Enhancing Democracy: Public Policies and Citizen Participation in Chile 9781782385479

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Enhancing Democracy

CEDLA Latin America Studies (CLAS) General Editor: Michiel Baud, CEDLA Series Editorial Board Anthony Bebbington, Clark University Edward F. Fischer, Vanderbilt University Anthony L. Hall, London School of Economics and Political Science Barbara Hogenboom, CEDLA Barbara Potthast, University of Cologne Rachel Sieder, CIESAS, Mexico D. F. Eduardo Silva, Tulane University Patricio Silva, Leiden University CEDLA Centro de Estudios y Documentación Latinoamericanos Centro de Estudos e Documentação Latino-Americanos Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation CEDLA conducts social science and history research, offers university courses, and has a specialized library for the study of the region. The Centre also publishes monographs and a journal on Latin America. Keizersgracht 395-397 1016 EK Amsterdam The Netherlands / Países Bajos www.cedla.uva.nl [For information on previous volumes published in this series, please contact CEDLA at the above address.] Volume 98

Latin America Facing China: South-South Relations beyond the Washington Consensus Edited by Alex E. Fernández Jilberto and Barbara Hogenboom Volume 99

Foodscapes, Foodfields, and Identities in Yucatán Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz Volume 100

Urban Residence: Housing and Social Transformations in Globalizing Ecuador Christien Klaufus Volume 101

Environment And Citizenship In Latin America: Natures, Subjects and Struggles Edited by Alex Latta and Hannah Wittman Volume 102

Central America in the New Millennium: Living Transition and Reimaging Democracy Edited by Jennifer L. Burrell and Ellen Moodie Volume 103

Dignity for the Voiceless: Willem Assies’s Anthropological Work in Context Edited by Ton Salman, Salvador Martí i Puig, and Gemma van der Haar Volume 104

Enhancing Democracy: Public Policies and Citizen Participation in Chile Gonzalo Delamaza

ENHANCING DEMOCRACY Public Policies and Citizen Participation in Chile

Gonzalo Delamaza

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

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Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com © 2015 Gonzalo Delamaza All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Delamaza, Gonzalo. Enhancing democracy : public policies and citizen participation in Chile / Gonzalo Delamaza. pages cm.— (CEDLA Latin America studies ; volume 104) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78238-546-2 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78238-547-9 (ebook) 1. Political participation—Chile. 2. Democracy—Chile. 3. Civil society— Chile. 4. Chile—Social policy. 5. Chile—Politics and government—1988– I. Title. JL2681.D45 2014 320.60983—dc23 2014018762

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed on acid-free paper ISBN 978-1-78238-546-2 hardback ISBN 978-1-78238-547-9 ebook

Contents

List of Tables

vi

Acknowledgements

vii

List of Abbreviations

viii

Introduction. The Question of Democracy in a Democratic Society

1

Chapter 1. Construction of Democracy, Public Policy and Civil Society’s Participation

17

Chapter 2. Chile: Top-down Modernization and Low-intensity Re-democratization

63

Chapter 3. Social Policy Agendas in the Transition to Democracy

104

Chapter 4. Civil Society, Public Policy Networks and Participatory Initiatives

157

Chapter 5. From Civil Society to the State: A New Elite Is Born?

207

Conclusion. Participation and Public Policies in the Chilean Democratic Process

249

References

271

Index

292

–v–

Tables

1.1. Socio-state Interfaces

47

2.1. Confidence in Political Parties in Latin America (%)

90

4.1. Cultural Appurtenances in the Home (%, Metropolitan Region, 2004)

160

4.2. Percentage of People Not Participating in Any Organization

166

4.3. Number of Organizations in Chile by Type of Organization

168

4.4. Object of Associations in Chile

169

4.5. Typology of Civil Society Organizations (%)

169

4.6. Trade Union Affiliation in Chile

170

4.7. Types of Participation in the Mechanisms Incorporated into Governance

176

4.8. Dimensions of Change and Variables that Impact Citizenship

185

4.9. Dimensions of Change and Variables that Impact Governance

187

4.10. Reported Impact on Governance and Citizenship According to Dimension

189

4.11. Reported Impact on Governance According to Dimensions and Variables

190

4.12. Reported Impact on Citizenship According to Dimensions and Variables

193

5.1. Positions by Level of Responsibility and Type of Agency

227

5.2. Positions by Generation and Political Affiliation

229

5.3. Positions Held by People from CSOs by Organization of Origin

230

5.4. Positions by Participation in CSOs and Political Affiliation

231

5.5. Positions Held by People from CSOs by Political Affiliation and Organizations of Origin

232

– vi –

Acknowledgements

Many people and institutions have helped to bring this work to fruition. First I wish to I thank my wife, Delia, and my children, Emiliano, Ariel and Laura. They most generously shared their time to the benefit of this lengthy work, which I dedicate to them with all my love. I also thank my colleagues from the Society and Public Policy Research Centre at the Universidad de Los Lagos. For several years I have shared with them an interest in exploring Chilean society and its innovative possibilities for social transformation. Through them I acknowledge the hundreds of innovative local initiatives that dynamize development and social life in Chile from day to day. A decade of sustained support from the Ford Foundation for various projects was an irreplaceable element that ensured this work’s continuity. Special thanks to its former representatives Augusto Varas and Martín Abregú. The institutional support of Universidad de Los Lagos, together with the direct commitment and confidence of Rector Oscar Garrido, have ensured academic realization of what might otherwise have remained only an idea. The research that gave empirical support to the text’s hypotheses and ideas benefited from the support of the Chilean Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (Projects 1060087 and 1085180) between 2006 and 2010. The work contains an intellectual debt to my colleague and lifelong friend Carlos Ochsenius. Many intuitions have become ideas and made sense over the course of long, productive conversations and shared projects. In preparing the text I give special thanks to Pascale Bonnefoy, Paula Martínez, Jorge Moraga and Claudia Robles. For the English version I wish to thank María Teresa Escobar, who is my mother and a professional translator, as well as Miriam Rabinovich and Jaime Taber. Thanks also to those who read the first version of the book, especially Dr Evelina Dagnino and Dr Eduardo Silva, whose comments gave me more work to do but undoubtedly improved the final text. I also received much support and useful suggestions from Kathleen Willingham of CEDLA. Lastly, I thank Prof. Dr Patricio Silva of Leiden University for his unfailing support. His intellectual rigour, together with his practical sense, unfailing warmth and encouragement, were of the greatest help in the completion of this work. – vii –

Abbreviations

AFP

Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones (Pension Funds)

AGCI

Agencia Chilena de Cooperación Internacional (Chilean Agency for International Cooperation)

AUGE

Acceso Universal con Garantías Explícitas en Salud (Universal Access with Explicit Health-care Guarantees)

BID

Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (International Development Bank, IDB)

Ficha CAS

Ficha de Caracterización Socioeconómica (Socioeconomic Description Card)

CASEN

Encuesta de Caracterización Socioeconómica (Socioeconomic Description Survey)

CEDAW

Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women

CEM

Centro de Estudios de la Mujer (Centre for Women’s Studies)

CEPAL

Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, ECLAC)

CEPI

Comisión Especial de Pueblos Indígenas (Special Commission for Indigenous Peoples)

CESCO

Consejo Económico Social Comunal (Communal Socioeconomic Council)

CIEPLAN

Corporación de Investigaciones Económicas para Latinoamérica (Corporation for Latin American Economic Research)

CIRA

Consejo Integrador de la Red Asistencial (Health-care Network Member Council)

CIS

Consejo Interministerial Social (Social Interministerial Council) – viii –

A b b rev i a ti o n s |

CODECO

ix

Consejo de Desarrollo Comunal (Communal Development Council)

CODELCO Corporación del Cobre (state-owned copper company) CONACE

Consejo Nacional para el Control de Estupefacientes (National Narcotics Control Council)

CONADI

Corporación Nacional de Desarrollo Indígena (National Indigenous Development Corporation)

CONAMA

Comisión Nacional del Medio Ambiente (National Environmental Commission)

CONICYT

Consejo Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (National Scientific and Technological Research Council)

COPESA

Consorcio Periodístico Sociedad Anónima (Media Consortium)

CORA

Corporación de Reforma Agraria (Agrarian Reform Corporation)

CORE

Consejos Regionales (Regional Councils)

COREMAs

Comisiones Regionales del Medio Ambiente (Regional Environmental Commisions)

CORFO

Corporación de Fomento de la Producción (Chilean Development Corporation)

COSOC

Consejo de Organizaciones de la Sociedad Civil (Civil Society Organizations Council)

CPU

Centro de Promoción Universitaria (University Promotion Centre)

CSO

Civil Society Organization

CUT

Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (General Workers’ Union)

DC

Democracia Cristiana (Christian Democracy)

DESAL

Centro para el Desarrollo de América Latina (Center for Latin American Development)

DIDECO

Dirección de Desarrollo Comunitario (Community Development Bureau)

DOS

División de Organizaciones Sociales (Social Organizations Division)

FLACSO

Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (Latin American Faculty for Social Sciences)

FNDR

Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Regional (National Fund for Regional Development)

x

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Abbreviations

FOCH

Federación Obrera de Chile (Chilean Workers’ Federation)

FONADIS

Fondo Nacional de la Discapacidad (National Disability Fund)

FONDART Fondo Nacional para el Desarrollo de las Artes (National Art Development Fund) FOSIS

Fondo de Solidaridad e Inversión Social (Solidarity and Social Investment Fund)

GADIS

Grupo de Análisis y Desarrollo Institucional y Social (Institutional and Social Analysis and Development Group)

GES

Garantías Explícitas en Salud (Explicit Health-care Guarantees)

GORE

Gobierno Regional (Regional Government)

IC

Izquierda Cristiana (Christian Left)

IDR

Inversión Decidida Regionalmente (Regionally Decided Investment)

INDAP

Instituto de Desarrollo Agropecuario (Agriculture and Livestock Development Institute)

INJUV

Instituto Nacional de la Juventud (National Youth Institute)

ISAPRES

Instituciones de Salud Previsional (Health-care Insurance Institutions)

MAPU

Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitaria (United Popular Action Movement)

MIDEPLAN Ministerio de Planificación (Ministry of Planning) MINVU

Ministry of Housing and Urban Development

MIR

Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left Movement)

NGO

Nongovernmental Organization

OCDE

Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económico (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD)

ODEPLAN Oficina de Planificación (Planning Bureau) OIP

Organizaciones de Interés Público (Public Interest Organizations)

PC

Partido Comunista (Communist Party)

PL

Partido Liberal (Liberal Party)

PN

Partido Nacional (National Party)

A b b rev i a ti o n s |

xi

PLADECO

Plan de Desarrollo Comunal (Communal Development Plan)

PNUD

Programa de Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo (United Nations Development Programme, UNDP)

PPD

Partido por la Democracia (Party for Democracy)

PR

Partido Radical (Radical Party)

PRI

Partido Regionalista de los Independientes (Independent Regionalist Party)

PRSD

Partido Radical Social Demócrata (Radical Social Democratic Party)

PS

Partido Socialista (Socialist Party)

REDLAC

Red de Fondos Ambientales de Latinoamérica y el Caribe (Environment Fund Network for Latin America and the Caribbean)

RN

Renovación Nacional (National Renovation Party)

SEGEGOB

Ministerio Secretaría General de Gobierno (Secretariat of Government)

SEGPRES

Ministerio Secretaría General de la Presidencia (Secretariat of the Office of the President)

SENAMA

Servicio Nacional del Adulto Mayor (Senior Citizen Bureau)

SERNAC

Servicio Nacional del Consumidor (National Consumer Bureau)

SERNAM

Servicio Nacional de la Mujer (National Women’s Bureau)

SNS

Servicio Nacional de Salud (National Health Service)

SOFOFA

Sociedad de Fomento Fabril (Industrial Development Association)

SUBDERE

Subsecretaría de Desarrollo Regional y Administrativo (Office of the Under-Secretary for Regional and Administrative Development)

UDI

Unión Demócrata Independiente (Independent Democrat Union Party)

Introduction The Question of Democracy in a Democratic Society

When French philosopher Régis Debray visited Chile in 1971, he noted with astonishment that in downtown Santiago, amidst a radical political transformation led by the Unidad Popular administration, the texts of laws were for sale in the streets alongside newspapers and magazines. Vendors hawked the latest legal novelties and stop-press news items simultaneously. The current debate centred on the word ‘legality’. What kind of revolution, Debray wondered, was conducted in the name of the laws it sought to abolish? The conventional wisdom of the revolutionary theoretician was challenged by an original experience, which he nonetheless was not ready to disqualify. Ironically, Debray said, ‘From top to bottom of the administrative hierarchy, from one end to the other of the country, and endless bickering of pettifoggers, codes in hand, verdicts in the first instance, appeals based on counterclaims and motions to vacate take up the foreground of the stage. The keyword in all these debates … is not Revolution nor Justice nor Liberation nor Proletariat, but Legality, taboo word, obsessive leitmotiv, apple of visible discord’ (Debray 1971: 5). On 17 September 2005, President Ricardo Lagos, seeking to leave behind the authoritarian legacy of General Augusto Pinochet – de facto ruler from 1973 to 1990 – consolidated the text of the Constitution and its amendments, then signed it with his own hand, conveying a sense of finalizing and culminating a political process. From that moment on, the signature of a democratically elected president legitimized the same Constitution enacted by Pinochet in 1980 and its partial amendments. What kind of democratic transition ended up approving the very Constitution it ought to have abolished? On this point, another foreign observer, Spanish journalist Rafael Otano, added with a touch of irony: ‘Much has been said of a transition that is incomplete, imperfect, interminable, infinite. There is also a somewhat sarcastic view, to the effect that the transition, as such, never was: there has been a distribution of power at the top, and the Concertación has been an efficient administrator of an economic and political project inherited from the dictatorship’ (Otano 2006: 490). –1–

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Introduction

As this book nears completion, Chile is again showing itself to be an original case that does not fit neatly into a simple mould. In the course of 2011, amidst an economic revival that topped off a twenty-year period of political stability, ample and diverse sectors of society marched repeatedly through the streets for months, voicing demands on issues of education, the environment and respect for diversity. In February 2012 the distant region of Aysén led a regional rebellion that lasted forty days. In 2013 massive urban demonstrations broke out again, and the unrest spread even to small towns in the north. The country’s general profile remained unchanged, but the society seemed to come to life, reacting against politics and institutions, the government and the opposition, the executive, Congress, and the parties (Mayol and Azócar 2012; Atria et al. 2013). The nation boasting Latin America’s most exemplary transition – an island of political stability and individual progress under a market economy – again became the stage for the people’s expression of collective demands, outside of institutions. In democratization studies on the ‘third wave’ in Latin America, Chile appears as a late case but ranks topmost in stability and successful performance, despite the counterbalance of the quality of its democracy. Of course, various criteria influence the assessment and analysis. Chile is seen as both a model for other countries and an exception in the region. A quarter century after the succession plebiscite of 1988 that opened the door to the peculiar Chilean political transition, it is possible to examine consolidated trends of the process and understand some of its contradictory traits and paradoxes. Governance was the paramount theme of the 1990s as the country recovered its democratic institutions and partly overcame the dangers of authoritarian reversal, though with the institutional and matter-of-fact presence of General Pinochet as Commander-in-Chief of the Army.1 This was a period of development and stability, understood here to mean the reestablishment of a tightly constrained democratic political system in a framework of constitutional continuity, maintenance of economic growth based on the neoliberal model, absence of social unrest or major mobilizations against social and political order, and positive results in poverty reduction in Chile. This conjunction of factors led Chileans to closely associate the concept of governance with notions of political stability and gradual, limited change. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the long dictatorship and its profound consequences the challenge of democratization entailed more extensive change. The destroyed links between state and society had to be repaired. In other words, the challenge was hardly limited to the operation of representative political institutions and the effective management of public affairs: thoroughgoing political reform and strong development of public policies were expected, the latter to ensure economic growth and address social problems that had worsened under the military regime. Whereas the anticipated politi-

Introduction

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3

cal reforms were long in coming and advanced very little in the 1990s, public policies were a site of immediate action by democratic administrations and the point on which they expected to distinguish themselves from the military government. Precisely these policies are the subject of this work. Coherent, effective public policies were more important than assuring the provision of services. They became a key factor in the economic and social systems’ legitimacy, insofar as they prevented escalation of tensions and social demands seeking changes under both headings (Boeninger 1997, 2007; Fernández 1998; Drake and Jaksic 1999). The public policies during the Chilean transition period were not the mere result of political agreement but one of the central factors in its design and management. Did they comply with the democratizing role entrusted to them? It should be stressed that change came ‘from the top down’, negotiated and implemented by a consensus between the governing political-military elites and the new forces seeking access to the government (Brunner 1990; Agüero 2005). A very small group of people participated in these negotiations. The process was not publicized while it was going on, nor did it end in a publicized document or agreement, in contrast to, for instance, the Moncloa Pact that guided the Spanish transition process. Such design meant constraints on democratic development, and not only in the sphere of political institutions, which retained the constitutional framework enacted by Pinochet in 1980. The governing consensus also strictly limited the autonomy and structure of both social movements and mechanisms for public participation in governance with a view to reducing social pressures, contrary to what had happened in other Latin American countries (Oxhorn 1995; Boeninger 1997; Posner 2003; Hagopian 2005; Petras and Veltmeyer 2005). The particular features of the Chilean case are several. First, the political transition left the Constitution unchanged, and policy in the first decade was subject to an institutional military presence. Also, the country’s stability was manifest in its avoidance of the crises other countries had weathered in the past few years, and in the continuity of governance under the same political coalition for twenty years. Moreover, the set of social policies that was designed and implemented somewhat reduced the level of poverty inherited from the military dictatorship without altering the socioeconomic structure of the country or strengthening Chilean civil society. How to judge the construction of democratic governance in this particular context? On the one hand, Chile’s significant indexes of political stability, economic growth and even poverty reduction were all attained in a democratic (though restricted) institutional framework. On the other hand, Chile has failed to reduce its high indexes of inequality. Civil society remains fragmented, and adherence to democracy, participation in politics and the prestige of representative institutions such as the political parties and Congress

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are low indeed.2 The former markers have been and continue to be stressed as evidence of Chile’s successful transition. The latter remain much less visible and are so far unresolved, a situation that has intensified since the political change in the executive in 2010, when a right-wing administration took office. This is manifest in the lack of confidence in the discredited democratic institutions, together with loss of support for political coalitions with either the government or the opposition. This volume examines the links between civil society and the state as factors in the construction of democratic governance in Chile in the post-transition period. It examines the role of public policies and the opportunities they created for civil society in a scenario of political stability and economic growth. Using a broad notion of governance, it postulates that the democratic governments’ main instrument for transformation has been public policies that link the state to society and modify the situation inherited from the dictatorship. It contends, however, that they have been insufficient, for they are subject to an elitist model of democracy and restricted citizen participation and thus have only limited ability to produce democratic governance. To these ends it covers the major social policy agendas, along with a sample of innovations in the link established with civil society as well as some personal trajectories from civil society to state power. It ends by reconceptualizing democratic governance in terms of incorporation of the democratic deepening of the state and new forms of participative democracy. Governance, public policies and citizen participation have each been the subject of various reflections and works, but they have not yet been mutually linked as components of the social and political process. Understanding the particular characteristics and evolution of the Chilean case requires an integrated approach that establishes the relationships among them, in part by discussing the very concept of democratic governance and its scope. If stability alone is privileged, then the Chilean way might be thought of as the best possible option, as one of its main artificers, Edgardo Boeninger (1997), held until he died. If, however, adherence to democracy and citizen participation are taken into account, then Chile’s path has incurred costs leading to instability in the medium term, as Jorge Domínguez (2005) pointed out and as has been observable since 2011. At the heart of the problem are the political reforms and the character of the public policies implemented. The latter are particularly relevant in the case of Chile owing to its tradition of change from the top down, which privileges institutional factors and central policy initiative. In conceptual terms, this work discusses how construction of democratic governance – beyond the transition of the political regime – relates to the construction of social citizenship and development of citizen participation. For this purpose, it uses the concept of construction of democracy, which is broader than that of governance.

Introduction

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5

In his essay on democracy, José Nun (2002) shows that the need for social conditions of inclusion was clearly established in the origins of the various traditions of democratic policy. This applies for proponents of minimalist and delegatory concepts (Joseph Schumpeter) as well as for their pluralist followers (Robert Dahl) and, of course, the heirs of T.H. Marshall. ‘What is striking is not so much the inequality as such but, on the one hand, the degree of polarization between those who have too much and those who have almost nothing, and, on the other, the very intensity of the condition of privation undergone by the latter’ (Nun 2002: 48). This is a key point, as Latin America often owes its troubles to the application of democratic paradigms without consideration of the necessary social conditions. Thus, a case of conceptual reification has arisen, reducing democracy to the duration of the competitive political regime and contradicting the original theory. Based on this reified concept, attempts to resolve the question of inclusion and participation have been considered populist forms perilous to democracy. Throughout much of Latin America, various initiatives have attempted to contend with the tensions that weigh on democracy owing to the fundamental problems that characterize the region: socioeconomic exclusion, inequality and the poverty that major segments of the population live in. Jorge Castañeda (1996) and other authors have precisely described the difficulties of sustaining democracy under existing conditions of inequality and poverty. Yet democracy is still standing, as distinguished from the past – despite outbreaks of intense social conflict, many of which have interrupted presidential terms of office and caused profound crises. Such situations have ultimately returned to the normal course of democracy, posing interesting challenges aimed at broadening political systems to make room for theretofore excluded groups. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, administrations have willingly taken up the agenda of inclusion and proposed more or less radical variations of the neoliberal model imposed on the region in the preceding period. This juncture of dispute over the construction of democracy is definitely post-authoritarian and post-transitional.3 The authoritarian project is weaker (but has not disappeared altogether). The democratic process has led to the emergence of no fewer than three political projects for building very different variants of democracy, here termed the constitutional, the reformist and the properly liberal. Adherents of the constitutional variant favour a shift away from the neoliberal mode, control over natural resources, a larger role for the state in the economy, redesign of political institutions – including constitutions – and a new geopolitical positioning in the international picture. Here, the vision of civil society’s role incorporates greater mobilization and activism among lower-income sectors, although greater polarization among conflicting projects is an attendant concern. Their differences aside, Latin America’s

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constitutional democracies are Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and (with major differences) Nicaragua. Another group of countries adheres to what is here termed the reformist variant. Different combinations of elements prevail in different countries; however, all members of this group have strengthened public policies and promoted higher degrees of state regulation, though in the framework of economic internationalization. This variant arises particularly in the Southern Cone. It extends from Argentina (bearing close resemblance to the constitutional variant) to Chile (much closer to the liberal variant, and closer still after the political change in 2010) by way of Brazil and Uruguay. The component of civil society’s participation is much more pronounced in the two latter countries, which possess adequate constitutional and juridical systems as well as constitutions that were reformed at the beginning of the political transition to democracy in the 1990s. This may well turn out to be the line the left-wing governments of Paraguay and El Salvador are pursuing at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Last is a strictly liberal variant, currently embraced by Mexico and Colombia (perhaps also Peru before the administration of Ollanta Humala). Here, bilateral relations with the United States are paramount for trade (and the U.S. has singled out both countries for joint action on drug traffic). In these cases the democratization agenda includes reinforcement of certain social policies, specifically those combating poverty. Nevertheless, the concept of citizenship is a strictly liberal one, and reform of the state is modernizing and managerial, seeking above all to increase transparency of public action in connection with the market. The role of violence is also significant in both countries. Is the Chilean situation an exception in Latin America? In some ways it would seem so, considering its remarkable political and economic stability. And it could be that Chile is once more a latecomer to the trends of change: in 2013 the political debate centred on a new political constitution and the possibility of a constituent assembly. Regardless, problems that are common in the region and present in the various countries warrant examination. Another aim of this study is to understand the specificity of the Chilean case, attempt an explanation of the process and identify its similarities to other countries in the region. The writing of this text mostly ended in 2010, a moment of political change in Chile. The Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia, in office since March 1990, lost the elections of January 2010 and gave way to a rightwing coalition that had been the opposition for twenty years. Whatever the course of political events in Chile, this change of power marks the close of a long political cycle inspired by the idea of transition to democracy. This volume may be considered a contribution to understanding that cycle. The text

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will develop a conceptual and empirical argument associating the design and implementation of the democratic process with two specific dimensions crucial to the problematic of relations between state and society: public policies and citizen participation.

