Embeddedness and Cohesion: Regimes of Urban Public Goods Distribution

Abstract

Why are some cities more effective than others in distributing public goods? Local government interventions in São Paulo, Brazil, have produced surprisingly effective redistribution of residential public goods — housing and sanitation — between 1989 and 2016. I use original interviews and archival research for a comparative-historical analysis of variation across time in São Paulo’s governance of housing and sanitation. I argue that sequential configurations of a) “embeddedness” of the local state in civil society and b) the “cohesion” of the institutional sphere of the local state, explain why and when cities generate the coordinating capacity to distribute public goods. I further illustrate how these configurations can explain variation in urban governing regimes across the world.