INR6938 Lecture 6

University of North Florida Master of Public Administration program Course syllabus INR6938 Field experience in International Affairs: !

Photo source Status quo (as opposed to last class’s ‘revolution’ theme) * Santa Catarina in context

Santa Catarina is a rather nondescript state in the Brazilian Federation. It is the smallest of the three southern states, with an area of 37,060 square miles (the 7th smallest of Brazil’s 26 states, and about the size of South Carolina) sandwiched between Paraná to the north and Rio Grande do Sul to the south. The state is wedge-shaped, with a 250 mile Atlantic coast on the east, narrowing as the state progresses inland, to a sixty mile western border with the Argentinean province of Misiones. A narrow coastal plain gives way to a rugged mountain range rising to 5000 feet, which historically inhibited settlement inland. The industrial heartland is located in the northeast, centered on the Itajaí Valley and the city of Joinville, which is the state’s largest. The capital city of Florianópolis is located on the island of Santa Catarina, which is connected to the mainland by a bridge.1 This will be discussed a bit further below, but Santa Catarina is unique in Brazil in that its capital is not far and away the largest city in the state.

Santa Catarina was settled relatively late. With the Spanish settlement of Colônia do Sacramento (up the Platte River from present day Montevideo) in 1680, the Portuguese settled what is now Santa Catarina to counter Spanish claims to the region. The region remained unsettled through the mid-eighteenth century, when some 9000 settlers from the overpopulated Azores were brought to the region. Still, the state’s population numbered only 24,000 by 1800. Population growth only took off with European immigration in the mid-nineteenth century, yet the state still had only 200,000 people by 1870. This immigration, from Italy, Poland, and other countries but especially from Germany, gave the state an entrepreneurial class and a skilled, disciplined, modern, and hard-working labor force, which is widely credited for the state’s relative economic

 1 Actually two, but the first, the Ponte Hercílio Luz, has been under renovation to be re-opened as a pedestrian bridge since I did dissertation research there in 1997.

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INR6938 Lecture 6 success. This large influx of outsiders into Santa Catarina, imbued as they were with the ethos of industrializing northwest Europe, had the critical mass to create semi-autonomous societies. Coupled with geographic distance from the established centers of power and a landholding system characterized by small holdings in the areas of densest population, this allowed for modernization and industrialization despite, as some scholars argue, the old clientelistic networks. The state’s population is estimated at about 6.5m, with a per capita income among the country’s highest.

Regionalization

A unique aspect of Santa Catarina, that will be developed below, is its distinct regions. All other Brazilian states have a dominant capital city, then generally subordinate regions. Catarinense identify six distinct economic regions:  The Littoral. Florianopolis (pop. 460,000) is a government, tourism (from Argentina, , inland Brazil, etc.) and business center. This coastal region also includes the cites of São José (pop. 200,000), just across the bridge from the island, and Palhoça (pop. 150,000), just south of São José.  The Vale do Itajaí (Itajaí Valley) is a textile center (along with other industries). Cities include (330,000) and Itajaí (200,000).  The North. The Norte includes Joinville (550,000) and the smaller city of Jaraguá do Sul (160,000). The region is known for manufacturing, with a number of domestic firms that are strong in the national market, as well as some of which have become global players. General Motors recently opened a Brazilian assembly plant in Joinville, with BMW joining them.  Chapecó and the Oeste (West) focus on agriculture and livestock.  Criciúma in the South is a ceramic center.  Timber and woodworking dominate in the (Highland) region and Lajes.

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INR6938 Lecture 6

Local government

Some context. Table 1 provides an overview of the various levels of government in our four countries, as well as two ‘unitary’, non-federal countries by way of context. To tease out one further variable, I’ve also highlighted in red those entities that have no legal rights2 relative to the next higher level.

Table 1 Local government compared US Brazil Canada Australia France New Zealand Township Município Municipal Municipality Communes City and district (16,500) (5500) (3700) (129) (36,529) councils (67) Municipal1 Shire Cantons Regional councils (19,000) (255) (1995) (11) County Arrondissements (3034) (others) (323) State State Province State Departments (50) (27) (10+3) (6+2) (96) Regions (13) Federal Federal Federal Federal National Central

In this week’s discussion, we especially focus on efforts to create more viable units of local government. The Stepan, and the Andion, Serva et al article looks at attempts to do this in Brazil, while the Canadian report looks at urban amalgamation in Canada.