Governance and Construction of Democracy Chapter 1 develops the main concepts discussed in this book. It opens by stating that in the context of the past quarter century’s reconstruction of democracy in Latin America, discussion of the issue of governance can no longer be restricted to the terms of the tradition that began with Huntington, Crozier and Watanuki’s first report to the Trilateral Commission in 1975. There these authors stressed that tensions had arisen vis-à-vis democratic values in the communities – in the form of counterculture, political unrest and the authorities’ loss of prestige – and governments’ ability to respond to such increasing demands in a framework that retained the parameters of socioeconomic order. This last point was apparently untouchable, and the resulting neoconservative rule ‘was aimed not at expanding the capacity of the state to respond but, on the contrary, at reduction of citizen demand’ (Moreno 2006: 32). Dictatorial governments employed the same notions in authoritarian formulas intended to control and deactivate social demands and impose neoliberal policies reducing the role of the state. The present, renewed democratic context has opened a search for notions associated with democracies’ capacity for inclusion, the quality of their institutions and formulation of alternatives to the predominance of the neoliberal model (see the concept of state of citizenship in Pinto and Flisfich 2011). To date, however, the concept of governance, in its most frequent use, has preserved the original basic objective: to reduce social conflict and above all prevent it from affecting policy and the state, which would cause ‘ungovernance’. This usage is associated with a restricted or ‘minimalist’ concept of democracy as an electoral political regime, with no reference to democratization beyond the political regime and the social conditions that make it possible and viable (Nun 2002; Vargas 2008). The first task undertaken in this work is thus conceptual and includes discussion and expansion of the notion of governance. Here governance is distinct from democracy and construction of democracy, as discussion of democratic governance in Chile has focused mainly on the functioning of institutions and the rules of the political game, appropriate to transitology or recovery of institutions following dictatorships. As Jorge Vargas remarked in his text on quality of democracy, transition to democracy is but a single, non-exhaustive variant of democratization. Yet

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theory has failed to meet the challenges imposed by historical and political reality, for although “the historic experience of living in a democracy has spread beyond the confines of the political regime, comparative theories on democracy have encountered serious difficulties, not only to explain the phenomenon but to propose conceptual and methodological innovations capable of verifying and interpreting democratic developments beyond the regime. … The remaining things – the democratic rule of law, the new mechanisms for citizen participation in public management, among others, are at most recognized as conditions facilitating democratic regimes” (2008: 17). The limitations Vargas described, which reduce democracy to some of its instruments, have helped identify the procedures providing greater stability but bypassed discussion of democracy’s capacity for inclusion or social transformation. Despite a fruitful debate that has enriched the field of political science, new levels of analysis are needed at the present theoretical juncture to supplement such studies and spark discussion of some of democracy’s more specific social dimensions. In the case of Chile, this limited conception has led to a sort of hypergovernance approach, where the main goal of the political system turns out to be its own stability (De la Cuadra 2003). Indeed, hypergovernance subordinates the materialization of policies to this goal and influences their design to assure its achievement, which is at the same time proof of its success. As a result, numerous transformational goals are sidelined or remain unformulated, lest they alter this governance model. More recently, the relationship between governance and public policies has drawn attention because the problems of the former appear closely bound to the implemented policies’ inability to promote inclusion and social citizenship following the weakening of the state since the 1980s. Economic and social crises no longer lead to interventions and military coups, but institutional stability ‘has often been affected by social unrest that overflowed existing institutional banks, revealing undeniable insufficiencies in their representative authorities’ (Varas 2006: 25). Crisis resolution has enabled democracies to function again; subsequently, however, new policies and approaches designed for expansion in terms of socioeconomics and participation have received priority. Therefore, under current circumstances, democratic governance is critically dependent on democracy’s capacity for reform favouring inclusion, rather than repression or suppression, of citizen demands (Gray et al. 2011). In chapter 1, the discussion links the debate on governance to two issues not usually included therein: public policy and citizen participation. A public policy is normally viewed as a set of designs and technical instruments that serve a political decision already made. However, the Chilean experience of the past twenty years shows that the scope of public policy is key to implementing options to expand democracy or restrict it. It is not merely derived from and restricted to the technologies of ‘govern mentality’ (Fou-

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cault 1999), a term designating state action restricted to supply of services and problem-solving, disconnected from the dimensions of participation and sovereignty of the people that belong to a democracy. Transition from a military regime to an electoral democracy created the conditions for democratically oriented reform of the political system, but at the same time it highlighted the need to generate social conditions for construction of democracy beyond the political system. However, the political elite conceptualized this construction – which was designed to work through implementation of public policies – solely as a condition for governance, restricting its scope and effect. Chapter 3 takes up the various approaches Chile has taken towards public policies, discussing them in relation to the link between state and society. Citizen participation, though a sometime topic of governmental discourse, has faced severe difficulties in practice. The conceptualization undertaken in chapter 1 examines the debate between representative and participative democracy, presents the main objections to the participative model and examines various institutional forms that citizen participation has taken in the management of public policies.

Participation and Citizenship as an Analytical Perspective Democracy in Latin America faces problems such as scant direct citizen participation, the weakening of traditional representation mechanisms’ capacity to involve citizens, the complexity and technical level of the decision-making process and the predominance of elitist and delegatory notions of democracy (O’Donnell 1993; Avritzer 2002). These factors have led to reflection on ways to strengthen the ‘participative dimension of democracy’ so as to produce a ‘democracy of citizens’, as the United Nations’ Development Program put it (PNUD 2004a). Political debate in Chile has addressed the subject of participation since the 1990s, resulting in numerous public policies, programmes and legal initiatives, as well as extensive calls to discuss the matter. In that decade, citizen participation was a politically correct idea, that is, it was part of the officially accepted discourse. Its meaning, however, remained obscure, and its application was limited. At any rate, citizen participation in the context of the 1990s entailed no concrete change in the orientation and practices of the political and institutional process. The situation changed in 2006, when the debate on ‘citizen government’ opened – and promptly closed – against the background of a widespread and intense, though brief, social mobilization known as the Penguins’ Revolution.4 This debate revealed an absence of consensus on implementing con-

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crete transformations in the way Chile was governed. Explicit opposition attacked the introduction of new mechanisms for institutional participation, denouncing the notion of ‘citizen government’ as pointless and highly perilous. The Law on Association and Citizen Participation in Public Management was eventually passed at the beginning of 2011, and after intensive and extensive student and citizen demonstrations, voluntary voting and automatic voter registration of all men and women over eighteen years of age were adopted by the year’s end. The debate on participation in Chile is discussed in chapter 4. Meanwhile, moving beyond the theoretical and historical-cultural debate, a multitude of new experiences in Chile and Latin America, closely linked to legal amendments and new approaches to public policy, have led to empirical debate on forms of direct and participative democracy and the tools to manage them. Such experiences include constitutional recognition of mechanisms of direct democracy (laws proposed by the people, mandate annulment and plebiscites), various legal and administrative reforms, and innovations in policy and programme designs (Payne et al. 2003; PNUD 2004a; Hevia 2005; Delamaza 2006). Certain experiences affecting this debate, however, have concerned not central government but local contexts, arising either from the political initiative of certain groups and movements, or from agreements among international agencies, local governments and various other actors. Some of these local initiatives have eventually led to national programmes, such as Brazil’s Bolsa Escola (later Bolsa Familia), or become institutionalized as national norms, like the participative budgets in Peru and Ecuador. Such local initiatives have resulted in participative municipal budgets, managing councils, panels to discuss and organize concerted action, social oversight organs, and participative planning instruments and norms, among other things. The present volume often refers to an abundant but little-known Latin American bibliography on the subject of local participation and its prospects for institutionalization. Works that systematize the Latin American experience share several conclusions. In general, they agree that success in transforming methods and objectives of public policy management does not depend on the mere existence of participative mechanisms but rather, and primarily, on the ability of partners in society to make these mechanisms mandatory. Similarly, the success of participative management in the public sector appears to depend basically on the public officials’ ability to conceive and generate commitments under these new approaches. In other words, mere legal enactment or administrative approval of participative democracy is not in itself sufficient. This fact underlines the importance of experiences in the subnational sphere that experiment with and shape participation mechanisms and structures. The relevant research

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also examines the conditions in which such structures may extend to other areas and undergo further dissemination and institutionalization. Chapter 2 discusses the Chilean historical tradition, political culture and state practices, which do not present useful models for incorporating citizen participation. The unitary state, centralized and sectorally divided, and the presidentialist political system (reinforced by the binominal nature of the current electoral procedure), together with the effect of neoliberal reforms, many of which have not been amended since 1990, create conditions unfavourable to participation. The Chilean state’s tradition of ‘democratic illuminism’ privileges ‘top-down’ changes and reforms with ‘national sense’ over those ‘from the bottom’ that contain some form of ‘local ethos’ (Salazar and Pinto 1999). Chilean society’s formation in outposts of a Spanish Empire embroiled in constant warfare with the inhabitants of the territory (Chile was known as the Flanders of the Indies) led to a highly centralized, unitary state. In the republican period, this trait lived on in the imposition of public order, which fairly quickly stabilized after prevailing over various points of resistance as well as proposals from the local elites. The political system expanded and became legitimate, admitting no constitutional discussion and showing major signs of stability over time. In the twentieth century, political mediation through the parties marked the configuration of civil society and structured its relationship with the state. This book discusses the consequences of this ‘sociopolitical matrix’ for Chilean society as well as the changes that came about under protracted military government (1973–1990) and the negotiated transition to democracy in 1990. The historical trajectory and depth of the crisis caused by the military government and the destruction of democracy have led to what might be called ‘fear of overflow’, particularly among one part of the Chilean population, namely, the political and economic elites. When the UNDP Report on Human Development asked the populace about the objectives and uses of power, the most frequently mentioned objective (39 per cent) was ‘for order to exist and not to lose respect’ (PNUD 2004b: 119). Other objectives of power, such as to ‘attain progress’ or ‘prevent some people from taking advantage of other people’ had less support (24 per cent and 26 per cent, respectively). In 2001, when asked what should be done in the event of conflict, 70 per cent found it necessary to ‘try to avoid conflicts to prevent things from getting out of hand’. Three years later, this reply had 56 per cent support, whereas 42 per cent accepted that one had to ‘let conflicts take place so that the problems can be seen (ibid.: 17). Underlying these fears is the historical experience of the military coup of 1973, which was associated with exacerbation of social and political conflict and subsequently influenced the development of relations between the state and society in Chile. Survey data

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from 2011 on show much support for student mobilizations, as was the case earlier with the indigenous people’s movement, the environmental cause and others (www.adimark.cl).

The Importance of Public Policies Chapter 3 discusses Chilean public policy agendas according to their respective models of relations with civil society. From 1990 on, the administrations of the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia redoubled state social action with the explicit goals of overcoming poverty and building equal opportunities. They made good progress towards the former aim, despite limitations and problems in the surveys and the fact that they achieved merely a recovery of earlier levels of poverty rather than overcoming the phenomenon as such.5 As for the distribution of income and opportunities, the situation has changed little since the military government (Ottone and Vergara 2007; Larrañaga and Herrera 2008). What have these policies achieved in terms of broadening and deepening democracy? What lessons does the case of Chile offer in terms of governance and consolidation of democracy in the region? This book’s field of research is social policy – the ‘contradiction in terms’ where the normative action of the state meets the diverse dynamics of society (Fleury 1999). It is the preferred area for examining the construction of democracy, if it is understood to be associated with social and citizenship conditions. Additionally, however, social policy in Chile has been both a target of various reforms and an instrument for realizing efforts to expand social inclusion and support the stability of democracy after 1990. This has meant establishing new relations between the state and society following the conflict begun in 1973. This study discusses social policy as the main area of political innovation and public investment by the democratic Chilean state. The research extends to the state’s ability to ensure and develop citizenship, strengthen civil society and promote citizen participation. It is based on the hypothesis that achievements in economic and political affairs – growth and stability, respectively – do not correlate with strengthening the society but rather curtail its democratizing potential. Lower numbers of individuals with incomes below the poverty line and improvements to the social infrastructure are undeniable achievements. Yet they have not been echoed by the construction and strengthening of democracy because this project was long subordinated to the initial goals of 1989, which were formulated to facilitate the political transition from dictatorship to democracy but failed to sufficiently advance the latter.

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Since the successful shift from military dictatorship to stable democratic institutions, various phenomena beyond the operation of representative institutions have increased the present-day challenges of realizing political constructions geared towards modifying the links between state and society. The general hypothesis in this research shows that the model of governance in effect since 1989 precludes effective linkage of citizenship and participation, even though social policies are prioritized in terms of resources. Some of these policies incorporate participative operation mechanisms – including promotion of citizenship, in the latest batch of policies. Nonetheless, they were not planned with a broader approach to democratization. Such an emphasis is useful in examining the particularities of Chilean ‘exceptionalism’, that is, the features that make this case of democratic transition seem to clash with present conceptual developments. The foregoing approach to policy is manifest in both the design of institutions and the instrumentation of policies, and defines the state-society relationship to a considerable extent. The approach taken here does not focus on the supply of services that result from such policies, a dominant trend in the discussion of governance that would be included in governmentality. Instead, this work discusses the mechanisms the state and the political system have recourse to for purposes of linking themselves with civil society. Their ability to affect this linkage is essential to meeting the current challenges of the construction of democracy, including citizenship, development of civil society, and participation (Vargas 2008). The problem is important, considering, as Brazilian Leonardo Avritzer does, that in exclusive and unequal societies ‘the problem of how to create stable institutions is much less related to the rules of political competition and the forms of the political system, and much more to the possible public relationship between state and society’ (Avritzer and De Souza Santos 2002: 15). The state’s position on participation is not homogeneous. Different organs and centres of governmental policy initiative function differently, forming veritable geological layers of the state with different orientations, programmes, objectives and strategies that often contradict one another. In the Chilean Executive, for instance, the strategic bodies of the ministries of the presidency, interior and finance must be distinguished from the traditional social sectors (ministries of health, housing, education, labour and social security), and these in turn from the innovative programmes that arose after 1990 (mostly grouped under the Ministry of Planning, now Ministry of Social Development), whose initiatives do not cohere with one another. Neither is there interconnection among the different levels of institutions, the regional level being particularly weak as it has no participation structures and is highly limited in municipal terms, as shown by the paucity of assessments of the subject, discussed in chapter 3. This chapter examines five

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types of policy agendas, determined according to their relationship with civil society. The importance of the political technocracy – here called democratic technocrats – is a common trait that emerges as agendas are examined. Chapter 4 describes some major transformations that took place in Chilean society after 1990, from cultural changes to those that transformed the organized part of society. The discussion also covers the specific governmentdirected agenda for fostering participation describing the tensions and political consequences of this agenda over the course of the period. After describing the trajectory of government initiatives to involve organized civil society in public affairs, the chapter supplies an empirical analysis of the incidence of this participation in the public agenda using a conceptualization based on a sample of innovations of subnational scope. This analysis highlights the large number of existing initiatives, together with their limited impact. An explanation is attempted based on the characteristics of political design as it relates to the model of governance. Complementing the analysis is examination of another type of public policy network characterized by greater impact, despite low political and juridical institutionalization. Its participants are strategic actors or actors endowed with social capital, again demonstrating the inequality arising from circumstances such as those in Chile. In this unequal distribution of opportunities, professionals and technicians again appear as major players, interconnected through political and knowledge networks that themselves participate in some of the relationships formed and their degree of importance. Inclusion of less frequently studied levels of analysis permits discussion of aspects of policy implementation: agenda structure, which is examined with an eye to consistency or inconsistency with the challenges of democracy, and construction and innovation of institutions (agencies) by incorporating the dimension of citizen participation as an element of institutional design. Lastly, chapter 5 examines a dimension inhabited by certain actors involved in the process – a group of persons who, by moving between civil society and the state, constitute a group of particular importance for defining the content and scope of public policies in the democratic context. This last investigation involves a methodological approximation supplementing those dealt with in previous chapters: whereas the prior chapters were relevant to an institutionalist approach, the last chapter will discuss personal trajectories, illustrating a specific form of relationship between civil society and the state. A second contribution of the trajectory-based approach concerns another, often overlooked aspect of this relationship: the formation of political elites. Chapter 5 begins by establishing the major traits of the political arena’s reconstruction during the 1980s in Chile, in which the opportunities afforded to members of the opposition at the time differed from those available to the elite that supported the military regime. Then it examines the particular

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features of this elite in social and cultural terms. The characterization ends by pointing to democratic technocrats as some of the actors enjoying the greatest opportunities during the period of transition and democratic consolidation. This is followed by an empirical analysis of government personnel – male and female civil servants working in political and social ministries between 1990 and 2006 – that attempts to identify their most salient features, their previous belonging to civil society and their later careers before reaching their government posts. It includes these actors’ own perceptions and evaluations on this trajectory, followed by a description of the effects that these agents have had on the government agenda as members of civil society. In brief, this study aims to show – from different angles, including empirical treatment of some of the more significant factors – the ways in which new links have been forged between the state and society in the context of Chilean redemocratization. The three major factors discussed herein, which characterize these links and reveal the scope and limits of public policy, are the diversity and degree of coordination of social policy agendas; public policy networks and the influence of civil society through participation; and the constitution of a new political elite that largely originated in civil society but was transformed en route to the state. These elements enable correlation of construction of democracy, citizen participation and public policies in the Chilean political process over the past two decades.

Notes 1. After almost seventeen years of exercising political power, in the course of the transition to democracy Pinochet served as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, not subject to the possibility of removal by the President of the Republic, until March 1998, when he became senator for life in accordance with the Constitution of 1980. That October he was arrested in England under a Spanish court order. Having resigned his office as senator, he returned to Chile in March 2000. He died in December 2006. 2. Both the UNDP study on quality of democracy and comparative surveys such as Latinobarómetro show a remarkably low index of adherence to democracy in Chile, compared to the rest of Latin America (PNUD 2004a; Domínguez 2005; Luna and Seligson 2007). 3. La Disputa por la Construcción Democrática (The Dispute over Construction of Democracy) is the title of a major collection of essays on democracy and governance in the region, whose conceptual framework is partly utilized here (Dagnino, Olvera and Panfichi 2006). It establishes similarities and differences between various disputed political projects. The authors distinguish between three models: authoritarian, neoliberal and democratic-participation. 4. At the beginning of her administration, President Michelle Bachelet (2006–2010) stated that she sought to modify her way of exercising power by means of what she termed ‘citizen government’ (see chapter 4). The first mass street mobilization since 1989 occurred less than a month after she took office. Headed for some weeks by secondary school students, it became known as the Penguins’ Revolution in reference to the way the students looked in their school uniforms.

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5. Updating the parameters utilized to measure poverty – the so-called ‘basket of basic goods and services’ – results in estimated percentages of the population living in poverty that exceed the official figures, using the same method. Official poverty estimates retain as their reference point the value of the average ‘basket’ of Chilean families in 1986 (Larraín 2008). See chapter 4.

1

Construction of Democracy, Public Policy and Civil Society’s Participation

Given the semantic versatility of concepts and the relationships among them, examination of certain terms central to analysis of the process of democratic construction is a necessary first step. Crucial to this end is establishing the conceptual association between governance on the one hand, and construction of democracy, civil society’s participation in the public sphere and the role of public policies on the other. Historically, such concepts have been approached separately, but taking such a tack in the Chilean case would inhibit adequate explanation of the process of transition to democracy. Fortunately, however, an available bibliography of Latin American origin contributes conceptual tools to the formulation of such an explanation. The first part of this chapter discusses the difference between governance of democracy and construction of democracy. This approach substantially expands the complexity of governance by incorporating the participation of civil society. The chapter then explores the political and institutional manifestations of civil society, leading into a discussion establishing the orientations and institutional design of the public policies and specific forms of participation that shape and sustain participatory policies. Finally, the chapter discusses empirical evidence of the characteristics and outcomes of local participation processes with reference to the notion of public spaces of local agreement.

The Debate on Governance of Democracy and Construction of Democracy Mainstream analyses of the political and social changes leading to the recovery of democracy in Latin America since the 1980s have focused on political regime – basically, the establishment and consolidation of political regimes elected by popular vote. An institutional policy shift, understood to have occurred upon achievement of democracy, reinforced the move away from dictatorship towards political democracy (Vargas 2008). Once political change was effected, the next step was consolidation of democracy, always in terms of – 17 –

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political regime (Morlino 1994; Linz and Stepan 1996). However, this view reduced the transition to changes in the political regime that were isolated from any possible continuity on the economic and social plane. In practice, the political elites learned a lesson from each of these processes. Typically members of the same political-intellectual community, these elites played leading roles in the resulting change, also known as transitology (Santiso 1993; Collier and Levitsky 1998). In the Chilean case at least, the actors in the transition clearly had participated in earlier debates on the cases of Southern Europe and the Southern Cone of Latin America from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. These actors adhered to and set in motion a restricted, highly particular form of consociational democracy based on pacts, intending to ensure stable transition to democracy while avoiding the risks associated with other processes (Ruiz 1993). Beyond the political regime and its transitions, the democratization process that attends a change of regime involving both the society and the state, simultaneously or otherwise, merits consideration. As Jorge Vargas has pointed out, a broader notion of democratization allows a ‘distinguishing between transitions that, if one looks at the regime only, might appear similar, but on examining other dimensions are found to be quite dissimilar’ (2008: 30). This chapter will discuss the characteristics of the state ‘in action’ through its public policies and the citizenship regime in which civil society plays a part in Chilean democracy. Referring to various authors and approaches to the changes in Latin America, the discussion aims to develop a broader perspective of construction of democracy.

