazil. Specifically, I look at how a network of international and national UNDP officials, local researchers, and state politicians interacted in the state of Minas Gerais to institutionalize the human development paradigm into a tax policy that both redistributed wealth and spurred development in health, education, and the environment. Through interviews with players involved at both the national and state levels, I found that human development's innovative measurement technologies (the human development report (HDR) and index (HDI)), and Brazil's unique version of these (based on a universally accessible database), provided tools that simultaneously enabled and pressured politicians to create redistributive reforms. I set this story in a theoretical context that starts with Foucault, but tries to move beyond him by drawing on the concept of performativity as used by Michel Callon and others. This concept, I argue, can serve as a bridge between the development and economic sociology literatures. By considering human development as a potential "alternative performativity", moreover, we can imagine a theoretical project that accounts for development's power dynamics, but also makes room for a progressive political project. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]