Cities produce mountains of waste daily. Yet too often waste is poorly governed, and becomes a climate, public health, and environmental policy problem. This article investigates how effective civil society pressure can be in achieving sustainable waste policies in densely populated cities. The paper draws on over 50 interviews to illustrate how following legacies of authoritarian rule in the waste sector, activists in Argentina recast waste as a vehicle for exercising participatory rights that undergird urban democracy. Local activists leveraged national and transnational networks to participate in a global struggle for waste justice. Battles for equitable and participatory waste management are influencing waste policy at multiple scales and effectively recasting waste as a collective, public problem, even as waste management continues to be a pressing urban governance challenge.

Abstract Slow-moving environmental harms are typically ignored or accepted parts of everyday life, particularly in low-resource settings in Global South cities. How do communities mobilize around habituated exposure to toxins and initiate policy change for a historically ignored policy problem? The book compares advocacy movements for river pollution remediation in the capital regions of Argentina, Colombia, and Peru. Citizen-led efforts helped create environmental governance through networks that included impacted communities (bonding mobilization) and resourced allies (bridging mobilization). The book argues that bridging mobilization was strongest when bridges had material resources, common pasts, and a resonant frame for understanding the historically ignored problem of river pollution. This occurred in settings with established human rights movements and center-left presidential administrations that were unaligned with mineral wealth extraction. Through bonding and bridging mobilization, citizen advocacy for slow harms activated the state’s regulatory capacity. Citizen action included diverse claims making strategies such as protests, marches, rallies, participatory institutions, litigation, and media campaigns. By unpacking human rights movements as throughfares for environmental activism, these cases shed new light on the struggles for environmental justice in Latin America.

Wetlands provide ecosystem services such as flood protection, improved water quality, and wildlife habitat, but are under attack in urban land-use conflicts in the Global South. This article presents two cases of local wetlands governance conflicts in Colombia (Humedal la Conejera, Bogotá, Cundinamarca) and Argentina (Laguna de Rocha, Esteban Echeverría, Gran Buenos Aires) to illustrate divergent pathways toward improved environmental governance via citizen pressures: the collaborative method (Bogotá) and the adversarial method (Buenos Aires). While existing scholarship on citizen-led regulation stresses the importance of collaboration between community organizations and the state, this article argues that adversarial tactics are also a key component of environmental governance. In both cases, citizen-led pressures led to increased enforcement of regulatory measures to restore wetlands and gain protected-area status. Citizen-led governance involved adversarial strategies such as marches, litigation, and shaming and blaming in the media, as well as collaborative strategies such as creating broad-based educational forums, working inside city government, and partnering directly with public institutions to set new policies. Against the backdrop of extensive collusion between elected officials and land developers, citizen-led subnational environmental governance has become the regulatory regime of last resort in urban Latin America.

Abstract Slow-moving harms became part of the everyday landscape for the Rímac River, where communities historically suffered in silence amid growing toxins from industry and mining. Decades later not much has changed, and Lima’s main waterway represents the habituated pollution of most urban rivers in the Global South. This chapter examines the anemic mobilization around the Rímac River and the numerous public institutions that are staunchly resistant to change. Process tracing shows how low levels of bonding mobilization and missing bridging mobilization were shaped by hostile conditions that narrowed the window for autonomous civil society organizing. After the armed conflict, human rights mobilization was squashed by conservative presidential administrations aligned with military officials and extractivist interests. In Lima, human rights and environmental issues remain largely disconnected. Communities are besieged with fast-moving harms from mining, floods, and proposed relocation, and exposure to slow-harms river pollution continues unabated.

Abstract The Bogotá River in Colombia was engulfed by slow-moving environmental harms for decades as cries from impacted communities were ignored by public officials. Strong grassroots activism, or bonding mobilization, emerged but was not accompanied by equally robust bridging mobilization, resulting in pollution remediation reforms that were more fragmented and lacked transparency compared with the Matanza-Riachuelo River reforms in Argentina. This chapter examines how human rights campaigns were not connected to environmental claims for the Bogotá River. Weak bridging in slow-harms advocacy networks were enabled by conservative presidential administrations that were aligned with the military and export-oriented multinational firms, which over time shrank the resources and influence of human rights actors during the decades-long armed conflict. Unlike the slow-harms activists in Argentina, bridging activists in Colombia lacked material resources, prior collaborative experiences, and a socially resonant collective frame around which to recast an invisible policy problem.

