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Varieties of Civil Society and Patterns of Political Representation in Contemporary São Paulo and Mexico City’, paper presented at the 5th Annual Meeting of the Associação Brasileira de Ciencia Política, UFMG, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 26-29 July

Civil Society Innovation and Resilience in the Struggle for the Right to Food in India

Published by: Institute of Development Studies

India’s national network of social justice activists and civil society organisations helped achieve legal recognition for the Right to Food in the early 2000’s and are engaged in an ongoing struggle to implement the right to food in practice.

Social Accountability in Big Cities: Strategies and Institutions in Delhi and São Paulo

Published by: IDS

There are signs that public services can improve in big cities when the urban poor hold providers directly accountable – what we now call social accountability. We do not know, however, to what extent the urban poor, through their civil society groups, engage in forms of social accountability nor what strategies they use.

Introduction: Contours of a Research Project and Early Findings

Early in 2005 the editors of this IDS Bulletin began developing a multi-country study to assess whether sector-wide reforms of public...

Big Governance Research: Institutional Constraints, the Validity Gap and BIM

The pressing questions about governance today require research on a scale, and of a complexity, that the existing institutional...

The Silent Revolution in Anti-Poverty Programmes: Minimum Income Guarantees in Brazil

Municipal and federal governments in Brazil have created a series of minimum income guarantee programmes that aim to tackle...

Widgets or Watchdogs? Conceptual Explorations in Social Accountability

Strengthening ‘social accountability’ is emerging as a key strategy for improving public services and attaining the Millennium...

The Political Construction of Civil Societies (A Construção Política das Sociedades Civis)

What is the political status of civil society in democracies? Or rather, in the field of civil society theories, is there a specific...

Associations, Active Citizenship, and the Quality of Democracy in Brazil and Mexico

In many Third Wave democracies large classes of people experience diminished forms of citizenship. The systematic exclusion from...