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This article analyses the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Brazil's populist radical right (PRR), as well as the responses of PRR actors to the pandemic, during the period from March 2020 to October 2021. Despite high death rates and declining popularity in the final months of that period, the Brazilian president consistently maintained a denialist narrative that incorporated key aspects of populist ideology. Based on the analysis of opinion surveys, documents, online messages and secondary sources, we argue that explaining this denialism requires understanding Brazil's radical-right populism as more than an ideology: it is a social movement. The impacts of the pandemic on Bolsonaro's PRR government and its responses can only be understood by simultaneously analysing the top-down actions of the leader and the bottom-up role of bolsonarismo – that is, the broad coalition of actors who actively support the radical-right project. The case of bolsonarismo suggests that literature on populism in general would profit from taking right-wing movements more seriously as co-producers of populist rhetoric and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses social movement theory to explore how decentralized stakeholder governance can be fostered at the river basin level in contexts where local actors lack incentives to participate. Based on two Brazilian river basins where efforts to promote collaboration among state, civic and private organizations were successful, it emphasizes the importance of building collective identities revolving around river basin issues and groups. It shows how leadership and initial collaborative practices help build such identities, through reframing ideas about problems and solutions and through building basinwide networks, trust among stakeholders and social and political recognition. Key words--Latin America, Brazil, water resources management, stakeholder participation, decentralization, social movements

This article examines institutional activism between 2011 and 2018 in two Brazilian government programs, 'Green Grants' and the 'Stork Network'. Institutional activism is defined as collective action in the defense of contentious causes conducted within the boundaries of state institutions. The two policies were designed and implemented by bureaucrats committed to social movement causes, environmentalism and women's health, respectively. The environmentalist bureaucrats were mostly permanent public employees with few ties to movement networks, while the women's health group included mostly temporary employees with long histories of civil society activism. I argue that diverse locations in state institutions and movement networks gave these groups access to different combinations of institutional and relational resources. In dialogue with theories of situated agency and activist strategy, I show how those differences both led actors to engage in different kinds of strategies and influenced the way those strategies changed as political conditions became increasingly hostile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares how COVID-19 affected state–society relations differently in two relatively similar countries: Brazil and Argentina. Bringing together social movement theories and ideational institutionalism, we argue that variation in responses to the COVID-19 pandemic is explained by the different roles played by social movements inside and outside government and by contrasting ideational disputes. The extreme uncertainty introduced by the pandemic generated intense contestation about the meaning of the crisis and how to resolve it. In Brazil, progressive social movements not only were excluded from the government coalition, but also had to combat a powerful discourse that denied the existence of a crisis altogether. Such denialism did not flourish in the same way in Argentina, where progressive social movements were part of national government processes. The result was that in Argentina, movement–government dynamics revolved around constructing long-term policy proposals, whereas in Brazil movements focused on short-term emergency responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2003, the Workers’ Party took federaloffice in Brazil on an agenda of social inclusion and popular participation. This paper explores attempts to implement that agenda in big infrastructure projects in the Amazon: the BR-163 road and the Belo Monte dam. We argue that overlapping inequalities (between social groups, within the bureaucracy and between territorial centre and periphery) result in uneven state capacities for implementing projects in the Amazon. This framework helps explain why the government has moved much faster in building infrastructure than in implementing participatory social and environmental programmes that would benefit affected local communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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Over the last two decades, numerous international conferences and organizations have espoused managing water as an economic good, involving participatory forums in systems of decentralized management at the river-basin level. In the 1990s, Brazil adopted such a model. More than a simple transfer of power from the national to the local level or from bureaucratic to deliberative decision-making, however, this process requires multi-directional power transfers among a variety of policy arenas and actors and among national, state, municipal and river-basin institutions, as well as a complex — and ongoing — negotiation over the meanings of both water pricing and participation. Focusing on the politics of reform legislation in the state of São Paulo and nationally, the article examines how political-institutional features of federalism and executive-legislative relations constrained the passage of reform legislation, and how pro-reform actors attempted to surmount such institutional limitations with networking strategies and by fostering incremental changes in practices on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]