Subject Environmental Politics Comparative Politics Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

Abstract The concluding chapter revisits the book’s framework for understanding slow-harms advocacy centered around bridging mobilization, and then unpacks the role of cities as unique sites of disruption and bridging. Increased attention to legacies of political violence and civil society organizing can help explain the challenges cities face in environmental crisis management. Building on the book’s key insight that the right to disrupt and dissent undergirds environmental governance in Latin American cities, the chapter explores the relationship between democracy and environmentalism through reviews of environmental policymaking under authoritarian regimes in post-Soviet countries and China. The book concludes by emphasizing the role of citizen collective action in Global South regulatory regimes.

Abstract Individuals adjust their strategies based on anticipated time horizons, reacting to, for example, whether an event is unfolding quickly, or how much time is left. Temporalities of environmental dangers produce differences across threat types that impact the likelihood of collective action. This chapter argues that environmental harms vary based on temporal proximity to bodily harm (imminent or gradual) and geographical dispersion of perceived threats (concentrated or dispersed). Slow targeted harms, the topic of this book, are gradual, long-duration events, with concentrated impacts on distinct communities, producing a complex social process that makes them part of the everyday landscape. This chapter presents the concept of “slow harms,” introduces key issues in wastewater pollution as a type of slow harm, and traces the common history of slow harms accumulation across three polluted urban river basins in Buenos Aires, Bogotá, and Lima.

Abstract Slow-moving environmental harms on the Matanza-Riachuelo River were historically ignored in Argentina’s heavily industrialized capital region. Strong grassroots activism over environmental injustice, or bonding mobilization, ignited across the large territory, but it was only when strong resourced outsiders contributed bridging mobilization that expansive river remediation policies were adopted. Bridges were strong because they were resourced, had preexisting ties, and were rooted in a robust human rights network that grew under propitious political and economic conditions. Slow-harms mobilization included litigation, participatory institutions in the judiciary, protests, marches, rallies, and media campaigns to demand and oversee a new era of policy reform for environmental regulations. The Argentina case shows how environmental concern developed not due merely to the passage of a court ruling nor a postmaterial concern about environmental conservation but as a reconceptualization of pollution as a human rights crisis.

Abstract This introductory chapter introduces the problem of slow-moving environmental harms in Global South cities and summarizes the book’s contributions to the literatures on urban politics in the Global South, environmental justice, and environmental politics. The chapter unpacks the relationship between collective risk perception and issue identification, linking it to social capital and network theory to explain modes of environmental activism. What follows introduces the comparison of advocacy movements for river pollution remediation in the urban and industrialized capital regions of Argentina, Colombia, and Peru. The argument centers on the role of impacted communities (bonding mobilization) and resourced allies (bridging mobilization) in forming environmental advocacy networks, strategies that were strengthened in settings with established human rights movements and supportive left-of-center political administrations. The chapter previews the outcome under study of river remediation reforms, how cases varied across reform outcomes, the book’s methods, case selection strategies, and alternative explanations.

Debates about transparency standards in social science research often lack specificity, mischaracterize the status quo, or stress the value of replication. These debates frequently talk past each other and provide limited practical guidance for qualitative and multi-methods research. Focusing on text-based sources, we provide a review of qualitative research that identifies deficiencies in transparency practices, and advances a five-point framework for improving transparency premised on better specification of sources’ location, production, selection, analysis, and access. We next draw on a multi-year deliberative forum on qualitative transparency to identify researchers’ concerns about changing the status quo. We then showcase illustrative examples of enhanced transparency and conclude with recommendations for how to improve transparency practices for text-based sources. We argue that greater research transparency yields numerous benefits, including facilitating scholarly exchange, improving graduate training, and aiding knowledge cumulation. Rather than advancing replication, which may be undesirable for various qualitative research traditions, new transparency technologies are promising because they allow authors to more easily provide additional context, present complexity, and unpack relevant contradictions about politics.

