Jonathan A Fox

How Does Civil Society Thicken? The Political Construction of Social Capital in Rural Mexico

Abstract The growth of the building-block organizations of an autonomous civil society in an authoritarian environment depends on the “political construction” of social capital. Social capital can be coproduced by state and local societal actors or by the interaction of local societal actors and external actors in civil society. Social capital may also be produced from below, but external allies still turn out to be crucial in the ability of such organizations to survive. An examination of variety in political dynamics across different regions and over time in rural Mexico provides ample illustration of these general points.

The Uncertain Relationship between Transparency and Accountability

The concepts of transparency and accountability are closely linked: transparency is supposed to generate accountability. This article questions this widely held assumption. Transparency mobilises the power of shame, yet the shameless may not be vulnerable to public exposure. Truth often fails to lead to justice. After exploring different definitions and dimensions of the two ideas, the more relevant question turns out to be: what kinds of transparency lead to what kinds of accountability, and under what conditions? The article concludes by proposing that the concept can be unpacked in terms of two distinct variants. Transparency can be either ‘clear’ or ‘opaque’, while accountability can be either ‘soft’ or ‘hard’.

Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the United States

The multiple pasts and futures of the Mexican nation can be seen in the faces of the tens of thousands of indigenous people who each year set out on their voyages to the north, as well as the many others who decide to settle in countless communities within the United States. To study indigenous Mexican migrants in the United States today requires a binational lens, taking into account basic changes in the way Mexican society is understood as the twenty-first century begins. This collection explores these migration processes and their social, cultural, and civic impacts in the United States and in Mexico. The studies come from diverse perspectives, but they share a concern with how sustained migration and the emergence of organizations of indigenous migrants influence social and community identity, both in the United States and in Mexico. These studies also focus on how the creation and re-creation of collective ethnic identities among indigenous migrants influences their economic, social, and political relationships in the United States. of California, Santa Cruz

Vertically Integrated Policy Monitoring: A Tool for Civil Society Policy Advocacy

Effective independent civil society monitoring of public policy processes requires “vertical integration” to monitor different elite actors simultaneously. Vertical integration refers here to the coordination of policy monitoring and public interest advocacy efforts across different “levels” of the policy process, from the local to the national and transnational arenas. Systematic, coordinated monitoring of the performance of all levels of public decision making can reveal more clearly where the main problems are, permitting more precisely targeted civil society advocacy strategies. Because policy makers’ information about actual institutional performance is very limited, rarely field based, and drawn mainly from interested parties (especially in the case of large-scale, decentralized social programs), the resulting information gap creates opportunities for advocacy groups to use independent monitoring to gain credibility and leverage. This article, written originally for a Mexican activist audience, explores the implications of this approach in the context of civil society efforts to monitor and influence World Bank projects.

Introduction: New directions in agrarian political economy

For four decades, The Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) has served as a principal arena for the formation and dissemination of cutting-edge research and theory. It is globally renowned as a key site for documenting and analyzing variegated trajectories of agrarian change across space and time. Over the years, authors have taken new angles as they reinvigorated classic questions and debates about agrarian transition, resource access and rural livelihoods. This introductory essay highlights the four classic themes represented in Volume 1 of the JPS anniversary collection: land and resource dispossession, the financialization of food and agriculture, vulnerability and marginalization, and the blurring of the rural-urban relations through hybrid livelihoods. Contributors show both how new iterations of long-evident processes continue to catch peasants and smallholders in the crosshairs of crises and how many manage to face these challenges, developing new sources and sites of livelihood production.