Governance and Construction of Democracy Theoreticians of the Chilean transition identified the primary challenges of governance as avoiding a return to authoritarianism and establishing conditions for the political regime’s stable functioning. The debate then spread to consolidating the political system in the region, as the lingering economic and political problems had traditionally led to military coups or other forms of authoritarianism, including economic crises, forceful social mobilization and corruption. The various issues had in common their reference to the enactment of democracy rather than the mere stability of the political regime (Mainwaring, O’Donnell and Valenzuela 1992). ‘Transition’ may be said to have a dual character, for it simultaneously involves political transition to democracy as well as consolidation of a capitalist market economy. The two processes present different challenges and require reforms that are often mutually antagonistic and contradictory, as Miguel Angel Centeno (1994) has observed. The general problem – uncertainty of results – is inherent in both democracy and market operations (Przeworski

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1987). It is mitigated by effective achievement of results, which opens the possibility that cooperation and risk-taking will override fear of the outcome. Results, meanwhile, depend on policies’ capacity to involve actors to that end. The ‘twofold transition’ thus appears to challenge governance, as it implies resolution of various social problems involving contracts, domination and trust, whose characteristics depend on the history of each society. Despite a limited definition of democracy and a highly generic definition of transition to market economies, Centeno identified three necessary, though not sufficient, requirements for a successful transition process: ‘the creation of a social contract, a dominant but democratic state and an atmosphere of trust and cooperative behaviour will not in and of themselves guarantee a successful transition. Each depends in part on the presence of the others’ (1994: 140). Thus, even without considering possible transformations of structural adjustment models or market economy reforms, a successful democracy requires construction of social agreements establishing a foundation for confidence and rules of the game among a wide range of social and political movements. Another issue is the quality of democracy, a concept derived mainly from the works of the Argentine theoretician Guillermo O’Donnell. The quality of democracy refers to democracy’s capacity to integrate excluded majorities without restricting the concept of democracy to the realm of the regular operation of political institutions (O’Donnell, Vargas and Iazetta 2004; Olvera 2008; Vargas 2008).1 The major works that take this approach advance beyond the affairs of the political regime. For example, a UNDP report on a study headed by O’Donnell defines democracy as ‘a way of life’. Associated with this way of life is the notion of integral citizenship, which includes the political, civil and social rights that truly guarantee democracy. Instead of taking the state as a starting point, this approach considers the ‘democraticity’ of the state, examining the extent to which its institutions, practices and characteristics actually promote this integral citizenship (PNUD 2004a). Other authors have suggested that besides the democraticity of the state as a whole, an archaeology of the state is needed to understand how its institutions formed over time and grasp their differences. This would, for example, account for the coexistence of spaces of participation with others where a fully authoritarian logic still prevails (Dagnino et al. 2006: 22). Olvera (2008), discussing the quality of democracy in Mexico, also referred to the social outcomes of democracy and its ability to bring about human development. Meanwhile, Jorge Vargas (2008) placed the quality of democracy in the political sphere, and not just in terms of the political regime: it also depends on the character of the state and citizen participation, institutionally ensured and founded on rights. These elements do not necessarily behave in

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the same way as the political regime, but both are nonetheless equally important to the effectiveness and extension of democracy. From the standpoint of theoretical distinctions, Wolfgang Merkel (2004) essays a classification of what he calls defective democracies – a manifold group whose constructions of democracy are incomplete due to defects with various causes and expressions – by distinguishing between exclusive, illiberal, delegative and tutelary democracies. Unlike defective democracies, embedded democracies are based on the partial interdependence of five attributes of substantive democracy: electoral regime, political rights, civil rights, horizontal accountability and effective governing power (2004: 33). The significance of these debates in Latin American experience is that in the past thirty years, precisely what we examine as a problem – or a paradox – is the advance of democratic political regimes throughout the region despite their low quality in terms of construction of the state, incorporation and participation of social actors, and ability to process the more consequential challenges and conflicts of Latin American society. These shortcomings pose new governance challenges and increase uncertainty (Domínguez 2005). Discussion of other highly significant issues in the region, such as the participation of historically excluded indigenous sectors, has led to other proposals for construction of democracy. In Bolivia, for example, proposals to reformulate democratic institutions are linked to projects for anti-neoliberal political change and allow for prominent participation of excluded indigenous sectors (PNUD 2007; Svampa 2010). The thesis of the UNDP Report on Human Development for Bolivia is that the historical trajectory of social movements and policy in such a country leads to the need to reformulate the democratic political regime by introducing a fourth ‘branch’ – the social – with an oversight function in respect of the traditional branches. To this end the report seeks support in the expectations of the population and the historic association between the state and social movements. The Bolivian case, like those of Ecuador and Venezuela, is framed in the constitutional variant of increasing democracy. Proponents have embodied their proposals for change through the drafting and approval of new constitutions whose principles and norms amend hitherto prevailing models of democracy. Beyond such proposals in particular, it is noteworthy that by bypassing the mere political regime, the construction of democracy embodies specific societal features that affect the quality and effectiveness of the resulting democracy (Gray et al. 2011). A third angle from which to debate and question the representative political regime arises from theories (and practices) of participatory democracy. These concern the practices and actors that construct democracy in specific contexts and seek to deepen the exercise of democracy through new forms of linkage between the state, policy and civil society:

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We refer to the contemporary theories of participatory democracy, deliberative democracy, civil society and social movements. For some years past, a number of criticisms have arisen from this quarter addressed to actual democracies, including the Latin American ones, pointing to new ways of thinking of agency in the struggle for democracy, the structure, or the design of a democratic regime, and the type of rights and of citizens required for a democratic project … posing radical changes in the manner of thinking and exercising policy, that is, power, representation, and participation of society. Though not a specific political project, this approach poses the need to rethink the relations between state and society as the pivotal point of reflection on democracy. (Dagnino et al. 2006: 23)

These debates reveal the diversity of notions of democracy and thereby also the breadth of its scope. In a way, the ‘procedural’ notion of democracy dominates political science and has prevailed in the theories of transition whose application succeeded dictatorial regimes in Latin America (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Linz 1990). Regardless, an ahistorical analysis of democracy is unfeasible, particularly if one seeks to determine democracy’s effect or results in social life in order to develop ‘substantive’ notions of democracy that do not limit it to standardized application of a set of procedures. Beyond differences in approach, the exercise and consolidation of democracy are possible only under certain social conditions. This rule is valid even where democracy consists only in procedures for election of authorities (Nun 2002). Even when democracy is defined strictly as a political regime, the challenge of governance is to ensure the conditions necessary for the regime’s freedom to perform its function. According to Manuel Antonio Garretón, this function is ‘institutional mediation between the state and the people to resolve the problems of who is to govern the society and how it is to be done, how to define citizenship and how conflicts and social demands are to be channelled’ (1994: 64).

Civil Society, State and Citizenship: Conditions for Construction of Democracy In conceptualizations of participatory democracy, the notions of citizenship and participation are coexistent. Citizenship refers to rights guaranteed for all, both in the juridical sense (passive citizenship) and in the active exercise and defence of these rights via social groups (active citizenship). Participation, on the other hand, refers to mechanisms through which civil society can be an actor in the public sphere, beyond the traditional notion of joining, or being co-opted by, the state (Jones and Gaventa 2002; Velásquez and González 2003; Gaventa 2004).

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T.H. Marshall (1950) distinguishes among civil, political and social citizenship according to the rights enjoyed, each form having developed at different stages of European history. This evolution appears to have accompanied the development of social classes, capitalism and nation-states respectively (Arrau and Avendaño 2001: 4). The present scenario of citizenship is precisely that of change in the paradigm. Though civil and juridical rights have been consolidated, they are no longer restricted to functioning within nation-states but are covered by international instruments in a sort of juridical globalization. The other globalization, however – the economic one – questions social citizenship based on welfare states and progressive wage-earning. In Latin America, where no ‘welfare state’ ever existed, the state’s preeminence in economic tasks and organization of relations among social classes is suffering crisis. Meantime, the pressure of international agendas for eradication of poverty, good governance, economic growth and so on significantly restricts the autonomy of national policymakers. Even the distinction between what is properly domestic and what comes from abroad is blurred. This association between the domestic and the international highlights the role of technocrats in public policy (Grindle 1999: 194). Both the new conditions of social development and the new actors arising under them determine the notion of citizenship. Some of these actors have ‘citizenship’ in that they are clearly recognized as legitimate and belonging to the political community (Provoste and Valdés 2000: 5). Therefore the link between participation, citizenship and public policies is direct, as all three can expand or reduce opportunities for participation in, and exercise of, various forms of citizenship. Meanwhile, various public policies foster various types and qualities of citizenship, as Ann Schneider and Helen Ingram suggest: ‘[C]itizenship and democracy are contested concepts, with meanings that are constantly under contention and constantly evolving. Public policy both explicitly and implicitly affects those meanings as well as the material conditions that enable or thwart the practice of citizenship’ (2007: 342). The sequence of developments by which rights are won, Marshall suggests, has not occurred in Latin America because modernization there did not follow European canons. The immense breach of inequality, the uncritical importation of economic and institutional models and the centuries-old denial of cultural diversity and the rights of indigenous peoples, together with reiterated repression of organically developing social movements, are also some of the differential variables modifying the evolution of citizenship (Delamaza 2001b; Oxhorn 2001a; Hirschman 2004). Nonstate public spaces emerge with the rise of new dynamics and movements, revealing the dynamics of civil society and the extent of the traditional institutional public space. Something similar happens with certain cultural practices that, while also expressing particular identities, reflect the adaptation

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and remodelling of influences from abroad. But the emergence of civil society goes beyond a mere diversification of movements. Expansion of the public sphere may lead to deliberations to define a new ‘social contract’. As Inés González suggests, today the original notion of the contract, first mentioned in the political field and later partly extended to the ‘social question’, is being subjected to severe scrutiny. This, according to González, is why manifold expressions of civil society are emerging today and playing a major role in various public affairs, beyond the heterogeneity of civil society. New ways arise to … preserve the social link, ensure integration, promote the sense of belonging, safeguard that minimum threshold of rights enabling us to recognize one another as citizens of the same political community. … The social contract is an agreement on rules and norms telling us where in a society one judges what is right and what is wrong, what is admissible and what is inadmissible, what is just and what is unjust … the common sense of the common people who feel they have something in common (González 1998: 24).

The emergence of a strong civil society, however, even in the international field, does not invalidate the need for institutions, juridical norms and public programmes to ensure, promote and develop citizenship in accordance with the new canons. On the contrary, the need grows, for the social link has weakened owing to the increased deregulation and uncertainty of globalization, changed working relationships and the state’s abandonment of its traditional functions, even as new relationships between civil society and the state generate pressure for new forms of citizenship. The horizon may be the reconstruction of a social contract in which both civil society and state amend their traditional roles. In the Chilean case, it is not the emergence of an autonomous civil society but the active presence of the state that is everywhere noticeable in different relationships with segments of civil society. At the same time, other important areas remain deregulated. By establishing regulations and normative frameworks, the state simultaneously makes its presence felt directly, both in social dynamics through public financing, outsourcing, subsidies (to education, housing, irrigation, afforestation, entrepreneurial associativity, social security and health care, labour training and microbusiness), and in allocation of social projects through bidding among social organizations. Notwithstanding, the social consequences of this ubiquity of the state are completely different from their counterparts in the past, when the state was designed to generate social movements attuned to the dominant political strategies. Nor is the state presence homogeneous throughout its various levels and sectors, including the self-managed institutions of democratic political control. In Chile, the Central Bank and monetary policy, and indirectly

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the Finance Ministry itself, fall into this category. Though the latter is not institutionally self-managed, in practice it is accumulating power and independence as a sort of political ‘shield’ from social demands and processes. The similarly substantial presence of technocracy in the state renders public management, as a topic of discussion, less an ‘apparatus’ or ‘machinery’ than a space for bargaining, institutionally manifest in many guises. Thus the state is a force in promoting both active citizenship and its reverse – the thwarting of efforts via lack of juridical framework or adequate political support. This maxim applies also in the sphere of public policy. Given breadth and scope, and supplied with democratizing contents and objectives, policies might indeed become tools suitable to strengthen social capital, cooperate in representing interests, prevent diversity and social dispersion, and contribute to developing the central goals of local, regional and national public agendas. Civil society organizations are part of the various actors that has produced such innovations, which rules out their being considered merely a ‘government’ issue. In other words, new forms of interaction have arisen, empowering both citizens’ capacity for action and the state’s role in social life. A liberal view and pluralist variants thereof posit rational individuals who pursue their own interests and require a free, transparent market for this purpose. This viewpoint, in fact, promotes civil society and state accountability as the driving forces of policy. Theories of participatory democracy, however, see citizens as capable of identifying the public interest and acting accordingly. Thus citizens are not restricted to electing and controlling their governments ex post but take an active role in the decisions affecting them (Schneider and Ingram 2007: 331). This alters the liberal notion of civil society, which alone is insufficient to describe and construe social dynamics in societies with high inequality and limited democracy. That is, discussion limited to what happens in legal space and within a community supposedly of equals does not suffice to explain the social relations and links between society and state that stimulate the dynamics of the ‘truly existing’ civil society.2 In a framework of globalization and the emergence of subnational problems and social forces pushing for greater autonomy, changes in both state and civil society spur transformation in each. Issues involving the society will not be fully resolved in the framework of the state; nor is the converse valid, assuming, as neoliberal thinking did, that continuous reduction of the state is required. As Nuria Cunill pointed out many years ago, ‘strengthening the society requires strengthening the state itself. Not “any” state, however, but one that embodies democratic principles and that, while admitting its public responsibilities, is also capable of accepting its limits’ (1997: 17). The political connotation of civil society derives from the contemporary recovery of this notion – on a par with citizen movements’ recourse to it

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in Eastern Europe during the political fall of the Soviet bloc – by the antiauthoritarian movements in Latin America, a region where subjection to the state, and to the state’s moulding of society, are historically predominant (Olvera 1999; Cohen and Arato 2000). Opposition to the existing regimes took different forms, but in both contexts it began without political space for self-expression and set up organizations and expressions of civil society for that purpose. Both cases involved a social mobilization against the state that had political overtones and was backed by a huge variety of groups, ideologies and individuals, but lacked a project of its own. The horizon opened onto democracy and the goal of deepening it beyond the representative institutions and the validity of fundamental human rights. In the subsequent stage of greater cooperation between state and society, the critical meaning of the notion of civil society tends to be lost. In this new context, the idea of a ‘third sector’ emerges (Salamon and Anheier 1997) in the guise of the ‘virtuous side’ of civil society. Inasmuch as it merely remedies the deficiencies of state action through the pragmatic association of individuals seeking solutions to specific problems rather than mooting the conflict of interest, the third sector in practice advocates for the minimal state. This conceptualization depoliticizes the term civil society while also renouncing any universalist appeal or rights requiring juridical and political sanction. The leading actors in this version of civil society are, increasingly, philanthropy, ‘socially responsible’ corporations and volunteers fitting the model (Delamaza 2001a; Dagnino et al. 2006). Their actions tend to connect functionally with a strategy of outsourcing services to create a subsidiary state of diminished weight and presence, in accordance with the liberal view. Nevertheless, if civil society preserves a horizon of expanding rights as a framework for action, the attendant universalist discourse surpasses its own capacity for action. Civil society cannot, on its own, attain and practice the rights it claims. Its responses to the general challenges posed by society are normally approximate and experimental. On occasion, though, it is the agent that makes these challenges visible in the public space, demanding solutions and responses from the state. In this context, civil society is a normatively charged notion that defines a symbolic horizon for various sectors incapable of defining it for themselves. Civil society cannot present itself as a unit, a special spokesman facing the state and the market, as the theory of the ‘third sector’ would have it (Delamaza 2001a). Nevertheless, international organizations and sometimes governments habitually refer to professional, international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as ‘representatives’ of civil society in consultative or deliberative capacities. This raises certain actors of civil society above others that remain voiceless and unrepresented. Whereas democratization in Latin America and Eastern Europe underlined the rise of civil society as a factor in democracy, the process should not be un-

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derstood as endowed with a specific political meaning beyond the democratizing horizon. Civil society’s efforts may target social problems, but they fail to respond to the questions and basic values that should inspire such political order through a global project or an ideology. Social actors, however, respond with practices that modify social and cultural reality. They innovate and invent, and also copy, associate with, and link hitherto separate movements. The action of civil society is therefore diverse and manifold, for civil society is a space for political action, not a political project as such. Only a small fraction of civil action is spurred by political strategies like the one alterglobalists advertise under the slogan ‘another world is possible’. Yet civil society’s various doings must be seen as more than the isolated action of small groups concerned about their surroundings or the welfare of their members. These actions expand the public space for citizen action and hasten recognition of economic and social rights not yet admitted at the institutional level, by including them in local-level public programmes or strengthening the role of organized citizenry (Abers 2000). They express the diversity of local affairs and rely on citizens’ direct involvement, reducing – though not annulling – the dynamics of representation and delegation, and tending to unite diverse realities and persevere in the pursuit of possible local-level changes. They combine action levels, crossing frontiers between local and national or international affairs, and mix modernizing approaches with defence of identity. Members’ differences and diversity, their varying levels of access to power resources and their unequal positions in the socioeconomic structure reflect the internal diversity of organized civil society. An empirical examination of its components is needed to discern its internal trends and the degrees of internal unity it may achieve. But the very prospect of such a study prompts one of the most complex questions awaiting an answer: Who represents civil society? Taking such representation for granted obscures a fundamental problem requiring investigation. In the United States, for instance, a shift from small community organizations to more bureaucratic and centralized ones has been identified in patterns of organization and social and political participation (Verba et al. 1993; Schlozman et al. 1995). In Brazil, Adrian Gurza Lavalle has examined the greater relative weight of certain urban organizations in cases of participation involving ‘representation’ in that country (Gurza Lavalle et al. 2005, 2006). The resulting organizational and political models differ from previous ones in that they do not always conform to the classic distinctions separating the state from civil society or dividing society into sectors (first, second, third). Now, the space can be nonstate public, entrepreneurial social, citizen-state, or other combinations. In terms of social action theory, this space is the plane of decentralized, free actors who, though lacking determinism, are not therefore inert and dispersed but rather build connections based on their needs, aspirations and vari-

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able interests. Their activity does not turn them into antagonists of the state, but neither do they submit to the state’s bureaucratic rationale or share its strategic views. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this proposal is the space it allows for reconstituting policy beyond the state in co-participation dynamics (Mires 1999; Salamanca 2002). The catch, however, is that nowadays appealing to civil society has become so prevalent a byword in political and developmental discourse that it appears to have lost all theoretical usefulness. Such an appeal has become, in the words of Michael Edwards, ‘the chicken soup of the social sciences’ (2005: 1). Another author finds that it ‘runs the risk of becoming a political myth, in the Sorelian sense of the word’ – that is, it is politically mobilizing, but dichotomic and Manicheist (L. Salazar 1999: 24). The notion of civil society, therefore, should be utilized in a more restricted sense, based on its forms and content as embodied in debate, formulation, management and social control, including its relationship to the state (Olvera 1999; Delamaza 2001a; Pearce 2004).

Civil Society and Political Projects To confirm the emergence of civil society is not enough. It is also necessary to clarify the possible links between civil society and political projects, for a strong civil society appears to be the goal of both those who propose to dismantle the state and those who propose state-led projects for deepening democracy (Delamaza 2001a; Dagnino et al. 2006). These different views of the state’s role result in different approaches to civil society participation, and even to the meaning of the term (Dagnino 2003; Tatagiba 2006). According to the original hypothesis of Evelina Dagnino (2003), the democratizing consequences of the confluence of civil society and politics depend on the various individual underlying projects; moreover, such a confluence may be perverse or virtuous. Thus, the distinction between the political sphere and the social sphere is not absolute but arises from the ‘projects’ or political concepts of democracy, citizenship and social participation behind one or another sphere of public action. The convergence of such political projects is a necessary or favourable but never sufficient condition to ensure progressive democratization. It is further necessary to examine the general conditions in which such convergence takes place – the model of governance – particularly in the case of transitions, during which democratic institutions are not yet consolidated. This situation has been described, in an expression coined by Edelberto Torres Rivas, as ‘low-intensity democracy’, which limits the democratizing potential of the convergence of political projects of civil society and political society. Politics drifts apart from society to specialize in managing the model of governance,

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while the state and the parties co-opt civil society leaders to perform public functions and become resistant to reforms that fail to follow that model. Beyond the contextual variables of governance, it is also necessary to understand specific aspects of implementation of political agendas – namely, design, planning, execution and assessment – as civil society may have differential effects on each, and in various forms within the same policy (Jones and Gaventa 2002). Both civil society and the state are diverse and heterogeneous, and both are impacted by the political conflicts that split societies. Just as it is necessary to conceptualize civil society as a ‘space for dispute’ (Olvera 1999), it is also necessary to consider the characteristics of the state and its requirements in terms of public policy (Dowbor 2004; Filgueiras 2005; Cabrero 2006). This leads to what Dagnino, Olvera and Panfichi call the ‘archaeology of the state’: an institutional analysis that examines its internal diversity.

The Politics of Participative Public Policies The possibility of designing and implementing participative policies hinges on the key distinction between what is public and what is of the state, which permits the existence of a public nonstate space (Cunill 1997). The traditional liberal assumption restricts what is public to what is regulated by the state and regards civil society as the field of a diversity of particular and private interests. No public role emerges for civil society, which is the state’s opposite. The participative approach, however, assumes diverse actors in the public sphere and defines processes whereby nonstate actors may cooperate in its construction. Thus new actors with their own legitimacy have emerged and begun to contribute to the construction of public space. This redefines the challenges facing both policy and organized civil society itself, since the traditional composition of these two spheres and their mutual relationships corresponded to a model of clearly differentiated actors (Abers 2000; Avritzer 2002; Olvera 2003).

