Urban Floods, Clientelism, and the Political Ecology of the State in Latin America

Abstract

In this article, we examine the coproduction of hazardous urban space and new formations of clientelist state governance. Work on hazards and vulnerability frequently demonstrates how hazardous urban spaces are produced, but a critical understanding of state power is often left untouched. Correspondingly, scholars analyzing clientelism and state formation habitually discuss the configuration of new forms of governance and the consolidation of state power without intersecting these processes with the production of vulnerabilities and "hazardous nature." Drawing on ethnographic research in urban areas susceptible to serious floods and landslides in Brazil and Mexico, we argue that clientelist governance and state making, including complex forms of political favoritism, create urban hazardscapes, as much as the management of urban disasters acts to reconfigure patron-client relations within "hazardstates." The article contributes to an emerging body of literature analyzing linkages between urban environmental governance, state authority, and the reproduction of vulnerability.

Informal Modes of Governance: Negotiating Evictions and Housing Rights in Lisbon, Portugal

“…In this way, informality can also be considered a modality of governance and mode of production of space (Roy, 2015) through which political institutions deploy simultaneously legal and extra-legal mechanisms of control and discipline. These can involve both authoritarian or disciplinary modes of governance, which can coexist and intersect with neoliberal modalities of governance (Coates & Nygren, 2020). Disciplinary modes of governance have been conceptualised by Auyero (2010) as 'visible fists', meaning extra-legal and violent state tactics used to coerce the urban poor.…”

São Paulo’s 2013 water crisis: a socially constructed disaster risk

“…Brazil's colonial period created a societal dynamic based on an exchange of favours, clientelism and patrimonialism where high society people have access to properties based on their social and economic power. In consequence, mainly poor black former enslaved people and their descendants were placed on the margin of this societal relation (ALMEIDA, 2019;JESUS, 2017;NASCIMENTO, 2016), enhancing racialised inequalities through public policies that kept those people at the bottom of society (usually, located in risky peripherical areas) (COATES;NYGREN, 2020;MARICATO, 2015;.…”

Pathways to urban transformation: From dispossession to climate justice

“…Authority is also negotiated and sustained through the parcelling out of benefits to certain populations, sometimes even among the marginalised, to strengthen existing and establish new political alliances. This is achieved, for example, through the strategic deployment of assets, favours and rewards in exchange for political loyalty and votes, as documented, for instance, in Nepal (Nightingale, 2017) and Mexico and Brazil (Coates and Nygren, 2020). Finally, authority can also be reasserted through adaptation choices that minimise environmental risk for some groups by purposefully redirecting hazards and the financial burdens of adaptation to others.…”

“…Even though each case presents unique contextual specificities, they all point to similar dynamics centred on two core pillars of top-down flood risk management. First, they identify an inactive government, largely absent from informal communities who must construct their livelihoods amid precarious and environmentally volatile circumstances (Coates and Nygren, 2020). Second, flooding ignites a hyper-active government that mobilises selective flooding narratives to remove informal communities and replace them with urban spaces deemed modern, sustainable and resilient.…”