How can activist bureaucrats unexpectedly influence policy outcomes? What strategies do these actors adopt in order to defend and implement public policies in institutional settings unfavorable to their ideas? How do the individual trajectories of activist bureaucrats influence their strategies and repertoires of action? Drawing from the literature on institutional activism, this article shows how bureaucrats worked as activists to create and institutionalize participatory arenas in slum upgrading projects, within an institutional setting adverse to popular participation. Our research was […]

This paper, which is part of wider research on the transformation of political linkages in Argentina and Brazil, analyzes a specific dimension: political activist training. It seeks to understand how transformations such as weaker partisanship and intense political fluctuation manifest in the way activists have defined and experienced political training. I examine narratives in interviews held between 2007 and 2015 with four generational groups of activists, classified according to the historical period in which they engaged in youth activism. All […]