Civil Society’s Participation in Expanding and Diversifying Public Space State and civil society do not coexist in a zero-sum balance where one of them must shrink for the other to expand and vice versa. It is important to put aside the idea, highly popular in recent years, that strengthening civil society entails reducing the state, as though civil society were the replacement piece for a dismantled state. Rather, a democratizing strategy assumes the strengthening of both, so that the state guarantees and produces conditions for the

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development of civil society (Eisenstadt 2003) and the society ‘abandoned’ by the retreating state can be a source of support for its members and potentially for new political proposals (Mires 1999). The more social networking is reinforced by forging links and establishing local and global networks, the less dramatic the absence of familiar state institutions becomes. Of course, guarantees of rights and responsibilities, and the juridical sanction thereof (including physical enforcement) are still required, but what lies beyond state space is not anomie but potentially a form of global dynamics claiming and laying the basis for a new contract between individuals and society (ibid.). Many experiments in participatory institutional design that have been developed in Latin America since the 1980s revolve around a core set of processes whereby citizens cope with restricted resources, diverse opti¿et alons, complex dilemmas and the conflicts inherent in exercises of this kind (Sudarsky 2003). Such complexity, it should be noted, is today a ‘feature consubstantial with the political process in general, and with public policies as well as socio-political actors very much in particular’ (Ibarra, Martí and Gomá 2002: 9) For this reason, social movements and critical networks form part of the production space of public policies and have eminently flexible strategies for defining and influencing the spaces of ‘governance, [where] in addition to actors of the institutional-representative circuit, movements, networks, coordinators, platforms, associations are also present … giving democracy a much more plural tone’ (ibid.: 10). The complexity of current challenges means no ministerial or presidential cabinet can define public issues as such once and for all – not even in the name of electoral representation. The uncertainty of planning scenarios forces the generation of widely accepted operational agreements and requires that many actors define the nature of the problem as well as acceptable and unacceptable courses of action. They must also establish rules for redefining such elements as necessary, for the scenarios are continually and rapidly changing. Since the consequences of action are not entirely foreseeable, the practical efficacy of deliberation depends on the participation and involvement of various entities and points of view. Public policy decision-makers seek support from people who possess relevant scientific and technical knowledge or are directly involved as users or recipients, as well as, of course, people with political responsibilities. Only through deliberative discussion can these diverse actors’ differing rationales – technical, citizen-related, political – lead to effective, legitimate, rational decisions. In turn, the internal differentiation of the state intensifies the need to coordinate and involve various levels of administration. Policy assessment in aggregate terms normally covers the national space, but it fails to discern events and needs on regional or local scales, or with regard to specific communities. The challenges of participation entail all relevant levels and points of view, as well as the set-up of a process

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whereby various spokespeople may discuss, negotiate and reach agreements and decisions. Furthermore, as such points of view are not subordinate to a homogeneous set of values, arrangements must admit a pluralism of options. The resulting arrangements vary according to the problem at hand, so they are not discussed as global cases or mere ideological options. Public affairs are not equivalent to the corporate interests of more organized sectors: what predominates is the diversity of voices, the asymmetry of power among actors and the differences in their capacities, forms of mobilization, organization and so on. Governance has thus acquired a major dimension of consensusbuilding among diverse actors to achieve goals of public interest. Nonetheless, a normative ideal like the one described above is particularly difficult to achieve in unequal societies, where participation channels are few or ineffective. Initiatives rising ‘from below’ will not become an element of governance if groups are severely fragmented or lack the appropriate machinery to process their differences. Posed in such terms, the problem entails reconceptualizing the traditional assumptions of democratic governance. Traditional theory holds that democratic policy is exercised through popular election of representatives. Candidates in such elections, however, are selected by the political parties, which take care to include private interests in projects and proposals, and compete with them for positions of power. The deliberative side of democracy is realized in the actions of state bodies of political representation, where party diversity manifests itself and decisions are made. Once priorities and the distribution of social benefits are authoritatively established, public policy takes the stage. Here the major actors are the technicians appointed to implement, programme, finance and assess these decisions, which they do by adhering to criteria of administrative rationality (bureaucracy governed by objective rules) and, increasingly, requirements of efficiency and productivity in public management. Throughout this chain, no role of any kind is assigned to civil society organizations (CSOs). Schumpeterian democracy (Schumpeter 1946) allots such organizations no place in the chain of public decision and management, because their nature is to be carriers only of private and corporate interests. Incapable of aggregating and generalizing such interests, CSOs either disqualify themselves for policy or step out of their role to distort the process. Keeping them separate from policymaking is therefore advisable, for their presence would only cause deviations from public rationality and the possible capture of the state by private interests.3 Only at the end of the chain, in the implementation stage, do CSOs have a role to play in that they might enjoy some comparative advantage over other entities: greater operational efficiency, lower costs, co-financing and so forth.

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In this context, however, it would be erroneous to speak of consensus-building with civil society because it is not an intrinsic process of public management but only an operational decision for implementation. Expansion of citizen participation thus requires review of democratic governance, especially notions of citizenship and public policy’s role in strengthening or weakening them (Fischer 2003; Schneider and Ingram 2007). Political science traditionally assumes that power is first defined in the political process, which sets priorities regarding what and how much is allotted to each. Then the technicians apply instrumental rationality criteria to work out the best ways – the fastest and cheapest or most cost-effective – to obtain results. The participating actors are clearly defined: the policymakers decide, and the technicians implement. As Carlos Peña suggests (2006: 4): The design and execution of public policies rest on a technical, not political notion. … The public policymakers assume that the policymaking process is previous to the execution of public policies and not a part of them. After all, the aggregate of interests that is essential to set a range, is completed during the more global political process. If the purpose of public policy assumes ends previously defined in the democratic political process, then the participation of non-governmental organizations, instead of improving democracy, might harm it by altering its results under pressure and influence (in technical terms, it would be equivalent to a flaw of the political process).

But Peña’s assumption is impaired by many weaknesses of the policy process, notably delegitimized mechanisms of representation and the influence of marketing on policy programmes, among others. In the field of public policy, the traditional assumption also faces challenges that have led to an expanded notion of governance. Only when democratic governance is conceptualized in a broader sense does there emerge a need for consultation in decision-making, pursuit of synergies, generation of pro-cooperation rules and so forth. This conceptual expansion has various policy-related effects on the discussion and adoption of social decisions, and on management and public policies. It redefines the challenges for policy and for organized civil society itself (Avritzer 2002; Olvera 2003). The expressions and possibilities of institutional redesign have been formulated through the concept of socio-state interfaces (Isunza 2005), among others.4 In Latin America, institutional forms have responded to such challenges with manifold advances that redefine the role of the state and its links with society (Gray et al. 2011: 172ff.) The state and civil society may associate at various levels and for different purposes, including facilitation of decision-making in areas inadequately covered by the political system. In this context, inclusion of citizen participation can strengthen and qualify policy in at least three ways:

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(a) generating decisions between elections that refer to emerging issues not covered in electoral debates, or decisions extending beyond political terms of office; (b) supplementing the function of aggregating political party interests, given the complexity of certain problems, uncertain and constantly changing scenarios, diverse options and the difficulty of aligning them into stable and coherent projects; (c) generating more social inclusion and effectiveness in originating, implementing and controlling public policies, especially at the subnational level, by deliberately incorporating the expression of interests and demands of sectors not usually represented or organized. (Delamaza 2006) The link between concerted participation and adoption of decisions may or may not be institutionalized. Also, it can be a mandatory element of decisions or only an input intended to improve decision-making by the executive branch or in the course of congressional debate. In Chile, for example, following the 2006 Penguins’ Revolution, a major demonstration by secondary-school students demanding quality improvement in public education, the administration summoned an advisory committee composed of over eighty persons linked to institutions connected with education (academics, professionals, owners of educational establishments, etc.). Their mission resembled that of a national assembly for education, as it was expected to propose a new policy. Its scope was national, and the issue it discussed had not been among the programme proposals in the presidential election held just five months earlier. However, it was not a permanent body, and its place in the decision chain was unclear. In the absence of institutional participation, lack of links to the public-decision-making chain led the commission to appoint a second negotiating group, composed of technicians and specialists sponsored by actors in the political system, to submit drafts to Congress, where further negotiations took place later (Aguilera 2009). Colombia, on the other hand, has developed numerous institutional mechanisms for community participation in public decisions, particularly in the spheres of planning and oversight of programmes’ and policies’ execution. They are mostly local institutions, and the authorities are not always obliged to convene them (Velásquez and González 2003: 98ff.). Meanwhile, following a comparison of participatory budgets in Latin America and Europe, Sintomer concluded that in Europe, ‘there is more informality, the rules are not so clear … they are processes from the top down, not intended to reverse social priorities’ (2005: 66). Delving into the field of public policy reveals problems that weaken the assumptions of the liberal approach. For instance, the current public policy

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scenario is one of growing self-management of technocracies in both defining the agenda and managing the policies, a situation resulting from problems’ complexity and a lack of technical knowledge among policymakers and the citizenry on the one hand, and the institutional design of states on the other. In Chile, for instance, both the Central Bank and monetary policy are autonomous. Sector ministries must negotiate with the highly powerful technicians of the Ministry of Finance over not just budget entries but also their own programme objectives, and the ministry is also in charge of ex post evaluation. In the case of educational institutions, this situation led to their being governed until August 2009 by a constitutional organic law enacted in 1990 by the military administration and most difficult to amend. Even in the field of technocracy and specialized knowledge, the public university crisis weakens the necessary critical debate on existing process options to achieve the same objectives and results. Intellectual and political critique of the goals pursued is similarly affected. The knowledge paradigms that guide public policy approaches are increasingly produced by international think tanks and disseminated or directly imposed in line with conditions set by multilateral agencies. The Chilean case is perhaps an extreme one in which business groups – and the conservative ideological trends they finance – enhance their own presence in higher education by establishing private universities. For this purpose they can apply to the state for tax exemptions, that is, indirect public financing. At the same time, they create think tanks, groups wielding powerful intellectual and political influence over the public sector (Gárate 2007; McGann 2008). At public universities, meanwhile, the pressures of self-financing, professionalization and sale of services sap the vitality of their other function: development of intellect and critical thinking. The growing complexity of public policy challenges demands that technocracy play an increasingly important role, though it also supports a ‘dialogue of knowledge’, that is, the spread of types of knowledge other than technical-professional wisdom. These might not be generally defined on the basis of the widespread policy options because they are not ordered according to such a rationale, particularly those based on the modes of life of individuals and communities. Such a circumstance carries several implications. In the first place, certain policy decisions may be effectively made or renegotiated on a case-by-case basis with local communities, or may involve negotiation of priorities with increasingly diversified communities: children, adolescents and adults; women and men; rural and urban sectors. These features comprise the outline of what has been called proximity governance (Blanco and Gomá 2002). On the other hand, very different methods may obtain the same results. There are several options for implementing health care, responsible citizen-

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ship, social integration of the elderly, prevention of teenage pregnancy or development of tourism, for example. In such cases it is more effective for individuals, families and local or affinity communities to determine or support specific ways to implement the options, for they directly affect the modes of life of the parties involved. The state continues as guarantor of the universal rights of all concerned – by means of juridical penalty or guaranteed access – in the framework in which the participatory construction of public policy is conducted. Such a participatory approach redefines relations among authorities, policymakers, technicians and citizens.

Critique of the Participatory Approach The ‘liberal critique’ of citizen participation and participatory democracy may be synthesized as the clear separation between civil society and state. The terms retain their Hegelian sense: civil society is by definition the domain of private and selfish interests, whereas only the state can perform the abstract synthesis of general interests. The following analysis by Carlos Peña (2006: 3) reflects this view: Without making the effort to universalize them, non-governmental organizations would be another form of aggregating interests or preferences (a function similar to that performed by elections or the market, but without their procedural guarantees). Non-governmental organizations would not then be a remedy for, but the best expression of, the representation crisis (to the extent that citizens unable to universalize their interests through party politics promote them through corporations).

This liberal reasoning contemplates no channel for aggregation of interests other than political parties. In other words, it fails to consider the methodological possibility of building public interests on a foundation of citizen deliberation outside the parties or where such parties share roles with other actors. And it views any construction of political will by means of direct participation mechanisms as populism. A second set of criticisms emerges directly from representative politics, which harbours a sense that direct citizen participation might weaken representation by making politics informal. The channels by which it might do so, though imprecisely defined, run parallel to those of elected representatives. This critique essentially contests one of the main foundations of participatory democracy: democratic improvement and deepening (Barber 1984). Whereas it confirms the diagnosis of the difficulties besetting representative democracy, it nonetheless finds that the participatory solution is no solution because it aggravates the problem instead of resolving it (G. Arriagada 2007).

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Another vein of criticism considers the risk that elite interests might take over the spaces for participation in public policies. Local governments, it argues, have fewer prospects of resistance and weaker defences against the power of elite groups that threaten to capture public funds. Thus, in the guise of participation, or by legitimizing participatory processes, elites might subordinate and exclude less powerful groups even further. Another important point is that the more organized interests are most likely to fill the spaces created. Such spaces, therefore, would be neither more inclusive nor more democratic than those filled by popular election, where at least each person has one vote. In addition, ‘participatory elites’ are likely to consolidate themselves in such spaces and manipulate them for their own benefit. One variant of this situation would be political authorities or clientelist networks instrumentalizing spaces of participation. A study of the members of managing councils of public policies in Curitiba, Brazil, provides an example of the foregoing: In these councils there is a group whose characteristics give its members an elite profile … only 33 per cent of the council members earn a monthly income below ten times the minimum wage; 22.7 per cent earn more than twenty times the minimum wage, and 17.3 per cent more than forty … those with regular and graduate university degrees form a cumulative percentage of 66.7 … council members belong to a group of associations representing certain segments of organized civil society. … This reinforces the elite profile of the councils, for re-election is, in practical terms, a monopoly of ‘professional’ organizations. (Fuks et al. 2007: 18)

Assuming that the tendency for elites to configure and sway the various forms of organizations is ‘universal’, it is worth establishing whether participatory processes increase or diminish the phenomenon. The fact that members of participatory organizations possess elite characteristics or come to do so may reflect what happens in the social context, so it is necessary to examine whether the participatory spaces reinforce or modify this tendency (Canto 2004: 11). The rules that structure spaces for participation and the distribution of allocated resources define whether such spaces are more or less egalitarian in character. According to the factors favouring or reducing the power of the groups involved, participation will result in more or less equity, modifying the regime of citizenship (Schneider and Ingram 2007: 339). Emphasis on the deliberative and communicative nature, rooted in Habermas, underestimates the importance of differences in wealth and power among participating actors, particularly when identifying problems and defining agendas (Kohn 2000: 424). Lastly, the technical critique suggests that citizen participation would go against the rationality of public policies, since it tends to fragment demands

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and assumes inclusion of the widely different, even contradictory, points of view found in civil society. In its traditional technocratic version, this critique is directly inspired by the paradigm of scientific reason. From another angle, the disproportionate presence of highly qualified professionals has negative effects on the exercise of citizenship (De León 1997; Stone 1997). Although some experiences point to the possibility of good results of citizen intervention in the treatment of complex topics (Fischer 2003: 206ff.; Schneider and Ingram 2007: 337–338), technical rationality’s position of predominance may be more or less absolute. A variant that admits marginal participation is the so-called ‘management democracy’ Luciana Tatagiba proposed when discussing experiences in Brazil. Tatagiba held that the management model of public administration allows space for participation, although it is subordinated to decisions made at the technical level, such as improvements to policies and programmes. ‘In the area of management democracy, the diversity of social actors is exalted, in the understanding that such diversity, if properly channelled, can be turned into creative and innovative impulses designed to overcome the traditional patterns of policy execution. Linkage and synergy are key words here’, Tatagiba observed. They indicate the presence of a ‘combination of appropriate elements for models of élitist and participatory democracy’ (2006: 154–155). This approach legitimizes participation in the area of public policy; however, its ends are not discussed. That is to say, it is not just the existence of participatory mechanisms that ensures more equity, expansion of citizenship and public space, for such mechanisms may respond to different concepts and connect variously to policy and public management. Another variant also legitimizes participation but restricts it to actors’ ensuring governance. In other words, it admits of a need for extra-institutional actors’ participation, assuming linkage with social actors to achieve efficiency and governance, but offers them no prospect of social inclusion or expansion of democracy. Consistent with the restricted view of governance, this means that the participation of ‘strategic actors’ is considered an effective way to obtain good results. Such actors appear to be equipped with funds, technical capabilities and the desire for strategic change (Blanco and Vargas 2006: 8–9), or possessed of veto power that, if ignored, would hinder governance. Of course, this approach privileges the participation of elites and is not intended to include underprivileged sectors in decision-making. The above views implicitly acknowledge the difficulty of producing public goods exclusively via the state. They are not, however, intended to expand what is public to a larger number of actors, but to aid the bargaining that the state must inevitably conduct with ‘extra-institutional’ powers (Cortés 2000). Edgardo Boeninger, discussing the case of Chile, pointed first to large business organizations as actors usually considered strategic. Though often

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in conflict with the Concertación parties, they ‘usually applaud unreservedly’ the government’s economic policies, ‘to the point of establishing close personal links with ministers, technical advisers and entrepreneurs’. He also indicated certain union organizations that ‘only have veto power to respond to the government. The latter tends to be active when the [Concertación] parties are involved’. Finally, he mentioned the environmentalist NGOs, ‘whose political influence on political parties and members of Congress, especially if they belong to the Concertación, is considerable’. Boeninger went into detail about the media, seeing it as so influential in defining agendas and guiding political behaviour that ‘negotiations regarding sensitive or delicate subjects should be carried on in maximum privacy and kept from the media until a solid base of agreement is achieved’ (2007: 102). Clearly, a broad and diverse range of debate and criticism addresses the participatory approach. Views from the elite perspective distrust the claim that participation’s true value lies in enriching and strengthening the democratic political process. Others recognize that public decisions are necessarily technical and complex, and that social expressions have limited ability to intervene successfully. From the standpoint of expanding citizenship by supporting citizen rights, the participatory process appears very often to weaken the necessary state action, for these rights have failed to become institutionalized under new public policy designs.5 Finally, various actors in the political field have misgivings about participation by the people. In 2006, early in the administration of Michelle Bachelet, a brief but intense debate arose in Chile over the prospect of a ‘citizen government’, suggested at the time by the president. Political analysts in both the opposition and the government alluded to the ‘danger of spill-over’ in such an approach. The same response was given at various times of crisis sparked by citizen demands, including mobilizations of indigenous people in the south of Chile, subcontractor workers in the copper mines, people affected by environmental conditions and others. Such demands lacked channels for institutional participation, so they arose without them. Nevertheless, the Chilean elites markedly emphasized the need to ‘keep order’ over the need to expand institutions to include underprivileged sectors of society. This reaction may reflect democracy’s inability to channel the ‘explosion of social demands’ that characterized the period immediately preceding the military coup. However, it may also be understood as a long-term pattern of behaviour linked to the historic configuration of democracy in Chile and its overwhelming notion of governance as ‘keeping order’.6 Different sources have reported on new forms of interface between the state and civil society. Though they enable the latter to have an effective say in the full cycle of public policies, these constructions pose highly significant dilemmas for the parties involved. Such dilemmas cannot be resolved by a

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unique institutional figure, nor are there prior models to follow. Even considering that citizen participation in public policies may have positive outcomes (in both political and operational terms), the difficulties surrounding the participation process should be examined. Otherwise, regulations whose application provokes the same difficulties time and again are never overcome. Various problems normally arise during the participative transformation of policy design and implementation. Both civil society and the state face their own dilemmas regarding traditional guidelines for action and mutual relations. In the process of amending its role, the state may happen on at least four sets of dilemmas that gain significance when it comes time to coordinate and find new types of linkage with social movements: the dilemmas of representation, command, efficiency and legal framework. Representation, perhaps the most profound of the four, refers to the legitimacy of the principals. Before they dialogue with technicians and social movements, elected representatives themselves must decide to sit down with these actors – not (this time) to explain their politics or ask for votes, but to share a decision, discuss a joint strategy or submit to their oversight and inspection. The trouble is twofold. On the one hand, representatives are always seeking reelection and strong electoral support, whereas social groups seeking agreement are not always able or prepared to promise votes in exchange for participation. It is also, on the other hand, a matter of conflicting legitimacies. Whereas the elected authority represents a majority of voters, an NGO or a citizen movement is only the bearer or expression of a problem whose victims may be few or unclear. The difficulty increases when NGOs present themselves as representatives of civil society, whether on their own initiative or because they are so appointed by authorities or some international body seeking organizations as interlocutors (Pearce 2004). NGO leaders exhibit diverse levels of awareness of this problem. Some are most careful not to accept representations granted by authorities seeking actors; instead, they have set up associations of their own and collective platforms in several countries. Indeed, since the early 1990s national associations have proliferated in Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay and other countries. Other NGO leaders, however, ignore the problem, arguing that ‘legitimacy of this kind is not granted; it is earned’, alluding to the positive features they attribute to NGOs (de la Jara 2005, cited in Varas 2006: 36). Augusto Varas himself enthusiastically complemented this statement, pointing out, on the subject of NGOs, that it would be necessary to add ‘a high degree of transparency and all-resistant internal democracy’ (2006: 36). Testimonies included in a volume on activists and intellectuals in civil society who have played a role in government show the same type of nonproblematic selfperception when it comes to representation (Basombrío 2005). Of course, not all social and political movements have the same view of NGOs. At times,

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too, the degree to which CSOs are represented is questionable, as is their controlling or supervisory capacity. Membership organizations, for instance, often have ties to political opposition leaders, or weak internal democracy. Development NGOs often maintain questionable links to international cooperation and financing that lie outside the accountability of local or national authorities. The dilemma of command refers to control of public actions by the responsible authority. The ‘state-centred’ tradition that survives in civil service and the institutional design underlying numerous policies and programmes poses a serious challenge based on the defence of the general interest. Other factors point to this same centrality of the state. One is the need to meet specific management goals, usually within specified time limits. When public management undergoes modernization, government agencies, or whatever agencies are responsible, set deadlines that must be met through preset actions, limiting the possibility of collusion with external agents. Another such factor is the asymmetry between public agencies and CSOs. Public agencies’ greater access to funding and the need to enact nationwide programmes – as opposed to the local scope of political coalitions – bring pressures to bear. As a result, officials are driven to attempt to control and foretell CSOs’ actions in order to prevent participation or concerted action. Efficiency of management, which is increasingly required of the state, poses another major dilemma. For one thing, the cost-effectiveness of government actions is not guaranteed; they may eventually require further investment in human resources and other items not easily accounted for. As for concerted action, the mere process of coordination requires time not directly associated with verifiable results, though it may be a requisite for them. Administrative deadlines are fixed in advance. In Chile, budget allocations are made on a yearly basis, and there is no multi-year planning.7 The same applies to time periods involved in electoral policy. Timely planning, however, can be coordinated only after the manner of the coordination is known, when there is an actual ‘us’ involved (Bebbington, Delamaza and Villar 2005: 22). Submitting to citizen oversight implies an element of uncertainty that counteracts the requirements of the top-down planning and results-oriented management methods normally employed by the private sector. A fourth set of dilemmas the state faces involves the legal framework and above all the legalism of the Latin American juridical and administrative tradition, in which the mere existence of a juridical norm suffices to transform reality. This applies also to the norms governing administrative action, which are well suited to the hierarchy of vertical institutions and, more recently, to the ‘management by results’ demanded from agencies undergoing modernization. For example, account-rendering is seldom practised and not yet a feature of the state’s organizational culture, which often makes do with