Water for All examines the Cochabamba water conflict of 2000, known as the “Water War,” which brought down water privatization and led to political regime change in Bolivia. Hines argues that the successful anti-privatization movement was rooted in a long history of collective grassroots labor that built water access when a sometimes predatory, absent, or negligent state failed to do so. These same social forces were well equipped to defend what they had built and in doing so to definitively reshape Bolivian politics. Hines argues that collective labor brought greater validity to claims made by Indigenous water users and shaped the efficacy of their social mobilization.In contrast to dominant historical approaches to hydraulic engineering, which see hydraulic civilizations (Karl Wittfogel's term) as centralized, top-down entities, Hines chronicles the active participation of water users who fight for greater democracy and equity while building water infrastructure from the ground up. While Cochabamba's Water War is one of the most written-about water conflicts in recent decades, Hines brings new perspectives by tracing its roots to the 1952 Bolivian Revolution and the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario's agrarian reform and reallocation of water resources. During the revolution, peasant power grew, and future foreign lenders and state officials began to seek water in aquifers as opposed to surface water, setting the stage for excluding grassroots access. Complex struggles over limited resources continued, as public water utilities and later neoliberal forces encroached on wells and pipes that agrarian users had themselves built.As a deep dive into the roots of social mobilization, Water for All shines. Hines provides detailed evidence of how dictatorship, socialist projects, and foreign interests have shaped battles over access to lakes, wells, dams, and rivers in the Cochabamba region. Hines shows how demands for water redistribution are inextricably linked to land tenure. While studies of agrarian and land reform in Latin America have focused on the role of land conflicts in shaping political outcomes, Hines masterfully illustrates how land is water, and how conflicts over water access defined a century.Water for All ends by chronicling the 2000s, where in a five-year period water privatization was defeated, two presidents were brought down, and Evo Morales, the country's first Indigenous president, was elected. Here the book covers well-trodden, but important, ground. Recent studies show that Cochabamba continues to struggle to supply water access and that community-based water provision is not a panacea. Over time, Morales's revolutionary project leaned toward autocracy, and many of the social movements that supported him have critiqued him for power grabbing and excluding the grassroots. Hines hints at this toward the end, but these issues could have been further unpacked. Water for All concludes by noting that water users have defended their water access against powerful interests but have been less willing to give up water for their neighbors. This rings true with how battles over limited resources are full of conflict and inequity throughout the world at multiple scales; it would have been valuable to examine this tension further.Hines draws on a large trove of evidence while building her account. She visited over 20 archives, interviewed 112 people, and drew on other text-based sources such as newspapers. She developed relationships with many Cochabambino water users while living in the region for six years; this access strengthened the book by basing it not only on historical sources but also on the interpretations of those who lived through some of the events. The triangulation of multiple sources was exemplary, although a methodological narrative in an appendix detailing how different sources were selected and employed would have been welcome.Water for All is a masterful account, but it could have been strengthened in some respects. First, interdisciplinary readers may find themselves at times losing the forest for the trees: Water for All covers a large amount of information with few signposts. Second, the book's focus on a singular location for over a century leads to conclusions about the uniqueness of the Cochabamba case that beg for more evidence. Had Cochabamba been compared to other cases where water users also are inextricably tied to water for spiritual and cultural reasons, where users engage in collective labor, and where water conflicts shape politics and social life, the reader may have better understood the similarities and differences of the Bolivian case. A broader casting of how Cochabamba fits into a larger set of Latin American or global South water conflicts could have been instructive in the conclusion. Finally, the book ends by noting that “the popular hydraulic society that Cochabambinos built nevertheless remains unequal. Although Bolivians have won incredible power over water over the past century, it has not yielded ample water access for all” (p. 227). What are we to make of this contradiction, and how does this finding shape the promise and limitations of the argument that Hines makes about the role of collective labor in grassroots mobilization? Overall, Hines masterfully illuminates the historical roots of grassroots water mobilization, and by doing so warns of the coming crisis of extreme water inequity in a warming, globalized world.

