Practical Authority: Agency and Institutional Change in Brazilian Water Politics PDF Book Download *FREE

New institutions don’t come into being by themselves: They have to be organized. On the basis of research from a decade-long, multi-site study of efforts to transform freshwater management in Brazil, Practical Authority asks how new institutional arrangements established by law become operational in practice. The book explores how this happens by putting both agency and structures in motion. It looks at what actors in complex policy environments actually do to get new institutions off the ground. New configurations of authority in a policy area very often have to be produced relationally, on the ground, in practice. New organizations have to acquire problem-solving capabilities and recognition from others, what the authors call “practical authority.”

The story told here has a multiplicity of protagonists, many of whom are normally invisible in political studies, such as the state officials and university professors who struggled to move water reform forward. The book explores the interaction between their efforts to influence the design and passage of new legislation and the hard labor of creating the new water management organizations the laws called for. It follows three decades of law making at the national and state level and examines the creation of sixteen river basin committees throughout the country. By bringing together state and society actors around territorially specific problems, these committees were expected to promote a new vision of integrated water management. But none of the ones examined here followed the trajectory their organizers expected. Some adapted creatively to challenges, circumventing roadblocks encountered along the way; others never got off the ground. Rather than explain these differences on the basis of the varying conditions actors faced, the authors propose a focus on the process, and practice, of institution building.

“Abers and Keck combine innovative concepts of how actors make and use institutions with a rich body of empirical material. The result is an intriguing story of how actors have created, shaped, and used institutions that are ‘entangled’ in a particularly complex environment. The authors show the importance of agency, of viewing institutions dynamically, and of following the messy process of creating the practical authority with which to govern.”-Ken Conca, author of Governing Water

“An attractive, compelling, and theoretically ambitious pragmatic account of agentic political actors struggling to construct new governance arrangements that span state, industry, and civil society, and balance the demands of environment, development, and fairness. This book will reward those seeking to understand the strategic and structural dynamics of institutional reform efforts.”-Archon Fung, Harvard Kennedy School

“In the hands of the authors, the emergence of innovative water management institutions in Brazil becomes an unparalleled opportunity to question how people construct new institutions. The authors generate a powerful response by combining a carefully crafted, highly original theoretical framework with a treasure chest of empirical observations. Everyone from theoreticians to policy makers and activists will find this book invaluable.”-Peter Evans, UC Berkeley

How do institutional arrangements established by law become operational in practice? It takes work for them to develop problem-solving capabilities and win recognition from others-what the authors call “practical authority.”

Drawing from a decade-long, multi-site study of efforts to transform freshwater management in Brazil, the authors show how an assortment of protagonists-from state officials to university professors to activists-struggled to breathe life into new institutional designs. Their account weaves together three decades of national and state law-making with experimentation in establishing new kinds of participatory water management organizations. Exploring this process in sixteen river basins, the authors examine why some of those organizations adapted creatively to challenges while others never got off the ground. To approach this complex, volatile, and non-linear process of transformation, the book develops a framework for investigating the actions and practices of institution-building.

Rebecca Neaera Abers is Professor of Political Science at the University of Brasília.

Margaret Keck is Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University.

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Prologue

Chapter 1 — Practical Authority, Institution-building, and Entanglement

Chapter 2 — Entangled Institutions and Layered Reform Narratives: Governing Water Resources in Historical Context

Chapter 3 — Institutional Design in Entangled Settings: How to Make an Unfinished Law

Chapter 4 –Practicing Laws: Experiments with Institution Building

Chapter 5 — Becoming Committees: Diversity, Problems and Processes

Chapter 6 — Diversions of Authority: Power, Perseverance and Struggles over the Control of Water Resources

Chapter 7 — Building Practical Authority from Outside the State

Conclusions

Appendix 1: Methodological Narrative

Appendix 2: List of interviews

References