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limited legal frameworks. Accordingly, amendments to require rendering of accounts open new, interesting scenarios in favour of joint action. Locally, participative budgets are such a scenario, as they always begin by rendering accounts for the preceding year; nationally, the picture involves institutional initiatives featuring social control and disclosure (Saldaña 2005: 56, 57). These four sets of dilemmas facing the public sector are not easily resolved. They may be seen as challenging the state to change and innovate, but they also mean limits –imposed today, in real life – on instances of institutional participation and concerted action. Civil society too confronts dilemmas related to the drafting of public policy. One concerns the autonomy of its organizations, perhaps one of their most readily identifiable traits. How to take part in an agenda coordinated for developing a public policy without sacrificing autonomy? The first hurdle is to accept both self-limitations on action and the limitations of the agency involved. Meanwhile, the traditional forms of association with government present other dilemmas. The traditional ‘petition’ style, like the grievance and the conflict stances, places social organizations ‘face to face’ with the government, debating or confronting it from the outside. Here too, the state is generally expected to conform to its traditional role as provider of services and opponent of privatization. Concerted and institutionalized forms of action, by contrast, require sitting at the same table and agreeing on some common initiatives and responsibilities. A second dilemma refers to political accumulation strategies in civil society. The contemporary notion of civil society emerged in a context of struggle against the state for democratization and respect for fundamental human rights. Civil society supported political demands when political spaces were closed or restricted. But the consequent reconstruction of political parties and representation brought back the traditional practices of political mediation, reducing the political involvement of CSOs. Civil society is not homogeneous, however, but harbours various trends and all manner of interests. When associating with the state, organizations ‘representing’ or embodying civil society are therefore challenged to find ways to smooth out differences so as to act in relatively coordinated fashion. This dilemma often arises in grass-roots organizations that find themselves having to come to terms with the state in institutionalized but ineffective forms of participation. Evelina Dagnino vividly formulated the pressing question: ‘…what are we doing here? What project are we supporting? Wouldn’t we be better off with another form of strategy that would privilege organization and mobilization of civil society instead of acting side by side with the state?’ (Dagnino 2004, cited in Canto 2004: 1). Political trends and proposals also act on civil society, particularly those cohorts that are underrepresented in formal political circles. In Chile, the binominal political system has

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caused the increasing exclusion of social groups, including youth and political sectors not belonging to the bloc in office. Civil society gives these groups the possibility of engaging in politics, though coexisting with institutional political space. Furthermore, the notion of participation has several underlying meanings. Specific experiences of civil society engaging in concerted action refer to at least three main themes or logics that Manuel Canto has described as ‘[p]resence in government structures and public policies; transformation of social and political order; and finally, the matter of the demandable nature of rights’ (2004 4). As Canto pointed out, it is too early to claim the evidence is conclusive, but the evolution of certain Mexican experiences he has examined reveals difficulties for civil organizations. For one thing, ‘it is possible to include items on municipal agendas, but the ability to have an influence on decisions and implementation is lost’. For another, results depend greatly on the efforts of the organizations themselves. However, ‘a level of institutional development is still to be reached where action may be specifically promoted by public policies, and there is no framework of governmental organization consistent with social participation’ (2006: 11). Although such a framework might further strengthen joint actions, it involves contending with a third dilemma: the inner fragmentation of civil society. Changes in labour relations, economic and social crises, migration and weakening of state-supported social policies, among other things, make for a highly fragmented society with little capacity for internal coordination, even in contexts of high organizational density. Concerted action strategies on a nationwide scale in structured movements, such as those that developed in Europe in the postwar period, are not within the reach of social organizations. Scenarios today are more varied, and social categories that join in defensive struggles tend to become dismembered once cooperation and construction of alternatives come to the fore. Greater heterogeneity of actors and interests, combined with uncertain and variable scenarios, hinders the participatory construction of public affairs. This applies to traditional forms of public management as well as to emerging participatory forms. To date, the debate on representative democracy and participatory democracy has focused mainly on the difficulty of introducing mechanisms for compulsory or mandatory direct citizen participation in the system of national decisions (Payne et al. 2003; PNUD 2004a). Yet political authorities and organized social movements have devoted insufficient discussion to the dimension of concerted political action. A general approach that might help orient this discussion is that of public action for development. Enrique Cabrero envisioned urban development as depending on a ‘two-stroke engine’ comprising the public sector and nongovernmental organizations. Development would hinge on the combination of both, because it is a matter of

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two configurations of actors: one of governmental nature and another of non-governmental nature, neither of which by itself is able to start the endogenous engine of urban development. … Without convergence of such configurations, in their rate of evolution as well as in their internal interests, it does not seem possible to start a project endogenously made up of local development. (Cabrero 2005: 356)

Applying this vision to the broader field of relations aimed at democratic governance can reveal whether the momentum required for endogenous deepening of democracy is forthcoming. The central argument of this chapter is that transitology has reduced the debate on democracy to the challenges of governance, that is to say, the effectiveness of the representative political system. The suggested approach to surmounting such limits is democratic construction that involves more actors in the process and makes more spaces available for intervention in politics. Civil society and participatory policies are important factors in this construction. Numerous processes have led political systems to incorporate civil society’s participation in governmental processes. But because civil society is neither a single actor nor the expression of a specific political project, it cannot be ‘represented’ in the political system in the way a political party, or even a group of corporate interests, is represented. Nor is civil society’s participation an ‘alternative’ to representative democracy. Hence dilemmas emerge for both institutions of representative democracy and the actual management of public policies. The problems are not resolved by ruling on the need for citizen participation, but by facing the dilemmas presented by the coexistence of representative democracy and specific participatory mechanisms that include civil society. Such dilemmas are of a political nature, for they concern not only the very concept of democracy but also public policy implementation. Below I will examine the institutional consequences of this situation and discuss empirical evidence based on various experiences, mainly in Latin America and Spain.

Participatory Institutions in a Heterogeneous State The conceptual discussion of the difficulties of democratic innovation in highly complex scenarios has numerous variants, many based on empirical experiences in Latin America and other contexts. Of particular interest here are those that describe and interpret the links between society and state, that is, citizen participation in public policy. Such links include those that are forged by applying paradigms of participatory democracy but whose achievements and risks share certain general characteristics with links resulting from other paradigms. The practical expressions of these concepts and the possibilities

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for institutional redesign have been formulated through the study of institutionalization mechanisms nationally and, on a lower scale, locally. The first topic discussed below is the participation of civil society as described by the International Development Bank (IDB) in its volume about ‘the politics of public policies’. An analysis of the part played by national actors of civil society examines the direction taken by public policies, exemplifying the modes of convergence that Cabrero spoke of, though not necessarily leading to a momentum impelling them (BID 2006). The discussion of the process of formulating public policies emphasizes the participation of public policy networks (Börzel 1997; Peterson 2003; Zurbriggen 2004; Varas 2006; de León and Vogenbeck 2007), then takes up the main means of institutionalizing links between civil society and the state on a national scale. These include direct democracy (referendum, countermanding mandate and people’s lawmaking initiatives), so-called socio-state interfaces and the social accountability approach developed mainly by Enrique Peruzzotti and Catalina Smulovic (2002, 2006) based on the case of Argentina. The final topic in this section is the dynamics of institutionalized participation on a local scale. Here, a major corpus of empirical evidence on Latin America allows some conclusions to be drawn.

Public Policy Networks and Actual Participation ‘All budgets are participatory’, said the Brazilian analyst Peter Spink when consulted in Chile about the participatory budget process operating in the prefectures of Porto Alegre, Ipatinga and Santo André more than twenty years ago. This statement is applicable to all public policy decisions: no policy can be enacted with the participation of just one actor. This is particularly so today, when the state has retreated from its traditional social roles and its capacity for autonomous action. In doing so, it has created numerous forms of linkage with all manner of external actors in the process of designing, implementing and assessing public policies. Participatory processes are distinguished by their nature, the actors involved and their consequences, rather than by participation as such. The difference lies in who participates, what means are utilized and, above all, what results such participation produces. Below I examine various modes of presence and participation of civil society to identify the special features, if any, of those arising out of a desire for participatory democracy. A particularly revealing analysis by the IDB in 2006, titled The Politics of Public Policies, attempts to describe and examine the generally less discussed dimensions of public policies, particularly un-institutionalized or unrecognized areas. On the subject of civil society, the document discusses two sets of phenomena: those arising from the unexpected behaviour of formal actors in the process –

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that is, unforeseen functions in roles defined by mechanisms not covered by norms – and those arising from informal actors (and scenarios) that perform major functions in the policymaking process, even though the functions are not formally assigned (BID 2006: 97). In other words, the analysis concerns actual participation beyond proposals, paradigms and approaches. A separate discussion covers enterprises in their various forms and modes of participation (companies, sectors, associations, contact networks and capital mobility), the media, unions and social movements, which act ‘along different lines from those supplied by recognized institutions’, as well as what it terms ‘knowledge actors’ (ibid.: 98–113). The text discusses the varied ways in which different actors influence public policies. It also scrutinizes some of their major effects in terms of governments’ ability to define policies and implement them. Particularly interesting is its treatment of the extensive, diverse influence of the business sector in conjunction with the growing relevance of knowledge actors – or, phrased another way, the importance of the elite’s resources – in the current situation in Latin American countries. Regarding subordinate social movements, the IDB’s analysis discusses the decreasing weight of unionism and observes that its power is greater when it exercises political influence through union-based political parties. As for social movements, it refers mainly to ‘increased street power’ deriving from ‘three different crises of the political system … the “weakness of the state”, the “weakness of representative democracy” and the “weakness of the nation”’ (ibid.: 123). However, the report provides examples only of extra-institutional mobilizations leading to the fall of governments or serious political or governance crises; it does not discuss any proactive social movements with a broad social perspective. Nor does it address any initiatives aiming to ameliorate such crises by institutionalizing participation. Although the IDB analysis does not view social movements negatively but stresses that they are responses seeking inclusion, it warns against the danger courted if ‘mass protest becomes a structural instrument in lieu of a circumstantial mechanism for participating in political life and if traditional democratic institutions are incapable of sustaining a legitimate and effective government role’. It devotes only two paragraphs to the instruments of direct democracy and participatory budgets that ‘endeavour to bring beneficiaries closer to decisions concerning certain resources’ (ibid.: 127), warning that they might weaken representative democracy without necessarily containing the people’s unease. The IDB document therefore restricts discussion of civil society to the more powerful actors facing the public sector and fails to conceptualize modes of co-production or co-management of policies and other forms of concerted action. Such phenomena, then, must be considered in a broader perspective. An interesting approach involves public policy networks, especially those mak-

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ing space for civil society to introduce aspects of the democratizing agenda, including expansion of citizenship and the rights that political democracy has failed to achieve. Social movements and extra-institutional mobilizations arise out of existing gaps between the progress of political democracy, which empowers actors and enables them to speak their minds, and the obstacles to exercising social citizenship in response to unresolved, urgent problems. Also, however, depending on the characteristics of the state and the social configuration in a given country, new types of links take shape between organized society and public policies. The concept of public policy networks is utilized extensively, though the actors involved give it various meanings. Tanja Börzel has pointed to two main schools – different, though not entirely antagonistic – of public policy network conceptualization: that of intermediation of interests and that of governing. The school of intermediation of interests is an analytical tool for examining institutionalized exchange relationships between the state and the CSOs, allowing a more detailed discussion by bearing in mind sector and sub-sector differences, the role of public actors, as well as formal and informal relationships among them. The basic assumption is that the existence of policy networks reflecting the relative power status of particular interests in an area of policy, influences (but does not determine) the political results. (Börzel 1997: 10)

This last feature is analytically important, for it means that identifying the actors composing the network allows identification of their possible inclinations to deepen democracy or reinforce elitism.8 Several instances of public policy networks in Chile allow a better understanding of political relationships in a state strongly linked to the private sector and civil society. However, the school of governance (also known as governing) sees these networks as holding a different analytical potential in respect of public policy design. ‘Actors interested in the making of certain policies and in whoever has the resources (both material and immaterial) unite to exchange such resources. The unions, which differ in their degree of intensity, standardization and frequency of interaction, form the structure of a network’ (Börzel 1997: 11). Considering, in addition, the complexity and disaggregation of decision-making structures, the importance of networks’ configuration increases. Are they oriented to mutual cooperation? Do they form horizontal relationships with actors asymmetrical in power and influence? The key here is that, on some plane at least, the actors are interdependent and different – basically public and private – and lack hierarchical centres to organize them (Knoke 1990; Le Galés 1995; Börzel 1997). Such networks are normally assumed to be made up of informal relationships; however, it is possible to analyse the underlying or encompassing network containing formalized structures

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of coordination between state and civil society. Public policy networks are a requirement of modern governance but not a normative ideal. ‘Governance networks also have negative effects on policymaking, such as problems of representation of the bodies involved in the network, exclusion of certain groups and creation of clientelistic systems’ (Zurbriggen 2004: 8). This aspect has particular significance for the construction of democracy.

New Institutional Forms and Methods Latin American countries’ constitutional and legal frameworks contain various mechanisms of direct democracy, in addition to recognized socio-state interfaces. Some are sometimes used more than others at various times (PNUD 2004a; Hevia 2005, 2008). In its examination of mechanisms of direct democracy from below, the UNDP (PNUD 2004a) distinguished between mandatory and nonmandatory initiatives, referendums and mandate annulment, all on a national scale. In each case, it recorded the existence, use, number of times utilized and results obtained. However, the information contained in the UNDP report on Latin America adequately covers only existence and use. Mandatory initiatives found in eleven out of eighteen countries studied and referendums found in eight made up the bulk of the mechanisms. This situation contrasts with the sole case, up to the study, of a country where both had taken place (Uruguay). The cases appear to have increased in the following years. Chile, however, did not and does not possess any mechanisms of direct democracy from below. Felipe Hevia (2005) systematized the basic research on mechanisms for direct political participation developed for direct democracy by Daniel Zovatto, and those for interfaces elaborated by Ernesto Isunza. Hevia broke instruments of direct democracy down into popular legislation initiatives, popular consultation (referendum and plebiscite) and mandate annulment. Interfaces were divided into representation of interests (consultative) and co-management participation. Unlike the UNDP document, Hevia included subnational scopes, increasing the number of different cases. In Chile, the possibility of calling a plebiscite arises only in the event of disagreement between the Executive and Congress over reform of the constitution. Consultation is available in provinces and communes (via economic and social councils). Co-management bodies, according to Hevia, include regional councils elected by the city councillors of the communes in the given region, and the National Television Council, whose members are elected by the Executive and Congress. There is no citizen participation in either of these instances. The concept of socio-state interfaces (Hevia 2004; Isunza 2005) describes the relationships between state and society according to direction, contents exchanged and intensity. Ernesto Isunza furnished a table covering all ex-

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isting interfaces. Its most recent version supports a broad classification of mechanisms (see Table 1.1). The categories in the table clearly have different intensities and capacities for transformation. Some engage in collective action while others require only isolated individuals. Works discussing social accountability (Peruzzotti and Smulovic 2002; Monsiváis 2005) maintain that in the framework of democracy consolidation following military governments, new forms of account-rendering distinct from the process of elections emerge in the society. Both transitology and consolidology, two schools of thought that have governed thinking about democracy, are lacking in concepts for such phenomena. Enrique Peruzzotti (2002: 90) claimed that ‘[t]he notion of societal accountability highlights the associational dimension of the concept of citizenship. It refers to the organizational aspect of a general public of citizens … (which has been blatantly ignored by the consolidation literature which either views society in mobilization terms or, alternatively, as an inarticulate aggregation of the individual preference of isolated citizens)’. Table 1.1. Socio-state Interfaces Basic Good Exchanged

Information

Power

Goods and Services

Grammar of the Relationship

Empirical Examples

Society informs the state

– Nonmandatory consultations – Complaints boxes – User surveys

Society is informed by the state

– State media campaigns – Government transparency – Reports on works

Society and the state are mutually informed

– Consultative councils – Dialogue meetings

Society gives mandate to the state

– Elections – Referendums, plebiscites

Society receives mandate from the state

– Outsourcing policies

Society and the state give each other mandate

– Deliberative councils – Participatory budget

Society supplies the state

– Taxes

Society is supplied by the state

– Transfers – Subsidies

Society and the state supply each other

– Works with beneficiary labour – Co-investment projects

Source: Isunza (2009: 6).

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This different way of looking at the political consequences of action by civil society ‘provides a dynamic understanding of political institutionalization correcting the deficiencies of the dominant Schumpeterian approach to democratization’ (ibid.: 91). It is a vertical account-rendering of a social, transversal and permanent nature, going beyond elections as an ex post accountability mechanism of politics. In the well-known categories formulated by O’Donnell, account-rendering is vertical when it involves information, justification and enforcement. When it originates in civil society, it is known as social accountability. It is transversal when it emerges within state associations incorporating citizens as such (Hevia 2005). Peruzzotti and Smulovic identified three main strategies for exercising these processes: judicial action, social mobilization and the media. None of these strategies is part of the regular exercise of the political system, but each conditions the system from outside through the action of civil society (2002: 214–224). Not all forms of court action, mobilization and communication through the media are associated with social accountability, but only those originating in civil society. Power is unequally distributed there, so the exercise of social accountability turns out to be more accessible to some groups than others. Like participation, a wide variety of forms of social auditing – another name for these phenomena – are exercised at different levels, at times with different intensities (Font et al. 2000).

Local Joint Actions and Public Policies: Proximity Governance and Multilevel Networks In the area of public policy, joint action between the state and civil society is highly diverse and addresses various matters, from organizing the supply of particular public services to formulating public policies. Its scope may encompass a small community or a city neighbourhood, or spread to include an entire town, as in the case of participatory budgets in Brazil or participatory planning in Colombia. These concerted actions may also encompass various phases of public policy: diagnosis, formulation, decision-making, management and assessment (Font et al. 2000: 121). The numerous forms of concerted action in public policy differ widely in their potential to construct governance, their complexity and so on. This differentiation is due not only to functional requirements but also to the diversity of orientations and dismembered state action, which in these matters shows little internal coherence. ‘We find the state present both in the support from an active citizenry and in its opposite, where initiatives fail to develop for lack of juridical frameworks or adequate political support’ (Delamaza 2003: 157–158). A collection on the subject of participatory dynamics of municipalities in Argentina proposes the following rising scale of complexity

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among state-society links: ‘Agreements on specific action on one occasion with the possibility of repetition; agreements over a particular action sustained over time; agreements over a series of actions with the possibility of repetition; agreements over a series of actions sustained over time’ (Cravacuore et al. 2004: 50). The concerted approach has changed with the evolution of social policies and their requirements. In the boom period of focalized policies, reduction of public funds and emergence of social investment funds across the continent, this approach was mainly restricted to developing ‘participatory diagnoses’, that is, the assessment of demand most adequate to guiding the resources of small local projects and ensuring some measure of social control over implementation. Nowadays, in multi-sector initiatives such as the Bolsa Familia programmes in Brazil and Oportunidades in Mexico, concerted action by the state and civil society is part of the very concept of the programmes, whose design assumes that whereas the state must guarantee certain rights and coverage to a specific disadvantaged population, CSOs and developmental NGOs should act in local design and implementation. Beyond merely supplying services, these actions are also expected to increase the social capital of communities (Cornwall and Gaventa 2000). Today these programmes are one of the main strategies for acting against poverty in several Latin American countries, including Chile (with its programme Chile Solidario). By means of conditioned transfer, they attempt to check the clientelism and assistentialism associated with earlier experiences. Examination of their mechanisms for citizen participation and social control reveals that although they are not necessarily efficient or utilized by the intended beneficiaries, they do include control measures that hinder clientelist or patrimonialist use of the funds transferred (Hevia 2009). Initiatives of this nature have not yet been sufficiently assessed, partly because several of these programmes are rather recent on the continent. In Latin America, they have introduced notions of guaranteed universal rights combined with strategies for focusing on poverty sectors, but it is still premature to consider them a firm base for ‘large national agreements in key areas’ as in the northern countries, as Bernardo Kliksberg suggests (2006: 43). The forms of national social concerted action in countries that have introduced programmes of this type cannot be assumed to be similar to those in the welfare states, as they are mostly designed to avoid the consequences of extreme poverty among groups that continue to be socially excluded. Some of the programmes have given rise to permanent forms of concerted action with increasing responsibilities. For instance, Brazil’s Bolsa Familia provides for joint action at various levels of administration and parity among local-level representatives of civil society and the state. Reinforcing associativism and enabling social groups to communicate are now included as pol-

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icy objectives. Crucially, institutional arrangements involving the concerted efforts of state and society answer both problems of legitimacy and those of efficient supply of services. In the words of Clarisa Hardy, ‘weakness of expression and representation of citizen interests, for example, in supplying services, is part of a deficit of democratic participation, but also of unsatisfactory results in the performance of social sectors. Hence the significance of policies, standards and institutions favouring associativity’ (2002: 306). Management of social policies is increasingly acquiring a multi-actor or multi-organizational character focused on problems of coordination. Different institutional arrangements are possible, considering the nature of the problem faced, the good or service supplied and the programme objectives. In cases of centralized management, challenges are less important, but the difficulty increases when execution is externalized or the programme is executed through variously complex networks of various actors. The resulting process is open and ongoing, adding new objectives to social programmes to aid the transformation of previous links among government agencies and the social expressions concerned. In the words of an author devoted to affairs of public management: Constitution and consolidation of such networks are included among the purposes of programmes whose objectives include fostering shared learning, improved utilization of resources and accumulation of impacts. Such programs include those dealing with local or community development, pursuing through the establishment of relationships among actors the opening of new opportunities for new initiatives and developing processes for construction of social capital’ (H. Martínez 2006: 149).