Spatial inequality and Brazil

Paradoxically, given the previous discussion, the two Brazilian readings look at attempts to  devolve policy down from the state to the regional level, giving the grass roots more involvement in determining what happens...  to create regional policy actors, which implies a...  consolidation/amalgamation process, not unlike that in Duval/Jacksonville. The reading also discusses various challenges at the local level in Brazil and, I’ll hazard a guess, the local level all over the world, to varying degrees.

Economic inequality. When we speak of inequality in the US, we usually refer to race, gender and ethnicity. The logic is that these characteristics often correlate with economic or social disadvantage, and so need to be addressed. Yet ‘space’ is also a variable that correlates with inequality: some regions are wealthier than others, and have more advantages. Think of Flint, Michigan at the moment.

2 With apologies to American ‘Charter Cities, which have been granted (by the state) a Charter (rough equivalent to a Constitution), which gives cities legal authority over their own affairs, without state meddling.

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INR6938 Lecture 6

‘Space’. By ‘space’ Andion, Serva and co-authors refer to, well, space. Or geography, perhaps, and they use the term ‘territory’. Just as race, gender, ethnicity, disability status and what have you can correlate with disadvantage, so can geography. As indicated early on, ‘space’ is especially relevant in Brazilian (and I’ll again hazard a guess, most countries’) inequality. Using the subnational level as unit of analysis, the table below provides an illustration of this. The ratio in the right hand column shows per capita income of the poorest state/region, relative to that of the national income per person. So in the United States, incomes in Mississippi are 77% of the national per capita GNP level. In the Brazilian state of Piauí, per capita income was 13¢ for every dollar of income nationwide.

Table 2 Regional inequality in international comparison Country Regions Ratio of GNP pc 1990 United States Mississippi 0.77 United Kingdom N. Ireland/ Southeast 0.60 Greece North Aegean/ Central 0.57 Germany S. Holstein/Hamburg 0.53 Spain Extremadura/ Navarre 0.49 France Corsica/Ile de France 0.47 Portugal Madeira/ Lisbon-Tejo 0.46 Italy Calabria/Lombardia 0.44 Brasil Northeast/Southeast 0.35 Piauí/ Brasília 0.13 Source: Candler 2007, Lavinas and Amaral (1996), with the US added from this.

Local government and inequality. Local government is especially relevant because small, rural regions often tend to be much poorer than urban (and especially suburban) areas. Inequality and ‘space’ relate at all levels:  Global spatial inequality. As this analysis shows, inequality is not just a racial or gender issue, it is also regional. What we would call ‘progressive’ Brazilians have often bemoaned structural inequality in the global economy, with the rich nations of Western Europe and North America the developed ‘center’, while countries of the south are the marginalized periphery.  National spatial inequality. Yet this regional inequality exists within countries as well. The cities of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Belo Horizonte (and to some extent the surrounding states) have long dominated Brazilian politics and economy.3 So they have been the center, the rest of the country the marginalized periphery. The Fenwick article especially discusses this, with reference to poverty alleviation.  Intra-state spatial inequality. As for countries and the world on the whole, states themselves are not uniform collections of egalitarian folks who, like so many musketeers, follow the motto “one for all, all for one.” We can see this within Santa Catarina, with the coastal areas, especially, being wealthier than inland, rural regions.

3 This is the ‘Southeast’ identified in the table on page 8 of week four’s lecture. Note from this table, as well, that the ‘South’ region of Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul also have higher levels of development. For a summary of these regions, see a more tourist-oriented, and a more business-oriented discussion.

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INR6938 Lecture 6

 Intra-regional spatial inequality. It just doesn’t stop: as for the states, so for the regions within these states, even the poorer ones. Lajes, the major city of the Serra Catarinense region of the state, is much wealthier than the three western municípios identified below.  Intra-município inequality. And then within these relatively small municípios, not surprisingly, there are the rich and powerful (who occasionally defraud or otherwise abuse government programs) and the poor and marginalized.

