São Paulo’s Two Worlds of Climate Politics: Political Infrastructures of Civil Society and Housing Movements

• In Event: 046 - Section on Environment and Technology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 06. Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation

Abstract

There is a growing consensus that cities will play a vital role in mitigating climate change, but we know more about how and why cities should provide climate leadership than what happens when they set out to. Moreover, as leading climate scholars identify a gap between rhetoric and action, there is a lack of sociologically satisfying explanations for stagnating urban climate policy. This paper provides one, building on a case study of São Paulo rooted in ten months of fieldwork, including over 30 formal interviews and the observation of dozens of events. Synthesizing sociological insights from network theory, social movement studies, and the political sociology of climate change, it develops a distinctive political infrastructure approach capable of identifying and exploring the mutual estrangement of two realms of compact city politics (in one case explicitly low-carbon; in the other implicitly): one rooted in environmentalist networks, and the other in poor people’s housing movements—a group included in no significant studies of urban climate politics so far. The paper traces the consolidation of these two distinct infrastructures under two mayoral regimes, and their apparently increasing convergence under a third. It argues that political economic structures and contingent left-right partisan struggles play key roles in shaping the relationship between these infrastructures, factors absent from the literature on urban climate governance. And it suggests that poor people’s housing movements could anchor an effective, alternative low-carbon urban politics, serving as actors with the “interests and the power” (Lever-Travy 2008) to secure substantial emissions reductions.

Author

• Daniel Aldana Cohen, New York University