Complexity may also extend to the institutionalization it involves. Processes at the most basic level are mainly aimed at setting priorities for public investment. As a rule these consultation processes have an instrumental character: the state sets out the agenda, and results refer to options between preset alternatives or temporal sequences. At a more complex level are the participative planning processes, which have a more extensive time frame and involve a less specific, limited dialogue for authorities and citizens. A third level refers directly to decision-making on specific projects and initiatives. The latter two levels require some form of public deliberation process, as well as successive negotiations of interests, priorities and proposals. In other words, when spaces for participation are opened, attention is necessarily owed to the specific methodology that must be built up to achieve the objectives. A continuous and more complex process requiring a high degree of previous maturation comprises forms of control over implementation, assessment of the process and reformulation of further stages, including the rules for concerted action itself. In the most advanced situation, the participating

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actors have previously agreed on these rules – and on when they can be renegotiated, also in concerted fashion, as the process itself develops. Such cases represent true horizontal consensuses and self-supporting networks with the ability to adapt. Their realization is not only a question of regulations or legal framework, but above all one of political effectiveness and social demand. For example, some advanced experiences of participatory budgets like those of Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre in Brazil, or of highly cohesive communities with access to the city council, such as Toribío in Colombia, have adopted these kinds of practices (Avritzer 2002; Velásquez and González 2003). Lastly, mixed agencies have recently come into being in cases where participation is a regular component of the administration. Such agencies – intermunicipal consortiums, or agencies for municipal or regional development – are not always in sync with the previously established dynamics of local participation and concerted actions and may edge them out. Similarly, on occasion a national project is modelled on a local experience but ends up closing down the previous local space in the course of standardization, regulation and allocation of resources. In fact, increases in scale produce some of the most difficult challenges to citizen participation in public policy, for the flexibility and local relevance at the base of the initial experience cannot easily be generalized later. This happened in Chile with Programa Puente, intended to provide direct support to families living in extreme poverty. The programme was explicitly partly inspired by the experience of the model of family care set up in the municipality of Quillota, close to Santiago. However, upon the launch of Programa Puente in that commune, the municipal team was required to deactivate the local model. According to the central government design, Programa Puente’s funding was allocated from the central government, as opposed to the local funding the Quillota model relied on (Ruz and Palma 2005). Likewise, Brazil met with disappointing results when its participatory budgets passed from municipal to state level. Evolution towards more complex participation is particularly difficult for the homogeneous, centralized, hierarchical Latin American state tradition. Agencies involved in concerted action targeting specific sectors such as health care, education or housing are challenged to garner sufficient autonomy and political support to run the risks inherent in participatory innovation and to overcome the obstacles that arise. Moreover, a single instrument for joint action may undergo extensive transformation according to its position vis-à-vis the political dynamics it encounters. An illustrative case is that of the Bureau of Joint Action for the Struggle against Poverty, operating in the framework of political changes in Peru (Panfichi and Dammert 2005). In this instance, the participative instrument was highly sensitive to political changes in the application contexts.

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On the local plane, projection and scaling up of such participatory experiences entails progress in decentralization, support from the higher echelons of public action and retained decision-making autonomy. Following the initial move towards innovation, specific strategies are needed to accommodate institutionalization and changed politics. These strategies must extend beyond the local level and involve other types of actors and processes: legislation, organizational designs, budgetary allocation logics, standards and regulations, and so on. This situation is quite common in institutional innovations – particularly in localities – which generally arise on the periphery of mainstream actions as expressions of local renegotiation of rules and trends in central policies, whether on a municipal and national scale, or between the programme makers and the grass roots. If these institutions are to develop further, they must meet the challenge of increasing their effect and sustainability, which depend on exogenous elements like the level of fiscal and policy decentralization. One likely cause of the success of Brazil’s participative budgets is the high degree of decentralization in that country; by contrast, limited, inconsistent decentralization appears to account for both the difficulties such organizations face in Peru and their diminished presence in Chile (Posner 2003; Remy 2005; E. Montecinos 2007). The foregoing considerations might alter the notion that problems of concerted action are more easily addressed on the local rather than the national scale. Experience shows that local initiatives are more meaningful and successful when they utilize the advantages of close public management. In their different cases, however, they fail to achieve the same positive results owing to outside influences on local joint action. For example, achievement of appropriate transversality or multidimensionality in approaches to local problems is impeded when the heterogeneity of the levels and institutions comes into play. In the words of a study on the Catalonian experience, this is a matter of ‘difficulties associated with scant transverse co-empowerment within the government structure for impulse and assumption of such participative results and they end in practice by adopting limited theme approaches’ (Blanco and Gomá 2002: 93). Similarly, sometimes a solid local agreement exceeds the limits imposed by sectoral policy and cannot be implemented. This happened in the Federal District of Mexico in respect of reforms relative to abortion, impelled by a network of shared local policy for defence and promotion of sexual and reproductive rights (Álvarez 2003: 305). Although it is plausible to suggest that concerted action of this kind is more feasible in local contexts because of the proximity between social actors and authority, and the lesser relative complexity of the items under discussion, other factors must concur for it to take place. Its realization hinges, on the one hand, on the nature of the problems to be faced: experience shows that heavily concerted actions are better suited to address matters involving

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collective interests, common rights and public goods than matters associated with individual or family satisfaction. It also requires that fairly constituted or legitimized actors take part in the joint actions. But on the other hand, effective joint action can face a major impediment in the local systems’ lack of relative autonomy and inadequate coordination with central policies and national decision levels. Therefore, the local environment is favourable to concerted action and facilitates it, but the action’s scope is subject to considerable outside influence and often cannot be locally defined. Accordingly, local coalitions sometimes form to contend with the higher levels in yet another form of actual, though more controversial, concerted action. Whereas local policies require more autonomy to reinforce their concerted strategy, sectoral policies have the advantage of being able to set up more functional, delimited bodies, such as consultative councils and social control mechanisms associated with specific aspects of policy design and implementation. The same trait, however, sometimes leads to less democracy via a kind of professionalism of participants, who tend to belong to development NGOs rather than represent a cross-section of social organizations (Cunill 2008). Meanwhile, although undertakings like the participative budgets have effectively organized concerted action to address problems connected with collective and community interests, particularly urban infrastructure, they fail to show the same potential in matters like social housing, where issues tend to concern individual and family matters and the link with sectoral policy is crucial (Filgueiras 2005). An approach focused on proximity governance and multilevel networks, developed and tested in Catalonia (Font et al. 2000; Blanco and Gomá 2002; Ibarra, Martí and Gomá 2002), helps to conceptualize the new problems in direct linkage between society and state. Responding to the complexity, uncertainty and intertwinement of contemporary public problems and the erosion of the hierarchical concept of government, this approach suggests a concept of network government supported by three pillars: (1) recognition, acceptance and integration of complexity as an intrinsic element of the political system; (2) a system of government in which diverse actors function in the framework of various networks; and (3) a new position for public authorities in government processes, adoption of new roles and utilization of new instruments (Blanco and Gomá 2002: 22). Here, as Blanco and Gomá pointed out, actors face the challenge of ‘legitimacy, that is, of democratic deepening, more civic-minded and participative’ together with that of strengthening local (politicized) territories and their link to overall dynamics, where ‘the state gives in and rearranges its government capabilities on a lower scale’ (ibid.: 23). The Catalonian viewpoint refers to empirical studies when it recognizes the progress of local governments in the European scenario. This progress,

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though limited, was much more intensive than that in the Chilean case. Nonetheless, it also has a normative dimension that recognizes the limitations of both the traditional forms of government and the contemporary challenges of social conflict. Accordingly, the concept of proximity governance requires concerted action, for ‘speaking of participative networks implies not only recognizing a plurality of actors but also the arrangement of such actors in common organization frameworks from which it is possible to exchange resources, negotiate priorities and make decisions on shared public projects’ (ibid.: 26). This network interaction strengthens actor capabilities in a highly participative public space. It is known as ‘multilevel proximity governance’, not because it operates exclusively at the local level but because of the ‘ability of local governments to lead, provide strategic guidance to these convergences between levels’ (ibid.: 28). Experiences suited for empirical reference include strategic plans, participative budgets, Local Agenda 21 (environmental), community planning, city educational projects, local agreements for employment, and cooperation in matters of policies for development and for cooperation itself. Blanco and Gomá also listed the main limitations of the participative instruments used in the foregoing multilevel networks: methodological standardization leading to further concentration of rigidities in making plans and thereby generating problems of adaptation to specific circumstances; scant participation, exclusion of non-organized citizenry and joint actions taken by elites; difficulties in operationalizing transverse views; neo-technocratism and excessive managerialism in lieu of plurality; difficulty in turning agreements and objectives into practical action; lack of mutual recognition of legitimacies and the anchoring of certain actors in their traditional roles (2002: 34–37). Another approach expanded action through networks via ‘alliances’ or partnerships (known in Brazil as parcerias) fostered by the World Bank and other international organizations in the mid-1990s (Fizsbein and Lowden 1999; Levinger and McLeod 2002). When linked to the policies of financial cooperation institutions, this approach promoted various experiences of cooperation between state and civil society, soon to be followed by other cooperation and alliance initiatives involving the ‘three sectors’ (state, civil society and market) in accordance with the concept prevailing at the time. What results did the alliance experience produce? A study on partnerships suggests an advanced form known as synergistic partnerships, which might be compared to instances of concerted action such as those mentioned above. Levinger and McLeod stated that synergistic partnerships are advisable when the problem is complex, systemic and lasting, and when results are obtainable only in an extended time frame, as this form of alliance is relatively comprehensive and continuous, capable of sustaining initial benefits and con-

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structing long-term effects. Synergistic partnerships are also fitting when the context is volatile, for diversity allows existing risks to be shared (Levinger and McLeod 2002: 44). According to the same study, the general benefits of synergistic alliances include coordination, comprehensiveness and continuity. The first allows clearer identification of requirements and coverage problems, and according assignment of resources. Comprehensiveness refers to synergy among activities, allowing manifold approaches to complex problems, while continuity means greater efficiency and impact over the long term. Both beneficiaries and participants in the alliance feel its effects. The former very likely obtain a greater and better supply of goods and services; direct participants experience more intangible effects in the form of organizational learning and social capital (ibid. 2002: 31). However, the relevance of the synergistic or advance approach to multidimensional problems does not ensure greater viability, because this approach also entails greater requirements for institutional transformation. Of all institutional arrangements, programme execution by means of strategic alliances and formation of consortiums is the most complex and difficult to maintain over time. These arrangements occur in diverse institutional contexts and often lack instruments or incentives to rectify courses of action already taken. From a standpoint of organizational change, Humberto Martínez warned that ‘the difficulties that sometimes arise in the course of implementation are due to differential distribution of capabilities among the members of the consortium, disparity between contributions and expectations of those involved, and the need to maintain balance in the spheres of consortium management’ (2006: 151). What kind of achievements does this type of concerted action enable? The evidence is inconclusive, but the few systematic studies that are available suggest certain major results. A comparison of four Chilean experiences of joint action for local development in low-income rural communities showed that in four to five years, improvements were achieved in terms of new capabilities among the actors in the territory, design of local strategies and portfolios of projects prioritized by the community – specifically, ‘local projects’, goals towards which to advance in concerted fashion. New institutions also emerged within the city council, and new legal concepts arose in associations of people adopting ‘hybrid’ profiles and combining diverse roles according to the challenges faced. The city council’s role was emphasized and intensified, insofar as the projects explicitly recognized this role; in addition, the city council received technical assistance and undertook strategies for institutional reinforcement (Delamaza 2002). In another example, a case study in Buenos Aires found that the greatest achievement of the participative innovations was the development of

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competences for project management in association, induced by training as well as by the practice of coordination. Local governments showed flexibility, and the programmes were appreciated because they increased transparency, fostered participation in strategic plans and diminished clientelism, in addition to increasing yields with lower costs in some cases (Cravacuore et al. 2004: 57–58). Furthermore, Bebbington, Delamaza and Villar compared so-called ‘public spaces of local concertation’ and found that the best results were obtained in the areas of reinforcing associative life and increasing the ‘voices of the poor’ in public decisions; also, confidence in collective action grew. Lesser achievements were recorded under the headings of distribution of public resources, improvement of quality of life in impoverished communities and making a more profound change in political culture (2005: 16ff.). Associative results are the fruit of deliberate efforts to promote and facilitate the inclusion expressed in the rules of the game that fostered it. These rules normally originate in the prior social dynamics that facilitate the process. Cooperation with external agents like NGOs has also been important: they play a role in training and technical assistance, and on occasion may act as intermediaries between social actors and the administration at some difficult juncture. Such roles suggest that in complex experiences the modes of organization may be diverse and mutually coordinated (Filgueiras 2005). The processes unleashed by the dynamics of concerted action, when institutionalized, require transformation within government proceedings themselves. That is, participative policy not only posits conditions in civil society but also calls for changes in the conditions public institutions require in order to act. This notion has been little discussed because its usual focus is entirely on the dynamics of civil society and social movements. Moreover, the challenges of institutional change are varied, and some are difficult to define. Cristina Filgueiras (2004: 29) spelled out some of them: Creation of new levels in the structure of municipal power; necessary coordination among existing structures; assignment of staff and resources; improvement of planning levels; improvement of information for monitoring investments; production of technical information; execution of the works decided; ability to alter administrative routines; modernizing sectors; training civil servants in democratic and participative logic; adoption of new management and planning instruments; acquisition of executive ability to manage conflicts; establishing negotiation among parties; coordinating planning and budget.

Meanwhile, changes in local-level forms of government management, which may also be considered a result of concerted action, deserve more attention.

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Public Spaces for Local Concerted Action and Empirical Evidence Hoping to improve understanding of the complexity of the link between state and civil society by means of public policies, I developed the conceptual device of ‘public spaces for local concertation’.9 In these spaces for the direct participation of grass-roots organizations, forms of social mobilization have moved beyond pure vindication and resistance. Administration officials are involved, but they have advanced beyond simple consultation with the people and strategies for subordinate incorporation. These are spaces for joint action involving processes and practices of meeting, negotiating, deliberating and constructing agreements among actors of different types, who represent various interests. In these public spaces, processes are visible, subject to social monitoring and to some extent institutionalized. When this is not the case, the outcomes of the experiences are weak, that is, vulnerable to changes of attitude or strategy on the part of the actors involved. Though not explicitly spelled out in the concept, these public spaces are intended to accommodate the participation of grass-roots organizations representing underprivileged sectors and/ or sectors previously excluded from discussion of public affairs. The distinction is important, because not all public spaces for local action in concert with participating civil society organizations include the grass-roots organizations of the poor or the excluded. Indeed, various actors entirely lack equitable access to such local spaces. Such spaces are not set up overnight. The major social processes that precede them also influence both the possibility of establishing them and the quality of their operations. Furthermore, because these spaces are always embedded in the political economy where they exist, the differences of power, interest and material resources that characterize the political economy are present in the spaces for joint action as well. Thus, the dynamics of markets, defined by political economy, seriously impact the material effects of participation while national and international policies, as well as other external variables, weigh heavily on market effects. What is local should always be understood in terms of its relationship to other scales. Moreover, these spaces for concerted action are rooted in the existing institutional framework. In some instances they adapt or make innovations to the institutions supplied by the state; in others, institutionalization proposals seek to link with or influence spaces for discussing policies or social programmes that are important to the locality. In still others, a policy framework is sought for the sake of permanence. Indeed, these spaces’ own emergence and spread has piggybacked on the momentum that decentralization efforts

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in Latin America have enjoyed since the 1980s. Such efforts have no single motive, and they do not respond to just one model of political institution. Consequently, their effects on participation are also varied. The foregoing arguments entail a ‘structural’ restriction on participation. Even though local space is usually said to be the best place to arrange participation, relative autonomy and availability of power resources are generally highly restricted in the local environment. Decentralization and participation thus are closely related; however, to the extent that national governments have no faith in the latter, the former will continue to be only a partly satisfied demand (Canto 2004). The cases of Brazil, Colombia and Chile clearly exemplify this assertion. The success of Brazil’s participative budgets is linked to the history of decentralization in that country. The same instrument utilized in another context, such as that of Chile, would encounter limitations imposed by a much more centralized administration (Posner 2003; Delamaza and Ochsenius 2010b). In Colombia, participation’s significance for the political system at a time of crisis in the late 1980s is evident in the profuse legislation in support of it. In Chile, however, decentralization was not a matter of political importance for the process of transition to democracy in the 1990s (Angell 1999; Mardones 2006). Public spaces for local concerted action have territorial bounds. Actors with different identities and interests meet there to discuss their differences and seek ways to combine efforts. They do not necessarily achieve this in all cases. Indeed, very often they agree on a single issue and disagree absolutely on others – but they do agree on at least something. The notion of concerted action does not rid such spaces of asymmetries in information, power, appetite for conflict and so on among the participating actors. Indeed, a certain levelling of forces and powers among the actors involved is often required, precisely because the notion of public space does not preclude social conflicts. For this reason, as Vieira remarked, public space does not resemble a market of individuals and opinions, for ‘the notion of public space may no more be restricted to the liberal vision of an opinion market. … Citizenship, defined under the principles of democracy, is manifest in the creation of social spaces for struggle (social movements) and the definition of permanent institutions for political expression’ (cited in Canto 2004: 26). The above definition of spaces for concerted action also assumes some degree of institutionalization, though not necessarily formal, based on rules, decrees issued at some level of government or formalization by the city council. Institutionalization means there are codes, rules and procedures, written, agreed and claimed by a set of governmental and nongovernmental actors. The critical attributes of ‘institutionalization’ are adaptation to social matters and the weight attached to codes, rules and procedures in view of actors’ emphasis on deliberative practices, whether or not such codes are part of the

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body of law. In turn, the design and rules of the institutional game make for differences in local dynamics of joint action. To support concerted efforts, it is not enough to promote the participating organizations’ capacity for collective action: attention must also be paid to institution design, incentives, rules of the game that guide the actors, the definition of the space’s efficacy and inclusiveness, and the ability to deepen democracy and curtail the formation of participative elites. In Latin America these experiences originate as innovations in the framework of a political culture marked by traits that hinder construction of deliberative public spaces. These traits include political clientelism and patrimonialism, together with relations of instrumentalization – or open confrontation – between state and society. The development and potential of such spaces depends partly on how well they succeed in transforming some of these contextual variables. In the case of clientelism, for example, concerted actions attempt to modify asymmetrical relations between state and society that are not subject to public scrutiny, particularly in popular sectors. This involves amending the particularistic way of allocating resources, the lack of accepted and permanent norms, and the private – though partial – appropriation of public resources. Nevertheless, clientelism shifts its shape, evolving and adapting to different modes of institutional management, for instance in processes arising from strategies for modernizing public management. Thus ‘the introduction of new mechanisms for distribution of public goods, such as the demand subsidy, projects open to competition and participative forms of management, does not necessarily do away completely with clientelist traits, for they can also begin to operate within clientelistic guidelines’ (Bebbington, Delamaza and Villar 2005: 321). The chief challenge of institutional designs for participation is not so much to create forums according to a preestablished model, such as the participatory budgets or panels for concerted action, but rather to generate a continuing dynamics of democratization at the local level to increase the relative significance of traditionally excluded sectors. Another challenge is to introduce public transparency and forums to control the allocation of public goods and services. According to John Durston, clientelism often ‘rides again’ and cannot be eradicated once and for all. Moreover, it is not an unambiguous term but one subject to degrees of heavier or lighter clientelist traits hidden in political relationships that also mask negotiation, compromise and not necessarily subordinate forms of participation (Durston 2005: 15). ‘Publifying’ relations between state and citizen aspire to turn public everything that should be so.10 Though such relations work against clientelism, in practice they coexist in permanent tension with it. Amending a traditional pattern of confrontation or clientelism so that it gives way to local-level concerted action between the public sector and civil society is no easy matter,

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as social movements distrust such forums for concerted action. Also, social movements do not share any clear determination of the optimal extent of participation; rather, its legitimacy and effect build up and evolve according to actors’ availability to participate or not. Furthermore, as shown in the case of people’s associations in Belo Horizonte, the strategy of participating in a space for concerted action does not inhibit other forms of social mobilization, which often involve confrontation with the same public apparatus involved in concerted action on other issues (Filgueiras 2005). Organizations retain their autonomy, for experience teaches them that different strategies obtain different results and it is necessary to combine various forms of action. As in the case of clientelism, the practice of local-level, public concerted action partly modifies the above forms of relationships between the state and social groups. It coexists, sometimes with enormous difficulty, with the confrontations that have often accompanied such relations. Finally, the potential to effectively transform the living conditions of the poor and excluded, like the scope that such spaces for concerted action may attain, depends on increasing levels of joint action in society in general. It is not reasonable to believe it may develop in isolation solely through the actions of local actors from poor communities. Participation involves dynamic power relationships in scenarios of lesser or greater participation. Excessive emphasis on the ‘deliberative’ dimension of participative spaces clouds their other dimensions and may detract from their legitimacy by omitting reference to power relationships. The spaces’ greater or lesser democratic character is manifest in the degree to which the tendency to form participative elites has been countered and new groups and interests have been included. Apparently, participation and deliberation mechanisms can improve their capacity for inclusivity enough to prolong social demand to participate and renew manifestations of power. This forces the elites to open up spaces, establishing equilibriums through inclusive institutional redesign (Canto 2006). Examination of the forms of political institutions involved in citizen participation reveals their reach as well as their wide diversity. Such modes have been conceptualized as networks of public policy and as socio-state interfaces. Each concept provides a general view of nongovernmental actors’ access to public affairs. Specific experiences have been conceptualized as concerted action and alliances, and in the local sphere as multilevel networks and public spaces for local concerted action. The conditions that permit them to play an effective role in expanding democracy become discernible upon inspection of the various experiences. Relevant factors include the degree of coherence in institutional designs for participation and the actual autonomy of the levels created, that is, whether they possess sizeable capabilities for independent decision-making. Even in the case of local initiatives, coordination with the

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institutional framework of the state is decisive. The issue, however, is not only institutional. From the standpoint of society, the decisive factor is the ability to bring in the excluded sectors of society. Yet the support and ‘appropriation’ that the involved citizenry give to such modes are also key – and very often, they are not sufficiently provided.