Rural political power. This inequality occurs despite rural states having more political power. The Stepan article presents the reality of rural (or periphery) political power. Small, rural states (especially) benefit at the expense of richer, larger states. This results both in the Senate (with every state, regardless of size, having three Senators) and the House (with the lowest number of seats a state can have being 8, while the maximum is capped at 70). In the lower house, note that the smallest US states only get one member of the House of Representatives, versus eight in Brazil. Worse, the population differences between Brazilian states is greater than that between American states.  São Paulo has about 44m people, larger than California’s 39m, while  Roraima has 500,000, smaller than Wyoming’s 560,000.  In percentage terms,  São Paulo has 21% of the population but under 14% of Deputies and 3.7% of Senators.  California has 12.7% of the population, 12.2% of Representatives, and 2% of Senators.  Roraima has 0.2% of the population, 3.7% of Senators, 1.6% of Deputies; while  Wyoming has 0.2% of the population, 2% of Senators, and 0.2% of Representatives.  As Stepan puts it: “one vote in the sparsely populated state of Roraima has 144 times the weight in producing a Brazilian Senator as does a vote case in the densely populated state of São Paulo” (p. 148, see also p. 150).

Constitutional constraints. The Constitution, see Article 158, allocates a certain amount of federal money to the municípios (Stepan, p. 150-1).

Municípios and ‘demos constraints’. Both Stepan and Andion/Serva comment on the lack of democracy in some of these rural regions. Stepan most dramatically refers to a history of violent impunity, with local coroneis (the same concept as a caudillo in Spanish speaking Latin America) exercising great power. The example of Eldorado dos Carajás, in which nineteen people were murdered in a political killing as recently as 1996, is offered as an example.

And so: demos-constraining. For Stepan, this is all a constraint on democracy. The Constitution enshrines rules that mandate resource transfer from the center to the periphery, then much of those resources have not been utilized for egalitarian ends.

Amalgamation and rationalization in Santa Catarina

The discussion in the article below is included in this course just to present the dynamic of a rural development program in a relatively wealthy Brazilian state. ‘Relatively wealthy’ is important because the challenges faced below would be far worse elsewhere.

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INR6938 Lecture 6

Rural rationalization in Brazil. Carolina Andion, Maurício Serva, and their two co-authors wrote this study about decentralization in Brazil, with the focus on Santa Catarina. As we’ve seen above, the fundamental unit of local government in Brazil is the município, a reasonable translation of which is ‘local authority’. As Andion, Serva et al note, in the 2000s an initiative was launched to devolve more decision-making from the state capitals (or worse, from the federal government). Rather than devolving this power to the municípios, though, an attempt was made to create larger, regional units. As we saw in Table 1, the country does have a relatively ‘flat’ organizational chart, with a federal government, 27 states, and then some 5000+ municípios. Many are small. Of the nearly 300 in Santa Catarina, the average population in this state of over 6,000,000 would be 20,000, but about 230 are smaller than that. The median population is under 8000. One hundred have fewer than 5000 inhabitants, which is about the point where one can’t have a reasonably diverse high school.

Space and inequality. In their theoretical development of the study, note the French influence in the sources the authors cite. Andion and Serva are two of a small, but active group of Brazilian scholars whose second language is French, rather than English, and who do their work out of this intellectual tradition. From this literature, a number of causes of spatial (especially rural) inequality are identified (p. 166-7):  the costs of urban expansion;  funding pressures;  human, social and economic consequences of rural depopulation; and the  lack of attractiveness of the small cities and rural areas.

Devolved policy. The idea here is to shift the origins of the policy response  from a national, planned, top-down approach,  to one in which rural areas are able to develop their own plans.

‘Local Systems of Production’. Part of the idea, too, was to break with conventional political boundaries and instead think in terms of natural economic, social and cultural regions. To continue only with reference to economics: it has long been recognized that some regions develop specializations that give them competitive advantages over others. To the extent that some specialization takes place, economies of scale develop.

So building on these sorts of new, rural regional competitive advantages is part of the goal. The goal, too, was to break the regional inequality by combining the poor, rural municípios into separate regions, to prevent any funds being sucked up by the regional center.

Constraints. Note, too, Andion, Serva et al’s reference to  80% of municípios being located in rural areas (p. 165)  “The majority of these municípios produce no budgetary revenue, and so are wholly dependent on the States and the Federal government for funds.”  “The municipal and state regional councils, formal bodies created to enhance popular control, tend to be only weakly representative, their members are poorly qualified, and have neither the financial nor administrative capacity to act in a more pro-active manner” (p. 165).  I’ll also add that corruption exists even in this relatively wealthy state, I’ll illustrate with reference to our Comparative Public Administrator of the Week.

