Characterizing social accountability regimes in Mexico and Brazil

• Grant number: 22/06083-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: October 01, 2022
• End date: November 23, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science
• Principal Investigator: Adrian Gurza Lavalle
• Grantee: Adrian Gurza Lavalle
• Host Investigator: Jonathan Fox
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: American University (AU), United States
• Associated research grant: 13/07616-7 - CEM - Center for Metropolitan Studies, AP.CEPID

Abstract

This proposal is part of my sabbatical leave, during which I propose to work on a book on social accountability in Mexico and Brazil. In the book, I aim to systematize and integrate a set of research results and theoretical and conceptual developments that I have developed with Ernesto Isunza over a decade and a half of joint collaboration. To this end, I intend to spend part of the sabbatical semester as a visiting scholar at a leading global institution in the field of social accountability: The Accountability Research Center (ARC), at American University's School of International Service. At ARC I expect to work, expose to criticisms and refine the arguments and evidence presented in the book. The objective of the book can be formulated simply and directly: to develop a comparative analysis of the different institutionalized experiences of social accountability that proliferated after the transitions in Mexico and Brazil. The analytical implications of this objective, however, are not self-evident nor can they be simply reported in a few words. The implications are related y to a working thesis, namely that the proliferation of instances of social accountability may configure social accountability regimes. Such regimes are the product of at least four factors: the institutional design of the instances of social accountability; the interconnection of these instances among themselves and their insertion in the broader institutional architecture of bureaucratic and political accountability; the political use that social and state actors make of such instances; and, finally, how the actors and instances of social, bureaucratic and political accountability work together (if at all) as an accountability network. These four factors are not givens, but politically constructed by trajectories of dispute over democratization. Thus, regimes are concrete and more or less stable configurations of institutional arrangements, institutional mechanisms of accountability working at macro, meso and micro levels, and modes of organization and mobilization of citizens and social actors engaged in keeping public authorities accountable. (AU)