Notes 1. According to Mainwaring and Scully: ‘Democratic governance is conceptually different from the quality of democracy and the quality of governance. It is, above all, a top-down phenomenon focused on how well the democratic government and the state work in a democratic regime. By contrast, quality of democracy alludes to the “democraticity” of the political regime’ (2008: 130). Although they acknowledge this difference, in their view the notions of governance and quality of democracy are both circumscribed to the sphere of the political regime. 2. Chatterjee considers the very notion of civil society inapplicable in postcolonial contexts such as India, as the liberal conceptualization would apply only to the small group that enjoys the conditions that make its relations possible. ‘Civil society, for instance, will appear as a closed association of modern élite groups, trapped in enclaves of civic freedom and legal rationality, separated from the broader community life of the people’ (Chatterjee 2008: 58). This book retains the notion of civil society but reconceptualizes it for the context of Latin America and Chile. 3. ‘As Schumpeter clearly said, the people act correctly when they vote and let their representatives govern without pestering them with letters or petitions (mother-in-law-in-the-backseat effect) and once their term is over judge how they have done’ (Abal Medina 2004: 25). 4. Conceptual formulations are diverse. They include, among others, the ‘discursive designs’ of Dryzek; Ackerman’s concept of ‘co-governance’; the ‘account-rendering interfaces’ of Isunza; Avritzer’s ‘participatory publics’, and the model of ‘empowered participatory democracy’ elaborated by Fung. They illustrate the variety of conceptualizations of innovative experiences in governance, participation and rendering accounts (Monsiváis 2005:14). 5. For this latter critique based on participatory strategy’s insufficiency to guarantee citizenship, see Campero and Gray-Molina (2005) on the Bolivian experience under the Popular Participation Law of 1994, and Ricci (2005) on the situation of participatory budgets in Brazil. 6. Several authors, e.g., Jocelyn-Holt (1999), Salazar and Pinto (1999) and Portales (2005), have critically discussed the historical behaviour of Chilean political and economic elites, underlining the exclusionary and restrictive aspects of the political system that resulted from their predominance. 7. An OECD report on territorial development in Chile associated economic development with governance and increases in actors that would necessitate amendment of the annual method of state planning. The report concluded that advancing towards more comprehensive investment would require adapting the investment process to territorial logic and a multi-annual scheme. This in turn required creating ‘a solid regional governance structure capable of creating a coherent framework for economic development’ (OECD 2009: 174). 8. In methodological terms, ‘in analysing a network it is important to identify the actors, clarify which are the goals of the agents, and how their political influence is utilized in the network. Secondly, it is important to determine how the exchange of resources and information takes

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place among the actors, together with the mechanisms guiding such exchanges: rules, informal routines, organizational links, etc.’ (Zurbriggen 2004: 7). 9. See the conceptual and applied development of this notion in the text I co-authored with Rodrigo Villar and Anthony Bebbington, where the notion is included in accounts of several concerted action experiences in Latin America (Bebbington, Delamaza and Villar 2005). The text is the result of research directed by the author. 10. See the collective volume on public space in Mexico compiled by Mauricio Merino (2010).

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Chile Top-down Modernization and Low-intensity Re-democratization

Extended use of the terms civil society and state comes with a risk of reifying concepts beyond their empirical existence, as though each were an essential entity manifested variously, according to context. The fact is that every society is characterized differently; hence, the state or civil society existing in reality is not a variant of any essentiality but a way of naming a specific historic process. The present chapter will show the ongoing link or subordinate interrelationship Chilean civil society shares with the dominant state, mainly through the political system. In the twentieth century, these links were so significant that the transition to democracy begun in the late 1980s has still not fully overcome the breakdown caused by the military regime, despite the recomposition of the political system. Both civil society and, above all, the state, were radically transformed during the 1970s and 1980s. The transition policy resembles the one prior to 1973 only in the permanence of certain parties. In treating the historical trajectory of relations between civil society and the state, this chapter will highlight civil society’s tendencies towards fragmentation and partial self-sufficiency, as well as the new mediation instruments emerging from the social policies of the post-1990 administrations. After positioning such policies in the framework of the evolution of Chilean democracy, the discussion will continue in the following chapter, which will identify their potential contribution to democratic governance.

The Early Formation of a State that Imposed Itself on the Society In Chile, it is said, the state is not a product of the nation but preceded it, becoming a major player in the constitution of a national space. This fact politicizes all reflection on society, because the ways a state is constituted are determining factors in social relationships in the national space. This phenomenon is generally considered characteristic of dependent societies. Insofar as these societies’ ruling classes are in turn subordinate to foreign bourgeoisies, – 63 –

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the state becomes autonomous as an agent of development, to the structural detriment of the class relations system. According to Alain Touraine, ‘[t]he general form of society is determined by its relationship with foreign capital; this relationship is managed or transformed by the state’ (1978: 97). In heavily traditional societies with major indigenous components grouped in broad cultural units and rural economies, the state fails to cover the national space and operates rather like a juridical fiction and repressive reality. The national integration of the people, meanwhile, progresses only fragmentarily in the course of industrial and urban development. In Chile, the image of the state looms over society. ‘The state is the matrix of nationality, the nation would not exist without the state’, the distinguished Chilean historian Mario Góngora (1981: 59) claimed in one of his most often cited theses. Also emphasized is the early constitution of a national state based on unification of the ruling classes as ‘managers’ subordinated to foreign domination expressed in an enclave economy (De Riz 1979). The state’s preeminence was institutionally consolidated a few years after independence was won from Spain. Political domination was instituted in the Constitution of 1833, which lasted 92 years and strongly influenced the one that followed it nearly a hundred years later, in 1925. This trait is present in the consciousness of the Chilean political elites and often arises in current debates that stress the value of the institutional stability that independent Chile appeared to have achieved early on, compared with other countries of Latin America. Edgardo Boeninger (1997, 2007), one of the artificers of the Chilean political transition, pointed out that the defining focus of Chile’s historical trajectory from independence onwards has been republican order and a centralized state that set up institutions that endure to the present day. The political philosophy held by the nineteenth century statesman Diego Portales and expressed in the Constitution of 1833 posits an impersonal, strong, centralized government, legality, austerity and public service (A. Edwards 2005: 677). Also noteworthy is the organization of a professional army and the expansion and drawing of frontiers in the 1880s. The state, as a ‘national conscience’, completed its formation in the late nineteenth century, largely by means of war efforts, the most important being the victorious War of the Pacific against Peru and Bolivia (1879–1883), which allowed annexation of considerable territory in the north of Chile while also producing social outcomes of national integration by instituting the ‘army of the Chilean roto (man of the people).’ While it integrated large contingents of the population symbolically and professionally, that same army also was used as a force for internal colonization in the conquest and definitive incorporation of Mapuche territory in the south of Chile in 1881 (Bengoa 1999a; Hernández 2003). The state that emerged from the conflicts following the War of Independence (1810–1818) was able to support a stable political regime despite suc-

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cessive internal (in 1851, 1859 1891) and external (in 1837, 1865 and 1879) armed conflicts in the course of the nineteenth century, but it was not the genuine expression of groups, interests and projects of the society it governed. Its order, imposed by force after conservatives defeated liberal fractions on the battlefield, actually excluded 90 per cent of the population from basic political rights, as recent work on Chilean social policy shows: The Constitution of 1833 … excluded women; male Chileans who owned no fixed assets, invested capital or income equivalent to $200 per year (that is four times the average income of an ordinary labourer); and domestic servants. The Electoral Law of the same year added the members of the regular clergy; soldiers, corporals and sergeants of the Permanent Army and ‘day labourers and farm hands’. This situation continued until 1914. (Salazar and Pinto 1999: 89)

Notwithstanding, the Electoral Law of 1874 significantly increased the representativeness and democratic effectiveness of the political system, making it possible to control presidentialism and paving the way for new political parties. The number of voters rose, and a manifold political system was permitted to develop, although it was limited to elites – a recurring feature of Chilean political development (Valenzuela 1985). The process came to have cultural consequences, and a reading of the ‘Chilean identity’ in such terms may be attempted. In his Historia de las Ideas y la Cultura en Chile, Bernardo Subercaseaux presents the problem as follows: There are countries such as Chile, where the discourse of homogeneity was implemented in the nineteenth century by the elite and the state with considerable success. It generated self-awareness in a nation that saw itself as culturally European, hence the myth of the ‘Switzerland or the England of South America’. Hence also the (nationalist) myth of being exceptional in the Latin American context. Comparatively speaking, it may be said that Chile, as regards socially circulating cultural depth – of ethnic or demographic origin – has a huge deficit. (2007: 22)

In the Chilean historic process, the political system works and admits new groups; however, it is deficient in representativeness owing to the basic political structure of the state, as described by recent historical revisionism. Archetype of state construction stands out clearly, as follows: the transformation of civil diversity into political unity has been achieved by replacing citizen dialogue with an ‘operational consensus’ consisting in the imposition of a given (unilateral) form of state with the aid of the Armed Forces. The ‘illegitimate’ task of politically homogenizing society on the basis of a one-sided project has been resolved with the use of force. (Salazar and Pinto 1999: 20)

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At each constitutional occasion, ‘the constituents designated by the authorities invariably tended (1833, 1925 and 1980) to construct an essentially political (not social or economic), essentially liberal (not corporate or socialist) and essentially centralist (not federal or communal) model of state’ (G. Salazar 1994: 94).

The Twentieth-Century Predominance of Politics Social conflict emerged strongly in the early twentieth century, checkmating the ‘private’ models of integration prevailing at the time: welfare from the rich and self-organization among the excluded, with no part played by the state. The social question (Morris 1967; Romero 1997) found expression in debates on the existence, causes and consequences of social and economic fracture in Chile. Some, like politician Enrique MacIver, argued that the so-called social question was only an import by ‘Frenchified intellectuals’. Others, like labour leader Luis Emilio Recabarren, made it the key topic of the Centennial of the Republic (Morris 1967). At the same time, violent disruption broke out between the elites and less privileged sectors in the form of ‘urban uprisings’. These were thoroughly quashed with the support of the armed forces on several occasions in the first two decades of the century (Garcés 1992). Although political instability continued more or less until 1938, the state also responded to social conflicts with regulatory action, including the enactment of labour laws under military pressure (1924) and the Labour Code at the end of that decade. Popular political representations gained prominence at that time, leading and channelling popular protest and making their way into the political system (the Communist Party in 1924; the Socialist Party in 1933). The process stabilized in 1938 under the Frente Popular administration and continued until 1973.1 An institutionalized form of labour relations and a pluralist political system, together with relatively high inclusion, characterized the links between society and the state for several decades. For that reason the political system became known as the ‘spinal column’ that supported social actors and the state for the forty years up to 1973 (Garretón 2000). Electoral participation was continuously expanded in the framework of political pluralism, and women gained the right to vote in 1949. Civil society developed along the same lines, oscillating between its autonomous constitution and urban and rural unionism, followed later by organizations of pobladores and their ongoing link to the political system that channelled their demands towards the state. This also expanded the response capacity of the state itself, which successively established structures to re-

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spond to problems arising in society. The history of institutionalizing social policies in Chile starts with education as of the 1920s, continuing with health care in the 1950s and housing and agrarian reform in the 1960s (Arellano 1985). Social movements did not arise autonomously, as they were partly framed in legality. They addressed their demands to the state and were carried out by political parties. Meanwhile, popular organization was strong on several important points and in fact expanded the agenda of the political system. Even so, the political system’s ongoing expansion failed to avoid major social exclusions such as the peasants and the masses of rural migrants that made cities grow from the 1950s on. In the early 1960s, developmental economist Aníbal Pinto made the initial diagnosis of the Chilean economy and state’s inability to meet the growing demands made by sectors excluded from the so-called ‘compromise’ state (Pinto 1963, 1970). The Pinto thesis emphasized that the stagnation of the Chilean economy since the mid-1950s was causing continued expansion of public space. This political and social ‘overdevelopment’, Pinto foresaw, would clash with the political model of the times, which indicated a need for a profound transformation. Facing a vision of the state as a ‘matrix of the nation’, one should highlight the great extent to which it was composed of social actors capable of political influence. Chilean social history during twentieth century was not simply a question of political co-opting or heteronomous subordination and mobilization of disorganized masses, consonant with the populist matrix (E. Valenzuela 1993). Yet despite the political impact of organized social participation and the presence of popular interests, the lead role in the twentiethcentury matrix of relations was played by the parties and the political system generally (Garretón 1985; S. Valenzuela 1995; Moulian 2006). A key distinction of the Chilean case is the importance of the institutionalized political parties’ role as mediators representing extensive social interests and successfully processing members’ demands within the state’s limits. Present and active in congress and government, the parties also energized civil society in its various expressions. Several works comparing Chile to other countries of the continent discuss this Chilean hallmark, which to this day influences civil society’s strategies and actions (A. Valenzuela 1977; Mainwaring and Scully 1995; Garretón 2006). All major parties had strong social roots, and all were in the government at some point between 1925 and 1973. Compared with neighbouring countries, Chile stands out in terms of the classist trajectory of its labour movement and the radical, highly mobilized nature of its urban popular movements in the 1960–1973 period. This trajectory came to a head with the election of President Salvador Allende (1970–1973) at the head of a left-wing coalition pursuing a transition to socialism within the existing legal framework, the so-called ‘Chilean way to

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socialism’ (Debray 1971). The Unidad Popular successfully deepened the reformist measures begun in the 1960s (agrarian reform, popular organization), nationalized the large-scale copper mining sector and began expropriation of corporations and banks to create an ‘area of social property’ or state ownership. Despite its major electoral achievements, it failed to obtain the congressional majority that would enable its advance along the legal path and faced foreign intervention by the United States. The right-wing opposition sided with the Christian Democracy (Democracia Cristiana, DC), and together they mobilized the middle classes against the government. In 1973 the government was overthrown by a violent military coup, opening a period of dictatorship that lasted nearly seventeen years. The significant degree of autonomy unattached Chilean peasant workers enjoyed in the nineteenth century has been investigated since the 1980s. The path of these independent peons or labourers, not attached to the traditional hacienda, was partially obscured by the heroic history of the labour movement that arose among workers in nitrate mines (G. Salazar 1985). Furthermore, the association between parties and social movements cannot be described as clientelism, as it was connected to political projects for transformation. As Arturo Valenzuela points out (1977), unlike in other countries of the region, such as Brazil and Colombia, clientelism was not a salient trait of this association: it was present at the local level, but less so at the national level. Twentieth-century Chilean political dynamics was also marked by successive political projects conceived and imposed in the top-down manner favoured by presidentialism and the heavy weight of technocracy. The Constitution of 1925 recovered the spirit of Portales embodied in the Constitution of 1833, strengthening presidential authority and curtailing the influence of political parties. This ended the period of parliamentarism begun in 1891 with the victory of Congress troops against President Balmaceda in the civil war. Thereafter, at least three presidents governed by virtue of their authority or personal charisma rather than party coalitions: Arturo Alessandri (1920–1925, 1932–1938), Carlos Ibáñez (1927–1931, 1952–1958) and Jorge Alessandri (1958–1964). The last two also wielded a strong anti-political discourse. Both the personal autonomy of the President and the discourse against politics and parties expanded and became extreme during the long military administration of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). Although sociological and historical discussions since 1973 have tended to emphasize the centrality of the state in the constitution of Chilean society – and, in passing, the state’s bias in political notions – one cannot overlook the presence of social actors promoting high degrees of stability and their own identity. Limiting the discussion to the political insertion of different sectors or the behaviour of parties claiming representation would evade the point

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that needs clarification: the partial and subordinate coexistence of political integration and social autonomy. Conflict tended to be channelled through pressure on the state, exerted by definite, powerful actors. The resulting relationship between society and the state therefore bore hallmarks of dependent societies (state autonomy, fused conflicts) alongside the distinctive composition of its actors (unified ruling classes, political autonomy of the classist labour movement). These traits led Chilean society to realize its great capacity for transformation. In the 1960s the model of domination fell into a crisis that altered the relationships between society and politics, culminating in the institutional breakdown of 1973. The presence of an organized civil society was also evident in cooperation between, and participative co-construction of, institutions. In numerous instances, the state agreed to support initiatives arising from civil society with funding, regulations, exceptions and benefits. This happened especially in sectors whose power enabled them to secure spaces for cooperation and then turn them – by means of legislation and political initiative of the Executive – into new institutions. For example, of the eight universities operating in 1973, only the two national universities were public: Universidad de Chile (1842) and Universidad Técnica del Estado, formerly Escuela de Artes y Oficios (1849), both inaugurated at the time of the republic’s construction (Brunner and Barrios 1987: 43). The other six were founded by private corporations of importance in national life, including the Roman Catholic Church (Universidad Católica de Santiago, U.C. de Valparaíso and U.C. del Norte) and the Masonic Lodge (Universidad de Concepción), or were private initiatives by professionals, businessmen and philanthropists (Universidad Austral in Valdivia and Universidad Federico Santa María in Valparaíso). All these universities received public funding under equal terms. Another example, the Bar Association created to oversee the legal profession, was financed, structured and listed in the national budget as a government agency precisely because of its public status (Ibáñez 2003: 300ff.). Later on, other institutions organized themselves according to the institutional model of this association. Yet another example of a state-supported civil society initiative, the Board of Development of Arica, was organized to promote development in that northern province. Managed by a business council, it received funds from a tax on goods and services sales in the area, assured by law (R. González 2006: 315ff.). Such instances belie claims of fully autonomous and unilateral action by the state. It also would be unfair to view these kinds of institutions as purely corporative or as betokening a state ‘captured’ by corporations. From today’s standpoint, they are forms of cooperation between the state and civil society, appropriate to a period of greater state protagonism and a weightier civil society, especially its middle and higher strata.

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In this context, the state’s organizational structure correlated with the growth of the civil service and the emergence of a body of ‘development professionals’ whose importance increased over the years, beyond political changes. The weight of bureaucracy has been significant at various times but has not been sufficiently studied, especially with respect to approaches emphasizing the more political sides of the process. Alternatives and competing projects are found on the political plane, but continuity is much greater at the techno-bureaucratic level. For instance, the Chilean Development Corporation (Corporación de Fomento de la Producción, CORFO) – considered the most important project of the Pedro Aguirre Cerda administration (1938–1941) and a symbol of state intervention – was largely created by conservative technicians trained in the economic cabinet of Gustavo Ross, the candidate who opposed President Aguirre Cerda. The Engineering Association (Instituto de Ingenieros) and the Industrial Development Association (Sociedad de Fomento Fabril, SOFOFA), completely unlinked from the political transformation projects of the Frente Popular, also played crucial roles (Ibáñez 2003; S. Correa 2004; Silva 2009). Such technocrats had gathered strength during the first administration of General Ibáñez (1927–1931) and would do so again in the second half of his second term (1952–1958). The Jorge Alessandri administration (1958–1964) was known as a ‘government of CEOs’ due to the major role played then by top private-sector executives who filled positions in support of the apolitical discourse emphasized by the President, as had also happened under Ibáñez. During the administration of Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–1970) the technical transformation of state management advanced further, this time in the service of a more extensive planning and social engineering model. It relied on ‘advisers’ and an increased number of government agencies, which began taking over functions previously performed by the political parties, this time inside the Executive branch.. For example, the National Advisory Board of Popular Promotion (Consejería Nacional de Promoción Popular) took over the organization (via residents’ associations and women’s centres) of people inspired by the theory of marginality proposed by the Belgian Jesuit Roger Vekemans. Agencies also took charge of the agrarian reform, among them the Institute for Agricultural and Livestock Development (Instituto de Desarrollo Agropecuario, INDAP) and the Agrarian Reform Corporation (Corporación de la Reforma Agraria, CORA) (Silva 2009). With Jesuit support, Vekemans also founded the School of Sociology at Catholic University, and the Centre for the Social Development in Latin America (Centro para el Desarrollo Social de América Latina - DESAL). Both became sites of formation and expansion of ideas for change among new generations of Roman Catholic professionals. A wave of young Christian Dem-

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ocrat professional men and women implemented social reforms through the state, creating a technical stratum of increasing political significance (Beigel 2011). Splits in the DC in 1969 and 1971 gave rise to the left-wing political groups the United Popular Action Movement (Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitaria, MAPU) and the Christian Left (Izquierda Cristiana - IC). These groups did not originate from the DC’s historical roots either ideologically or politically. Composed mostly of professional, high-income men and women of Roman Catholic origin, they added few votes to the traditional left wing; however, their high-income origins, together with their technical and professional capabilities, lent them weight. This was evident during the Unidad Popular administration, in the later reorganization of opposition to the military dictatorship and, most significantly, in the democratic administrations from 1990 on (Otano 1995; Moyano 2009). Of course, the weight of technocracy was also decisive during the military dictatorship, once army forces held the reins of power and the restrictions arising from political brokerage had been suppressed. The privileged place for technocracy was economic policy and social policies derived from it. Over time, this expanded the influence of a group of Catholic University economists whose postgraduate work was mostly at the University of Chicago in the United States. With great cohesion and political decisiveness, they took over economic and social conduct at various times during this administration, with Pinochet’s support. This influence grew into the forms of management – and, increasingly, of policy – applied later (Valdés 1995).

