"Social Movements and Participatory Institutions in Latin America"

ANNUNZIATA, ROCÍO; GOLDFRANK, BENJAMIN

The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements

Oxford University Press

Lugar: Oxford ; Año: 2023; p. 759 - 774

Research on social movements rarely pays attention to participatory institutions (PIs), since they tend to be introduced by government authorities from the top down and oriented towards consensus, rejecting openly contentious action. In fact, work in this field tends to understand participation in terms of advocacy, social protest, and struggle for rights, that is, repertoires of contention. Typically, the point of departure is a degree of autonomy of civil society that provides capacity to make demands on authorities outside of institutional frameworks. On the other hand, the literature on PI often emphasizes social movements as the key promoters, supporters, or participants. In fact, some authors consider PIs to be products of demands from below, results of pressure from organized civil society. Other authors identify a strong associative network as a crucial condition for the success of participatory policies. Preexisting associative density as well as cohesion and high social capital and capacity to resist instrumentalization are often pointed out as performance determinants of PIs. In this perspective, only when there is true civil society autonomy is it possible to speak of "participatory democracy". Research in this field, then, has addressed social movements as both explanatory factors in the origins and success or failure of PI and as potential outcomes of PIsThis chapter aims to analyze the different relationships between participatory institutions and social movements in Latin America. We conceptualize four ideal types of PI focusing on the role that social movements play (or not) within them: (1) PIs promoting an interface between the state and organized civil society; (2) PIs promoting individual citizen participation; (3) PIs conceived for individual citizen voting but requiring campaigning by social movements; and (4) PIs promoting local- level popular organization and governance in competition with representative authorities rather than in concert. First, we define PIs and describe their origins and expansion in recent years in Latin America. Then, the third section centers on who participates in different PIs, and particularly on the role of social movements. We describe each of our four types and then illustrate them with at least one key example: National Public Policy Conferences in Brazil, Participatory Budgeting in Argentina, Citizen- Initiated Popular Consultations in Uruguay, and Communal Councils in Venezuela. In the conclusion, we reflect on the advantages and limits of the different types, noting that the role of social movements is not always and not necessarily related to more inclusionary participation.