Lessons from action-research partnerships: LASA/Oxfam America 2004 Martin Diskin Memorial Lecture

I am very grateful to the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) for sharing this great honour with me. Martin Diskin was first my teacher and mentor, then a research and teaching colleague, and always a friend. Not so long ago, I was thinking about Martin a great deal as I read his brother Saul’s moving memoir (Diskin 2001). Here one can learn what it takes to face the life-threatening illness that was looming behind Martin’s smile for so many years, unbeknown to all but family. Like so many defenders of human rights, he sustained an intense commitment to justice for all, in spite of an ever-present arbitrary threat to his own existence. I’d like to begin by recognising some of the many different ways of bridging scholarly and activist commitments. Martin’s own trajectory reflected many of them, including his deep commitment to teaching (outside as well as inside the university), his behind-the-scenes contribution to building progressive organisations for the long haul (as reflected in his service to Oxfam America), not to mention media work, fundraising, as well as creating free spaces within the university itself. Here, I’ll focus on some of the lessons that emerge from one specific approach to bridging activism and scholarship – the collaborative research partnership between scholars and activists. I will try to get to the point – without being ‘merely academic’ – by framing my points in the form of ten propositions for discussion. What these lessons share is a focus on recognising difference in order to bring people together.

Rural democratization and decentralization at the state/society interface: What counts as ‘local’ government in the mexican countryside?

Rural local government in Mexico is contested terrain, sometimes representing the state to society, sometimes representing society to the state. In Mexicos federal system, the municipality is widely considered to be the ‘most local’ level of government, but authoritarian centralization is often reproduced within municipalities, subordinating smaller, outlying villages politically, economically and socially. Grassroots civic movements throughout rural Mexico have mobilized for community self-governance, leading to a widespread, largely invisible and ongoing ‘regime transition’ at the sub-municipal level. This study analyzes this unresolved process of political contestation in the largely rural, low-income states of Guerrero, Hidalgo, Oaxaca and Chiapas.

Rural Democratisation in Mexico’s Deep South: Grassroots Right-to-Know Campaigns in Guerrero

In Mexicos southern state of Guerrero, rural social and civic movements are increasingly claiming their right to information as a tool to hold the state publicly accountable, as part of their ongoing issue-specific social, economic, and civic struggles. This study reviews the historical, social and political landscape that grounds campaigns for rural democratisation in Guerrero, including Mexicos recent information access reforms and then compares two different regional social movements that have claimed the ‘right to know’. For some movements, the demand for information rights is part of a sustained strategy, for others it is a tactic, but the claim bridges both more resistance-oriented and more negotiation-oriented social and civic movements.

Mexico's transparency reforms: Theory and practice

The experience of Mexicos 2002 transparency reform sheds light on the challenge of translating the promise of legal reform into more open government in practice. An innovative new agency that serves as an interface between citizens and the executive branch of government has demonstrated an uneven but significant capacity to encourage institutional responsiveness. A “culture of transparency” is emerging in both state and society, although the contribution of Mexicos transparency discourse and law to public accountability remains uncertain and contested.

Advocacy Research and the World Bank: Propositions for Discussion

Researchers committed to the public interest work hard to avoid being ‘merely academic’. Commitment is necessary but not sufficient for making a difference, however. Any discussion of how researchers can make a difference requires a broader assessment of whether the campaigns they work on are having an impact. From a research point of view, it turns out that assessing whether and how public interest campaigns are indeed having an impact is one of the hardest challenges. After all, most of the time, progress in dealing with powerful ´elite institutions inherently takes place through partial and uneven changes. Even more problematic, advocacy impact often needs to be assessed in terms of the terrible things that actually did not happen or were avoided—damage control—and this leads one onto the slippery terrain of the ‘counter-factual’. For example, is the World Bank doing more nasty things now than it did almost two decades ago, when what came to be known as the Multilateral Development Bank (MDB) campaign first took off? If so, what would that tell us about the efficacy of the many civil society efforts to challenge the Bank’s actions? Is the World Bank doing more decent things nowadays, having adopted a very enlightened-sounding series of official policies, public discourses, and NGO partners? Could both propositions be true at the same time, because the Bank is a contradictory institution that does lots of different things at once, some much worse than others?