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In the last two decades there has been a large and simultaneous expansion of delivery-based national housing programs in the global South. This paper draws on an investigation of living conditions in Ciudad del Bicentenario, a large-scale housing project on the outskirts of Cartagena. Based on a sample of seventy-five lengthy semistructured interviews with low-income residents and ten other stakeholders, we reached three paradoxical findings that reveal the high costs of free housing: the immediate improvement of overall quality of life but the impoverishment of economic prospects; the dual social condition of the residents who felt socially and economically isolated but also shared a widespread perception of being 'revueltos' or scrambled within the community of Ciudad del Bicentenario itself; and the growth of economic and physical informality in a project intended to counter the informal settlements in the inner city. These paradoxes reflect more than simple processes of impoverishment of living conditions: they demonstrate how this type of public policy systematically complexifies the daily life of relocated families. Sociologically, these findings reveal a new type of peri-urban poverty in the global South. We argue that the productive informalization of the formal housing projects constitutes a central, but previously understudied, aspect of what it means to develop equitable housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper discusses two well-known market-based social change initiatives, Fair Trade coffee and Forest Stewardship Council certification, which harness market forces to pursue social and environmental objectives. A serious challenge for both is to operate in the conventional market without undermining their original objectives. A global commodity chain analysis approach is combined with insights from economic sociology embeddedness theory to explore the social, cultural and organizational factors shaping the initiatives’ governance structures. Both initiatives are seen to move along opposite organizational trajectories, but face similar pressures from conventional market logics, practices and dominant actors. A preliminary framework is proposed for comparative assessment, focusing on distribution of benefits, how conventional market institutions may be questioned, and how internal governance manages diverse stakeholder interests and influence. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Why do emigration rates vary across Latin America? Since more than three-quarters of Latin America’s emigrants go to the United States, the paper estimates a model of emigration to the United States to isolate the fundamentals driving Latin American emigration. The model is estimated separately for all sending countries and for Latin America, asking whether migrants from the two respond differently to fundamentals. They do not. The estimates are then used to identify the sources of Latin American emigration since the early 1970s and compares them with those of Africa and Asia. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]