In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. In this Perspectives Reflection, we crystallize the central findings of a three-year deliberative process—the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD)—involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. Following an overview of the process and the key insights that emerged, we present summaries of the QTD Working Groups’ final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net , the reports unpack transparency’s promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports—the full versions of which can be found in the Supplementary Materials—offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate—as understood by relevant research communities—to the forms of inquiry being assessed. We dedicate this Reflection to the memory of our coauthor and QTD working group leader Kendra Koivu. 1

Recent discussions about transparency in political science have become fraught with concerns over replicability or even scholarly misconduct. The report of the QTD Working Group on Text-Based Sources emphasizes instead that the ultimate goal of augmenting transparency is to increase our ability to evaluate evidentiary claims, build on prior research, and produce better knowledge. Accordingly, this report reviews the complex issues raised by pursuing these goals through rendering more transparent qualitative research that employs text-based sources. We interpret "text-based sources" broadly to include a range of documents, from those found in state archives or the collections of parties and social movements to diaries, news media, and secondary sources. Text-based sources may be other media as well, such as photographs, transcriptions of radio or television broadcasts, videos, or websites. Moreover, our report applies to text-based portions of all social-scientific research, no matter what (combination of) methods they might employ in their empirical work. Drawing on QTD deliberations, existing scholarly work, and our own reflections, we discuss a range of transparency-enhancing practices and technologies, the costs and risks attendant with each, and their potential benefits. We close with a set of recommendations, ranked from least to most controversial.

In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. This essay is the introduction to a symposium that crystallizes the central findings of a three-year deliberative process – the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD) – involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. The symposium’s centerpiece is a series of summaries of the QTD Working Group’s final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net, the reports unpack transparency’s promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate – as understood by relevant research communities – to the forms of inquiry being assessed.

While prior studies have suggested that legal strategies offer promising tools for social accountability, the existing literature has not yet identified the underlying mechanisms that link legal strategies to accountability improvements. In this theory-building paper, we argue that there are four mechanisms by which legal strategies can enhance accountability. First, the courts can help those affected by policy failures to overcome the collective action problem. Second, courts can provide civil society with access to information about rights violations, malfeasance, and poor policy performance. Third, legal strategies can set in motion court-backed reforms that redress immediate rights violations and strengthen state capacity for more accountable governance. Fourth, court recognition can increase the symbolic and discursive resources of claimants, making their demands for accountability more effective. We illustrate these mechanisms through a comparative analysis of two policy arenas in Colombia, environment and healthcare – two areas in which civil society engagement with the judiciary opened up new routes for social accountability. By bridging the previously disconnected literatures on legal mobilisation and social accountability, this paper creates an analytical framework to understand the menu of options that citizens face about where and how to seek accountability from the state.

This is the summary of Qualitative Transparency Deliberations Final Report on Text-Based Sources, Working Group number II.1.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is ambitious and inclusive, but how well are these global aspirations likely to result in implementable policy change for water and sanitation? This article assesses governance challenges at the local level associated with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, which pledges to ensure sustainable water and sanitation for all. The majority of developing countries manage services at the subnational level, making the quality of local governance the key ingredient for improvements in the sector. This article first reviews prior shortcomings in global monitoring efforts and how SDG 6 was formulated to address them. The analysis then examines local governance challenges facing SDG 6 and potential barriers to implementation. These barriers manifest as both contradictions within SDG 6 itself as well as contradictions between SDG 6 and the Sustainable Development Agenda more broadly. As SDG monitoring rubrics undergo further reformulations, it may be necessary to prioritize between goals and targets, or otherwise stagger the timing of their promotion and implementation. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

ABSTRACT The politics of public policy is a vibrant research area increasingly at the forefront of intellectual innovations in the discipline. We argue that political scientists are best positioned to undertake research on the politics of public policy when they possess expertise in particular policy areas. Policy expertise positions scholars to conduct theoretically innovative work and to ensure that empirical research reflects the reality they aim to analyze. It also confers important practical advantages, such as access to a significant number of academic positions and major sources of research funding not otherwise available to political scientists. Perhaps most importantly, scholars with policy expertise are equipped to defend the value of political science degrees and research in the public sphere.