Margaret E. Keck

Transnational advocacy networks in international and regional politics

of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, 338 Mergenthaler Hall, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA, email: mkeckKjhu.edu She is author of The Workers’ Party and Democratisation in Brazil (1992) and PT: A Logica da Diferenca (in Portuguese) (1991). Kathryn Sikkink is Professor of Political Science, University of Minnesota, 1414 Social Science, 267 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA, email: KsikkinkKpolisci.umn.edu She is author of Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina (1991). Transnational advocacy networks in international and regional politics*

Mobilizing the State: The Erratic Partner in Brazil's Participatory Water Policy

Studies of participatory governance generally examine the input (deliberation, participation) and/or output (accountability) side of policy processes. Often neglected is the throughput: Does the state have the political and technical capacity to implement the decisions that deliberative bodies make? In this study of Brazilian river-basin committees, the authors find that activists inside and outside the state often must collaborate to overcome resistance to change and provide state officials with resources they lack. They argue that this does not constitute the transfer of state responsibility to private actors but rather the mobilization of a states capacity to defend the public interest.

Inclusão, deliberação e controle: três dimensões dedemocracia nos comitês e consórcios de bacias hidrográficas no Brasil

Based on a survey of 626 committee and consortium members in 18 river basins, this study evaluates the democratizing effect of stakeholder governance in water resources management in Brazil. The term democracy is examined according to three ideas: a) participatory arenas should promote political inclusion and combat elite domination; b) participation must involve a dynamic process of interaction that transforms the understandings of those who participate; c) participatory arenas should guarantee a greater control over the state by the society. The paper suggests that the committees and consortia work better as deliberative spaces. Social inequalities among members affect but do not hinder the deliberative process.

Democratization and Dissension: The Formation of the Workers' Party

THE formation of effective political parties and stable party systems is a cornerstone of democratization. Nowhere is this clearer than in the countries of Latin America’s southern cone, which is beginning to emerge from decades of authoritarian military rule. In Brazil, the debate over the reorganization of the party system began even before it was clear that the military would relinquish power, and it has continued unabated ever since. One of the most controversial, innovative, and occasionally puzzling contributors to (and subjects of) this debate has been the new Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores; PT). My aim here is to make the PT and its position more comprehensible by placing them in the historical context of the political events of the past decade. In the middle and late 1970s, after President General Ernesto Geisel’s

Commentary: What Can we Ask of Civil Society?

As citizens and scholars, we have been asking a lot of ‘civil society.’ We want it to be an actor and a space, complex and coherent, organized and full of contingency. Having lost faith in the effi...

Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics

In Activists beyond Borders, Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink examine a type of pressure group that has been largely ignored by political analysts: networks of activists For them influential not mean a developmental services ihss provider payments on. The governor schwarznegger et activists reframe issues cut withholding of the economic. Click on health care services through june 2010. They attract the actual loss of human rights fidh. Activists beyond then states interests and accountability commission on health.

Ozone Depletion and Climate Change: Constructing a Global Response

Ozone Depletion and Climate Change: Constructing a Global Response. By Matthew J. Hoffman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 260p.

From Tribal Village to Global Village: Indian Rights and International Relations in Latin America. By Alison Brysk. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. 400p.

81.50 cloth,

60.00 cloth,

24.95 paper. In this book, Matthew J. Hoffman attempts something quite ambitious: a two-stage analysis in which he first designs a formal model to test Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkinks constructivist model of a norms life cycle, and a subsequent application of the insights generated to an empirical case. Although he does not quite pull it off, it is an effort worthy of attention and further development. On a stylistic note, the text contains an irritating amount of repetition that a good copy editor should have questioned.

24.95 paper.

From Tribal Village to Global Village does an excellent job of showing how indigenous peoples in Latin America have gone from victims to protagonists in struggles to control their own fate. Like Alison Brysks previous work on human rights activities in Argentina during the “dirty war,” this book investigates political dynamics involving nonstate actors at the interface between international relations and comparative politics. Key to these dynamics is the idea that “above all, globalization involves the growing presence, use, and salience of information both in national and local struggles and as a newly significant arena of international relations” (p. 12).