In a broad sense, this allows a decoupling between who governs what and who governs what the government does not govern (Le Galès 2011). In this sense, different governance patterns can coexist and even contradict one another in policy areas, meaning that there is no sense in looking for an all‐encompassing logic of governance in a metropolis of such complexity. Technically, depending on the complexity of the situation, network analysis techniques may help map the relational tissue of the State that lies behind governance patterns (Marques 2012). There are at least four groups of actors within these governance patterns: politicians, bureaucracies/State agencies, contractors, and civil society organizations.
Politicians have been at the center of urban politics since the pluralist and elitist debate on community power in the 1950s. They are the most visible actors and are supposedly those behind the main policy decisions. As we discuss in Chapter 1, local political leaders participate in critical decisions and have individual characteristics, but are grounded in political contexts and relational settings. Their decisions reflect their general interest in winning and holding office, but also express their support for different political projects, as sustained by partisan politics theory. Regardless of these projects, they all depend on elections, making them subject to median voter mechanisms and the so‐called electoral connection, their constituencies and distributive politics (Fiorina 1989; Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007; Stokes et al. 2013). This is even stronger locally than in national politics since the higher tiers of local administrations are more exposed politically to citizens, who have known spatialized interests.
Consequently, local politicians face higher costs for conflictive policies, increasing their care and reliance on geographically‐bounded constituencies. Local politicians thus try even harder to create connections with the executive and appoint their political brokers to crucial positions (Kuschnir 2000), as well as controlling pork‐barrel distribution through works and services (Rocha and Silva 2017). This reinforces the spatial voting patterns of municipal elections present even in countries like Brazil with proportional representation in large size districts (Limongi and Mesquita 2011). On the other hand, mayors and policymakers rely on local politicians to politically mobilize their territories for policy delivery, not only in elections but during governments too, as we discuss in Chapter 2. All these elements mark the specificities of urban politics concerning other levels of subnational politics.
The second type of actor is directly associated with policy production and was already studied by a vast neo‐institutionalist literature: bureaucracies, agencies, their structures, but also their fit in society (Evans et al. 1985; Skocpol 1992). They always participate in policy production but are far from homogeneous. They tend to be highly heterogeneous considering their position within the State and their views about their work and policies, very often in connection with groups in society. Different parts of bureaucracies, therefore, are commonly engaged in political disputes within and around the State, supporting and advocating different policies. In many cases, since local policy cycles tend to be closer to implementation, street‐level agents become empowered. Important feedback mechanisms are created between institutions, capacity building, and policy production, contributing to resilience but also helping explain the difference in policy latency from policy to policy. As already mentioned, this also involves policy institutionalization, the multiple connections between State actors and societal groups, and policy instruments.
The third set of actors includes the many private providers of services, equipment, and management operations that construct and manage the city day‐to‐day. This group includes companies that differ substantially in terms of their valorization processes and their relations with the State and with urban space, although they tend to be considered generically by many authors. At least four entirely different types of companies need to be differentiated, including building companies (physically constructing buildings and infrastructures), development firms (developing new buildings and neighborhoods), urban service contractors (providing urban services) and management and consulting firms (hired for policy design and management itself). Each of these types of companies depends on urban space in different ways for their production processes and also relate differently to the State (selling to it or just being regulated by it) and under diverse formats (through localized or broad contracts, concessions, public‐private partnerships [PPPs], among other formats). All these elements lead to truly diverse political strategies, usually not accounted for by the literature (Marques 2016b). They contribute to policy resilience since they also have vested interests in the continuity of the policies they produce. On the other hand, especially in services, actions that strongly hurt their interests tend to be less resilient and face more difficulties in being reanimated from latency.
The fourth group of actors, also extremely heterogeneous, comprises civil society organizations and actors. In Brazil, urban social movements were very significant during redemocratization, then declined in the 1990s and 2000s, and returned to the public arena in the June 2013 protests, especially during their first phase, focused on transportation demands (Alonso and Mische 2017). Since the 1990s, however, civil society organizations more broadly have been influencing public policies in new participatory institutions, although less so in urban policies (Gurza Lavalle 2018). As already mentioned, civil society actors also played an essential role in many of São Paulo's policies during their production processes, not just advocating, but also safeguarding policy alternatives in a latent state during some governments in order to reanimate them later. In these cases, these actors had many connections with bureaucracies, policymakers and certain political parties, and the more embedded policies tended to be those more affected. So while their importance in a more traditional social movement format of challenging the State has been reduced, their political importance remains very high, albeit mainly within policy sectors and in association with policy production.
The City and Local Brazilian Institutions
This book analyses urban policies and politics in São Paulo. We are not centrally concerned with the main social, economic, and spatial characteristics of the city and their contemporary transformations, something we already analyzed in detail recently in another book (Marques 2016a). That book and the present one complement each other, creating a broad picture of the social, spatial, and political changes of the city since the return to democracy.
It is essential to present, however, some necessary information about Brazilian municipalities and São Paulo, as well as some short working definitions of the elements under analysis. Urban policies are understood here as the State in action (Jobert and Muller 1987) in what concerns primarily the production of the urban fabric – the physical and social space of the city – as well as the production of urban sociability. Urban politics, on the other hand, is defined as the conflicts, alliances, strategies, and mobilizations for and around urban policies, and the institutions that produce them and regulate political conflicts in the city.
Some doubt exists over defining the urban as either “local,” “of the city” or “municipal,” although the former may also include state‐level processes and the latter is too restrictive, excluding supramunicipal actions and processes. This imprecision is constitutive of the subject at hand, and the urban in this case is not merely a matter of scale, although it also encompasses elements of scale. Cities are both agglomerations and administrative jurisdictions (Post 2019) but incorporate actions and processes from other scales of governments (Le Galès 2020) whenever relevant.
However, most of the policies analyzed in this book are the responsibility of the municipal government of São Paulo. They are also, however, influenced by actions at other levels of the country's federal structure. The Brazilian Constitution recognizes municipalities as the third level of government, giving them specific policy responsibilities such as urban planning, licensing for buildings and settlements, intraurban transportation, local parks and sanitation (mostly conceded to state‐level public companies). Metropolitan railways, subways, and environmental control are state‐level policies, and there are no metropolitan‐level government structures. Policing is divided between the states and the federal government, while in housing, education, health, and social assistance, all levels of government contribute in some form.