Re-framing popular governance in Brazil: Re-insurgent and entrepreneurial arrangements in the urban peripheries

Abstract

In the periferias of Brazil, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the role of local actors to organise and manage networks, resources and discourses to support and advance residents’ demands. In this article, we argue that the pandemic gave visibility to emerging arrangements which remain under-theorised and under-analysed. Specifically, we examine how these arrangements reveal what we label re-insurgent and entrepreneurial forms of popular governance. Drawing upon fieldwork in Belo Horizonte and São Paulo, we examine how trajectories of autoconstruction and urban consolidation contribute to differently outline, legitimise and tend to local claims and demands. We show they rely and build on distinct networks of influence and resources, and encompass alternate combinations of state, private, and civil society actors, to both reinforce and challenge the urban inequalities and power asymmetries.