New municipalism in South America? Developing theory from experiences in Argentina and Chile

Abstract

Working towards social transformation through forms of participatory and economic democracy is a core element of the new municipalist agenda. While utilising a ‘politics of proximity’ to develop citizen-led collectives in various forms and at various scales, these projects reimagine and reclaim the local state for social and ecological justice. However, much of the empirical literature that has fed into the development of this conceptualisation of new municipalism, while having a global ambition, has been based on European experiences. Thus, there are key questions around its applicability to other places, particularly in the Global South. South America has generated some of the emblematic cases of struggles against neoliberalism through reclaiming public services, from important interventions in reversing privatisations in the region to influential municipalist innovations, including participatory public policies such as participatory budgeting. This article seeks to critically interrogate new municipalism through an engagement with key social and political changes, state–civil society dynamics and political concepts in South America, illustrated with examples from municipal grassroots initiatives in Argentina and Chile. It argues that municipalism can be more extensively theorised by, first, engaging with a broader temporality than just moments of crisis; second, being attentive to the longer history of diverse participatory municipal initiatives in the region; and finally, incorporating the concept of territory ( territorio in Spanish), which has emerged as a key dimension for understanding social transformations in the region.

Prospects for municipal stewardship as a national policy: A scoping review and thematic synthesis

“…At the time of writing, the Scottish Government is preparing CWB legislation having ran a consultation on the development of a CWB Bill in 2023. Considering the role of ‘new’ municipalism in informing approaches to CWB, Arpini et al (2022:8) suggested that ‘ A key dimension of new municipalist movements relates to their aspirations to democratise state institutions and have them “ opened outwards ” to allow for increasing levels of social involvement in deciding and implementing local policies ’. From this perspective, a first implication for Scotland, where CWB is a national policy commitment (rather than city-led as in earlier examples), is the recognition of the diverse geography of municipalities (city, town, remote and rural).…”

Politicising proximity: Radical municipalism as a strategy in crisis

“…Many of the concepts we are working with have a long history of development in other contexts, regardless of differences in discourse. A clear example here would be the parallels with the concept and practice of ‘territory’, explored by Arpini et al (2023) for the distinctive strand of South American municipalism. Territory has been defined as ‘space appropriated by a determinate social relation that produces and maintains it through a form of power’ (Fernandes, 2005: 27), and which Zibechi (2003: 26) identified as ‘the most important distinguishing feature of Latin American social movements’.…”

“…But this is not the only polarisation that hinders its political potential. As the contributions to this special issue demonstrate, divisions and contradictions abound: between the public and the common (Bianchi, 2023; Russell et al, 2023); between direct and representative democracy (van Outryve d’Ydewalle, 2023); between spontaneous grassroots organisation and institutionalised structures (Pinto et al, 2023); between innovating participatory processes within the green-left and building cross-class coalitions and counter-hegemonic visions (Béal et al, 2023); between green growth and degrowth (Sareen and Waagsaether, 2023), between urban centrality and peripheral urbanisation (Toro and Orozco, 2023); between territory regulated as state space and territory conceived as non-state self-government (Arpini et al, 2023); between embodying the slow time of feminist prefigurative practices and mastering the fast time of masculinist grammars, turned against hostile forces (Sarnow and Tiedermann, 2023); between dealing with the path-dependencies of history, utopian and dystopian, and engaging in future-oriented movement-building (Milan, 2023); between overhauling the state machinery and leveraging local government to deliver policy programmes (Bua and Davies, 2023); between transforming the state form through rupture and prefiguring new state forms through interstitial experimentation and symbiotic hacking (Joubert, 2023; Thorpe and Morgan, 2023); between reconfiguring capitalist supply chains and developing autonomous counter-logistics (Minuchin and Maino, 2023); between care as an economic sector for productivity and care as an ethics for reimagining the city (Kussy et al, 2023). So it seems that just as municipalists work to prise open the cracks in capitalism, so too do fissures and fault lines appear in radical municipalist strategy itself – a hypothesis just as challenged by the intersectional contradictions of colonial capitalism and the patriarchal nation-state as it is poised to sublate them.…”

“…As municipalist praxis has proliferated, so too have descriptors and typologies, with multiple municipalist monikers springing up across this diverse field; prefixes range from ‘new’ (Roth, 2019a, 2019b; Russell, 2019) and ‘democratic’ (Shelley, 2022) to ‘autonomist’, ‘platform’ and ‘managed’ (Thompson, 2021b) to ‘pragmatic’ (Warner, 2023) and ‘entrepreneurial’ (Thompson et al, 2020) to ‘degrowth’ (Vansintjan, 2018) and ‘post-growth’ (Schmid, 2023). With the publication of this double special issue, we can add many more: care municipalism (Kussy et al, 2023), southern municipalism (Pinto et al, 2023), peripheral municipalism (Toro and Orozco, 2023), territorial municipalism (Arpini et al, 2023) and weak municipalism (Béal et al, 2023). All this typological creativity certainly suggests a vibrant, ‘pre-paradigmatic’ scholarly field of empirical enquiry trying to keep up with fast-moving, diversifying experimentation on the ground (on pre-paradigmatic fields, see Nicholls, 2010).…”

Writing the Latin American city: Trajectories of urban scholarship

“…In the 2000s, the region experienced a re-politicisation of long-standing inequalities expressed in the rise of several movements against free-market capitalism and the emergence of new political issues and demands where more relevance was given to the ‘community’ as a powerful locus for organising and using new forms of transgressive direct action (Arce and Bellinger, 2007; Silva, 2009). Several concepts have been developed to capture progressive local experiments to expand democratic avenues: municipal socialism (Goldfrank and Schrank, 2009), radical cities (Baiocchi and Gies, 2019) and new municipalism (Arpini et al, 2022). Whatever the label, grassroots organisations’ power plays a key role in forging democratic pathways locally (Baiocchi and Gies, 2019; Gilbert, 2015).…”