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INR6938 Lecture 6

Regionalization in Santa Catarina.  Figure 1, in the paper (page 176), shows the distribution of the state’s municípios.  Figure 2 (reproduced above on page 2) shows the historic macro-economic regions of the state. Note, again, that part of the idea of the plan was to remove the smaller municípios in the various regions from their local urban centers. In the Serrano region this regional urban center was Lajes, so it was hoped that relatively urban and wealthy Lajes would not suck up these resources meant for poorer peripheral communities (the western municípios are especially poor in the Serrana).  Figure 3 in the paper shows the 36 existing Secretariats of Regional Development.  Figure 4 then shows the regions that were created for participation in this rural development program (also reproduced on the last page of these notes).

Twelve coastal and five far western Secretariats of Regional Development were omitted from the program, as too wealthy. That left 19 interior SDRs but, rather than using these (maybe even breaking them up to have more of a rural focus), combinations occurred, so that there were eight new regions.

Results

Regional focus reinforces intra-regional inequality. Instead the traditional regions were largely maintained as the unit of analysis in these programs. This ran the risk of empowering the regional centers (Chapecó and Lajes) at the expense of the especially isolated rural municípios. The income disparities are shown on page 178, along with the larger regional centers technically not being eligible for this program that was meant to help small, poor communities.

Competition, not cooperation. Indeed, the authors indicate that rather than intra-regional cooperation, there was competition, and the old power elites were well placed to benefit from this (p. 179-82).

Patronage not planning. Rather than using the resources available for long term, regional socio- economic planning, instead they were used as patronage, by the powerful to reward allies (and themselves!). Note, too, the lack of resources (financial and in terms of skilled municipal personnel, not least with planning skills) in many of these small municípios.

Little innovation. The programs supported by these Territories tended to emphasize existing strengths of family farming, rather than diversifying sources of revenue and opportunities for non-farm owners. Such options include tourism, crafts, small scale manufacturing, etc.

Local elites dominated. The authors also note that (as implied in much of the above) few representatives of marginalized groups participated in the program, so again existing economic relations were reinforced.

Positives!  Improvement in local accountability and local control of approved projects (rather than these being determined in the capital of Florianopolis).

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INR6938 Lecture 6

 Improvements in the management of local resources.  Some improvement in inter-municipal projects.

So where am I going with this?

Political culture rules! So the program was less successful than it might have been, as it sought to change political boundaries, without first addressing political culture, especially regional patterns of domination. Note, too, that this effort to reduce inequalities in the rural part of this state took place in a relatively developed, relatively egalitarian state. The story points to the challenges of rural development especially in places with even greater challenges.

Some closing comments  O sul é nosso pais. The South (Rio Grande do Sul, Paraná and Santa Catarina) has a small separatist movement (source). There is no doubt a bit of a racist tinge to this, as this largely (wealthy) region of European descent seeks to leave a country with lots of (poor) people of African descent (an example).  There are lots of Santa Catarinas. The world is full of regions like this that much of the world is wholly unaware of. This can be a problem! As Fernando Henrique Cardoso put it, in challenging the notion that global capitalism exploits: “We are dealing, in truth, with a crueler phenomenon: either the South (or a portion of it) enters the democratic-technological- scientific race, invests heavily in R&D, and endures the ‘information technology’ metamorphosis, or it becomes unimportant, unexploited, and unexploitable” (Cardoso 2001).  Quality of life. The brief article on the IT industry in Santa Catarina echoes what we know in the US about quality of life as a determinant in IT investment. Given that transport isn’t as important (product can be emailed!), firms prefer to start up in attractive places. Bosses like to live there, and workers will work for less to live in a nice place.  You can’t survive on English. Note how little information there is on Santa Catarina – a substantial economic actor – in English. So if you are serious about having an international career, learn a language. Any language, though one with an economy (or something else you are interested in) is preferred.  Why Brazil (and Portuguese)? As I argued in opening this course: “If the world as we know it survives, young professionals looking to make a career in the ‘global village’ will find opportunity in Brazil, and knowing something about this ‘emerging power’ will otherwise do you a great deal of good. * References:

Cardoso, Fernando Henrique (2001). Charting a New Course. Lavinas, Lena, Eduardo Henrique Garcia and Marcelo Rubens do Amaral (1996). “Desigualidades regionais: indicadores sócio-econômicas nos anos 90,” in Revista Econômica do Nordeste, 27/4: 607-32.

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