Chilean Civil Society: Its Political Links, Continuity of Those ‘Above’ and Discontinuity of Those ‘Below’ Although few studies have treated the development of civil society in Chile, some major traits stand out. One is the early constitution of civil organizations in the middle- and low-income sectors, from the foundation of the Society of Equality in 1850 and the Typesetters’ Union in 1853 to a broad set of organizations originating in mining and urban low-income sectors from the 1880s on. The first to appear were organizations for cooperation and self-help known as ‘mutual aid societies’, ‘through which they organized a social healthcare system and a pension fund according to their means, while they founded their own schools, their theatres, dance and culture halls and their own press. A micro-social and popular world, … supplied a referent for constructing an identity’ (Illanes 1993: 140). Such organizations tackled problems experienced by the general public in the absence of any state social policy (Illanes 1990). In turn, the upper classes channelled monetary contri-

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butions via the Roman Catholic Church to finance charitable institutions (orphanages, lazarettos, hospitals), which, following a paternalist pattern, met the more urgent needs of the underprivileged. In the course of the nineteenth century, therefore, with a state marked by ultra-liberalism and absent from the social sphere, two major organizational currents developed: one among the popular sectors, based on solidarity; and one for assistance, intended for the poor and managed by the Roman Catholic Church with money from the affluent sectors (Romero 1984, 1997; Grez 1997; Serrano 2008). In the field of ideas, traditional notions based on Roman Catholicism, Hispanicism and defence of the agrarian rule of the hacienda, contended with secular, liberal ideas that tended to democracy during the entire period. In the field of economics, the free market dominated the second half of the nineteenth century, whereas in politics, liberal and progressive ideas were usually defeated. They did gain a footing, however, in educational and cultural institutions such as Universidad de Chile and Instituto Nacional (founded in 1813), and in the voices of such major reformers as Manuel de Salas and Valentín Letelier, among others (Subercaseaux 1997). Illegal organizations in support of workers’ rights, such as unions, emerged later, alongside several joint associations combining cultural objectives with community development and economic rights. The first centralized workers’ organization, the Chilean Workers’ Federation (Federación de Trabajadores de Chile, FOCH), was founded with anarchist and socialist support. Organizations of middle-income sectors emerged in the 1920s, many of them involving civil servants such as teachers. Another significant Chilean trait is the structure and continuity of the economic elites, who have had major organizations since the mid-nineteenth century. The oldest is Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura (founded in 1838), which represents the interests of large-scale agricultural landowners. The Chamber of Commerce (Cámara de Comercio) was founded in 1858, followed by the SOFOFA ) and the Chilean Mining Association (Sociedad Nacional de Minería) in 1883. These organizations have traditionally acted as representatives of their sectors and been politically linked to right-wing parties and opposed to social reform projects. They make up the mainstream economic elite (Campero 1991; Montero 1997; G. Arriagada 2004; S. Correa 2004). They actively opposed the government during the Unidad Popular administration and openly supported the military uprising in 1973. Throughout the twentieth century, the business class played a significant political role associated with state intervention in social and economic affairs. Institutions for national production and monetary policy, financial and credit agencies, and corporations created by the state were directly or indirectly influenced by the business leaders who sat on their boards of directors and helped shape the political decisions affecting them. ‘From the first, legislation provided that these … elite business associations should be represented on

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the boards of government agencies responsible for economic regulations’ (S. Correa 2004: 34). Historian Adolfo Ibáñez (2003) underlines the importance of corporatist pressures, particularly from the entrepreneurial sector, on the regulatory agencies and promoters of sectoral development including mining, industry and others. In this context, and in the face of increasing political challenges, the various business trends came together in 1935 and founded the Confederation of Production and Trade (Confederación de la Producción y el Comercio), which to this day unites the organizations already named plus the Chamber of Construction and the Banking Association. Another key Chilean peculiarity is the continuing role of the daily paper El Mercurio in ideology, organization and communication. Founded in Valparaíso in 1827 and in Santiago in 1901, it is still heavily influential with respect to entrepreneurial ideas and acts as the Antonio Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectual’ of big business in the field of politics. This image of stability, continuity and unity in high civil society contrasts with the previous description of popular sectors. Workers organized slowly, confronting many instances of repression, and often forced to retreat or fragment. The elites, however, including traditional social organizations as the gentlemen’s Union Club, founded in 1864, have passed unscathed through major transformations of the country and of the economic elite itself. All the while, right-wing associations and political parties were directed by elite groups closely interrelated through family, friendship and shared ideas (S. Correa 2004). The Roman Catholic Church, a widespread institution throughout the national territory, has been one of Chile’s greatest social actors. Since the Spanish settlement period, it has sponsored most welfare initiatives in fields like health care, education, elder care and so on. Early in the twentieth century, the Roman Catholic Church began promoting urban unionism while opposing movements of Socialist origin. Present throughout the rural area, the Church’s influence was crucial, at first to maintaining the traditional order, and then to the emergence of movements for change in the 1950s and in the course of agrarian reform in the 1960s (Landsberger and Canitrot 1967; Serrano 2008). The Roman Catholic Church has also wielded very strong influence in educational institutions at the primary, secondary and higher levels (Catholic Universities now operate in Santiago, Antofagasta, Coquimbo, Valparaíso, Talca, Concepción and Temuco). As a result, its presence in civil society is felt in the formal institutional field as well as in various kinds of organizations and movements. Its activities range across the entire social spectrum, from the education of economic and political elites (Jesuit schools for boys, convent schools for upper-class girls and conservative movements such as Opus Dei) to rural schools for the children of peasants and boys’ and girls’ orphanages.

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The main channel of Roman Catholic influence has been the Conservative Party. In the 1920s, however, a reformist Social Christian trend emerged, first in the form of apostolic movements and later in the Falange Nacional, an outcrop of the Conservative Party backed by a major portion of the clergy. In 1957 it gave rise to the most important party in the past fifty years in Chile: Christian Democracy (Smith 1982; S. Valenzuela 1995). The DC dominated the vote from the mid-1960s to 2004, when it was replaced by the Independent Democrat Union Party (Unión Demócrata Independiente - UDI). UDI also originated among the Roman Catholic elites, but it had Conservative leanings and was backed by Opus Dei. Neighbourhood organization of poor urban sectors began in the late 1950s (primarily through committees of the homeless) together with the cooperative movement, increasing the presence of popular sectors in national life. These organizations responded to various phenomena: migration from the country to the towns, increasing social mobilizations regarding wages and services, state-originated reforms (particularly as of 1964), the activities of centre and left-wing political parties, and the strong influence of the Roman Catholic Church. The first countryside strikes took place upon the founding of the General Workers’ Union (Central Única de Trabajadores, CUT) in 1953, triggering cyclical mobilization processes throughout the 1960s and early 1970s in an environment of maximal politicization (Espinoza 1986; Pizarro 1986; Arrate and Rojas 2003). During the Frei Montalva administration from 1964 to 1970, the state began to organize and mobilize popular sectors, aiming at their political integration. The Law on Peasant Unions and the Law on Agrarian Reform were enacted in 1966. The Law on Residents’ Associations and Community Organizations, enacted in 1968, legalized and expanded a number of territorial organizations (residents’ associations and committees) and functional bodies (mothers’ centres, parent-teacher associations, youth centres, cultural centres and sports clubs). Residents’ associations and mothers’ centres operated for five years before they were taken over by the military dictatorship (Garcés 2002). Other segments of society, including the indigenous population, organized based on their own communities and established purely clientelist relations with politics. The change of influence was manifested in local or provincial terms, and as soon as the indigenous leaders engaged in politics they were co-opted by the parties, though the latter failed to see them as an autonomous social movement. For this reason, the Mapuche movement was always fragmented according to the political leanings of its leaders. Only in the late 1960s did mobilizations aim to establish certain forms of people power outside (and against) political institutions, fostered by political movements outside the system (Bengoa 1987, 1999a; Foerster and Vergara 2000).

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As of the early twentieth century, political phenomena in Chile strongly influenced Chilean civil society, mostly because political space expanded until it became a space for negotiation and resolution of civil society’s main interests. Early on, the Democrat Party (founded in 1887) had had great influence among craftsmen and new middle-income sectors, while the Communist Party and the anarchists were strong among the unions. Until 1925, though, politics was handled mostly by elite groups divided between conservatives and liberals. A shift began in 1920, when the liberal Arturo Alessandri won the presidency and extended the field to include middle-income and popular sectors. Starting in 1925, the relationship between politics and civil organizations became close, and a sort of conveyor-belt effect arose, whereby social groups mobilized and exerted pressure by making demands of the political system. The latter, through the parties and Congress, opened and regulated spaces within the state. Until the military coup in 1973 and the subsequent repression, which interrupted the entire process (Angell 1974), the state was increasingly active in the economic and social field. It was supported by new labour legislation and representation of the urban social sector in Congress. This trend swelled after electoral reform prevented right-wing leaders from controlling the rural vote. All of this helped to open institutional spaces, and a great many popular claims were partially met (Portales, 2005). Political influence on civil society intensified as the political space grew until it became an arena for negotiation and resolution of conflicts among major social interests, having travelled from the elitism of the early century to massive electoral participation in the 1960s. Because this inclusion was also supported by increasingly expanded social policies, the autonomy of popular organizations was affected by the predominance of claims on the state from all sides, popular and dominant alike. The state responded by expanding inorganically but constantly, until 1973. Some historical interpretations hold that the predominance of political action affecting the state led to the social movement’s total subordination to control by the ‘political class’: After 1932, the popular movement submitted no alternative project for state construction. Rather, owing to pressure or otherwise, it submitted to the Constitution and the Labour Code. It even cooperated in clientelistic fashion until 1946. Later, however, it actively entered the competitive market for ‘petitions’ (where fair and not so fair demands competed) … the state in 1925 was not an instrument for domination by the entrepreneurs nor the proletariat nor the middle classes but, in fact, by the civil political class … excluding and subordinating all social movements (including that of the military). That is to say: all branches of civil society. The exchange of ‘participation’ for ‘petition’ was practiced to the end. (Salazar and Pinto 1999: 64–65)

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Political and Social Recomposition under the Reforms of the Military Regime The installation of a long-standing military government led by the same person for more than sixteen years led to considerable restructuring of Chilean civil society and its links with politics and the state. The general framework attempted to refound the economic and political system from above while exercising heavy political and military repression of any expression of discontent or opposition. The regime’s historical diagnosis of the forces that had taken over the state led to measures to deactivate options for change and their ability to affect state structures. In social matters, the ‘privatization’ of citizens kept them from political participation as well as from their own forms of participation (Garretón 2000; Cristi and Ruiz Tagle 2006). In the economic sphere, two years after seizing power the regime imposed a model open to the foreign sector, privatization and economic deregulation. It caused significant concentration of property and income, amendments to labour laws, privatization of the health-care and social security systems, and transformations in the social structure, among other outcomes. Two periods of severe economic adjustment in 1975–1976 and 1982–1983 resulted in the impoverishment of large sectors of the population, deterioration of living standards and unresolved basic needs owing to the diminished social action of the state. Simultaneously, social differentiation increased owing to the exclusion of large sectors of production, due to large rates of unemployment and cuts in state supports, growth of a reduced but highly technified tertiary sector (linked to finance and foreign trade), increased informal employment, reduced civil service employment, transformation in the agricultural sector, and so on. Broadly speaking, in the 1980s an extensive sector was ‘excluded’ from all benefits of the system’s operation (open unemployment reached 30 per cent), in contrast to another, ‘integrated’ sector, in privileged or deteriorated form, that enjoyed, for instance, permanence in stable jobs with market-level salaries. In short, heterogeneity increased among and within social sectors (Ffrench-Davis 2004). The high rate of unemployment and consequent fear of job loss virtually froze independent worker activity. Meanwhile, the jobless engaged in numerous strategies for survival that came to play a major role in their actions. Spaces for participation and linking social identities were closed at this time. Legal reforms and repression atomized popular social organizations, and social conflict was privatized through reforms privatizing health care, social security, education and labour laws – or simply through direct or indirect government control (of residents’ associations, mothers’ centres, student centres and federations, parents’ centres, city councils, etc.). Political space remained closed to all organized activity, and relations forged previously be-

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tween society and state were broken up. From the outset the regime prohibited, persecuted and repressed the traditional political parties, especially those of the left wing. The right-wing parties self-dissolved, entrusting their representative role to the military and the technocrats linked to large-scale business, who took over public posts. The regime also abolished directly elected positions of representative democracy and incinerated the voter registers (I. Díaz n.d.). The economic and political role of the state was reformulated: it abandoned its traditional functions in favour of an eminently repressive role supporting an anti-interventionist economic policy that did not recognize the social groups involved as interlocutors. Mass communication excluded nonofficial groups and suffered heavy control, as did universities (Brunner and Barrios 1987: 40ff.). These measures were intended to suppress the mediatory role that political parties, large-scale organizations, leaders, communicators and intellectuals had played in the democratic system. These actors subsisted despite repression, but their forty-year tradition as intermediaries between social groups and the state had ended. The Labour Code enacted in 1978 restructured the union movement, excluding self-managed representative organizations and aiming to depoliticize unionism (Drake 2003). Policies affecting the cooperative movement were also pursued until it virtually disappeared, at least in the urban environment. In 1979 a law was passed to divide indigenous communities by allocating their land individually and introducing the possibility of buying and selling the community-owned lands of the southern indigenes, the Mapuche. Residents’ associations, which grouped urban and rural dwellers, were controlled, their leaders designated by mayors and governors as well as the government (Oxhorn 1995). In the 1980s, the military regime was able to institutionalize its political design and deepen its economic and social reforms. The Constitution Pinochet got approved in 1980 – still in force today – enabled him to govern as President of the Republic for eight years and summon a successoral plebiscite in 1988 to decide on the continuation of the regime (Huneeus, 2000). The profound economic and social transformation strategy initiated in 1981 formed the basis of the institutions that direct life in Chile to this day, privatizing the pension system, transferring primary and secondary schools and primary health care institutions to municipalities, and creating systems of private health-care institutions and subsidized private education (state-funded but privately operated), among other reforms. In the course of this decade, many public concerns were privatized; the exceptions were copper mines, ports and railways (Cavallo et al.1997; Moulian 1997; Ffrench-Davis 2004). The military regime organized itself internally in a particular way: even though the military junta was composed of the chiefs of the four branches

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(Army, Navy, Air Force and Carabineros) and Pinochet was head of both the army and the government, only a few army men served as ministers or heads of agencies. High-ranking officers were more likely to be intendentes or mayors, or delegate rectors at universities – that is, wherever it was necessary ‘to ensure order’. Very soon after the military coup, groups of technocrats joined the public system and remained for a long time in positions of power, principally in economic and social affairs. Most noteworthy was the group of economists nicknamed the Chicago Boys, most of whom were products of Catholic University and held graduate degrees from the University of Chicago under a mutual cooperation agreement signed in 1957 (Rosende 2007). This group displayed high ideological cohesion and enjoyed great autonomy throughout most of the military government. The Chicago Boys were responsible for the shock economic policy in 1975, the Labour Plan of 1978, the modernizing reforms of the early 1980s and – after an interregnum to handle the crisis after 1982 – the economic reactivation headed by Minister of Finance Hernán Büchi. They radically implemented the privatizing ideas of Milton Friedman (based on Friedrich Hayek), which had been elaborated in Chile since the late 1960s. The programme applied in 1975 had already been compiled in the volume known as El Ladrillo (Centro de Estudios Públicos 1992) and submitted to Pinochet, who adopted it although it was neither his view nor that of the military (Cavallo et al. 1997).2 A group of young professionals with traditional religious views were recruited to handle social issues. Led by Miguel Kast, they were responsible for adapting social policy to the requirements of the economic model (Angell 1999). Some new civilian members of the Guild Movement (Movimiento Gremial) inside Santiago’s Catholic University completed the team. These traditional young Roman Catholics, students of law professor Jaime Guzmán, filled offices as mayors and secretaries of youth movements, trade associations and other agencies for recruiting new political supporters. From those agencies would arise the future technical teams of the right wing, as well as the leaders of UDI, the party responsible for spreading Pinochet’s political legacy and economic model (Silva 1991; J. Valdés 1995; V. Montecinos 1998). The above civilian groups owed their considerable autonomy thanks to the Pinochet’s unbending support, the lack of political opposition and democratic exchange, and their own high level of cultural capital, internal cohesion and sense of mission. This enabled the government to maintain a coherent line for a long period and secure it beyond the sectoral and trade pressure on it, especially from business sectors. The military coup of 1973 destroyed not only democracy but also the model of the state and its relationship to political parties and social actors. The state separated from the nation and reinforced its repressive role towards

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the popular sectors and their parties |and trade unions using terror and general social repression of all forms of organization and expression of civil society. A most significant change for social dynamics was the banishment and repression of all democratic political parties. This spurred the self-dissolution of the National Party (Partido Nacional, PN) and the National Front ‘Patria y Libertad’, major referents of the right wing that supported the coup. In fact, not only was party politics suppressed, but the Congress was closed as well, concentrating political and institutional power in the hands of the military government. The Unidad Popular was dissolved and persecuted from the first and had to reorganize from exile and underground. Meanwhile, the DC, which had initially supported the military regime, was declared to be in ‘recess’, although it retained the means to reproduce some of its activities (think tanks, the Roman Catholic Church, certain mass media). In 1980 Pinochet enacted Chile’s new Constitution, which set up a process for transition to a form of protected democracy, some of whose traits endure to this day: presidentialist regime, semiautonomous statusfor the armed forces, parties with scant political and economic powers in the Congress, and nondemocratic institutions with major powers, such as the Central Bank and the Constitutional Court. Intermediate or grass-roots leaders of left-wing parties who remained in Chile or returned from exile during the military regime took refuge in spaces organized by the Roman Catholic Church, which took a stance in defence of human rights and protection of victims of the regime. This opened a new relationship between the Church and the left wing, particularly through their militants, who had prior links with the Church and came mainly from parties that had branched out from the DC in the previous period. Also taking part in this alternative space were minority fractions of the DC that had opposed the coup from the beginning, unlike their official institutional leadership. Over time and outside the Church, some left-wing technical cadres with membership inside the country and, of course, the DC, which still owned press media and private institutes, joined forces in think tanks and among the ranks of NGOs organized in Chile from the 1980s on (Brunner and Barrios 1987; Taller de Cooperación al Desarrollo 1990; Puryear 1991). In 1983, sectors harmed by the dictatorship began to mobilize in the form of national protests. Their immediate cause was an economic crisis arising from the economic model’s dependence on external variables. Corporations went bankrupt, the government took over the banks, unemployment increased and stable exchange rate was ended. A regime that had described itself as ‘refounder’ of the economy and of society became one that ‘managed the crisis’ (Garretón 1985). In the next three and a half years, the emerging civil society mobilized repeatedly in direct conflict with the military government. Mobilization from 1983 to 1986 showed both the dictatorship’s

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effects on society and Chilean civil society’s capabilities, particularly in its ‘lower fraction.’ The initial call of the Copper Workers’ Federation, the most powerful core of national unionism (state-run corporations), was met with the mobilization of manifold urban masses: pobladores, students and, intermittently, middle-class sectors (Baño 1985; Delamaza y Garcés 1985; Delamaza 1999). Although the protests were organized through a network of groups built up patiently over ten years by political activists, defenders of human rights, pastoral agents of the churches and women joining the struggle for subsistence, in practice they were a mass mobilization of the ‘unorganized’. Arising after a decade of propaganda against politics and democratic proposals, these directly political national protests opposed the regime under the simple motto ‘Democracy now!’ They were periodical, discontinuous demonstrations, mostly peaceful though subject to violent encounters with the police and occasional acts of violence, either massive (particularly those involving young people) or conducted by armed groups. Various political strategies were attempted to conduct these protest and manifestations without clear success.These activities were more a reencounter between the social and the political in the framework of repressive action than a display of a calculated political strategy (Baño 1985; Delamaza and Garcés 1985). A major work on this period is Cathy Schneider’s (1990) doctoral thesis at Cornell on people protests. The Schneider thesis suggests that the intensiveness and combativeness of the protests were directly related to the presence in the poblaciones of militant groups, particularly those of the Communist Party. She does not attach much significance to the links between political militancy and the network of organizations rooted in the Church, nor does she discuss the emergence of the militants themselves from the previous social organization. This period of mobilizations had two major consequences: a space opened for the appearance of political actors seeking to take charge of the requirements for change and represent them to the state, despite the absence of political space in which to do so; and the protests fostered the reconstitution of civil society, publicly and directly expressed in the struggle against the regime. These two orientations, implicit in the protests, did not easily combine and in fact had different objectives. Thus, while one side tried to build up a political space for negotiating the transition, the other reinforced the organization of social sectors that were politically weak, either because their action for transformation tended to be ephemeral or because they responded to private interests with no direct translation into the political plane. The national protests were socially and politically effective only insofar as they induced a clear involvement and co-evolution between those poles under tension, because civil society lacked sufficient capacity for self-organization and self-summons under existing conditions, and politics could not become actually transform-

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ing without civil mobilization behind it (Delamaza and Garcés 1985). The mobilization of protestors and supporters of a democratic dismantling of the regime declined as of late 1986, for it had failed to achieve the end of the military regime. Major political sectors abandoned the strategy, fearful of the magnitude of popular mobilization and the difficulty of controlling it. The discovery that the Communist Party had brought weapons into the country to support a policy of armed insurrection also influenced the deactivation of the protests (Cavallo et al. 1997; Otano 1995). Another massive social mobilization, this one in mid-1988, focused on participation in a plebiscite – ordered by Pinochet and provided for in the Constitution of 1980 – to decide on continuation of the regime. The unity of the opposition (excepting the Communist Party), together with the support of the masses, defeated Pinochet and opened the way for democratic elections to be held in December 1989. Bearing in mind the previous traditional link between civil society and politics, the great importance of the political component of civil society’s mobilization against the regime in the mid-1980s should not come as a surprise (Schneider 1990; Oxhorn 1995; Taylor 1996). As Lucy Taylor put it: ‘This was a form of civil society in which the community appeared to unite a broad political position, in which a global analysis of the political context and social requirements dominated and where the link between reality, practicalities and political thinking was strong’ (1996: 779). These elements of continuity nonetheless concealed profound transformations suffered by both poles of the relationship during the military period. The clearest example, in terms of mobilization, is the movement of urban pobladores, which Taylor describes as ‘the most influential of these movements’ (ibid.). This strength, however, as Taylor herself recognizes, proved more apparent than real and failed to enable the movement to occupy the political space its own mobilization had helped create. This was particularly evident when the emerging rules of the political game restricted the movement to institutional space reserved exclusively for renascent political parties and negotiated to make room for the sectors supporting Pinochet. Reconstruction of civil society after 1973 had to be conducted outside the law and under forceful repression. Therefore it developed in small spaces for organization. Its public expression was weak and tended to reunite certain sectors of citizens while the great majority remained disjointed and had no voice of their own for at least ten years. The Roman Catholic Church and other Christian churches took up the defence of human rights and protected the sectors involved. Groups of relatives of the victims of oppression, which exist to this day, arose in the mid-1970s. Artistic shows and community work in popular neighbourhoods were occasions for meetings between political actors prevented from joining the state and new social leaders seeking solutions to their problems. The new spaces opened for sociability were always

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harassed or prohibited by the government, so they turned towards resistance to power in the name of cultural identity, the project for recovery of democracy and the experience of solidarity. Another key element was international cooperation with various countries to support the struggle for democracy in Chile. This allowed development of a set of NGOs, which were novel organizations at the time. Initially they were linked to the Church and human rights, but during the 1980s they came to be self-managed and cover a broad spectrum of social development. Meanwhile, popular economic organizations arose to take on issues of survival and unemployment. In the early 1990s they numbered over three thousand; thereafter they rapidly declined. Independent academic centres also flourished, as did new trade unions (allowed since 1978). Women participated widely in various organizations and groups: soup kitchens, community kitchens, workshops, health groups, Christian communities, committees for the homeless, feminist groups and so on. In addition, many environmental groups emerged, together with Indian cultural organizations and youth and cultural groups, among others (Taller de Cooperación al Desarrollo 1990; Puryear 1991; Loveman 1994; Delamaza 1999). Many of these organizations struggled actively against the dictatorship, though in widely different ways. Very often their leaders had political ties, whereas the constituent base moved in connection with specific interests or aims of social reorganization or cultural affirmation. The key point, however, was that the movement re-created these groups’ own repressed and fragmented society while formulating new political proposals to occupy the public space under conditions of negotiated transition. The Civilian Assembly (Asamblea de la Civilidad), organized in 1986, reflected sociopolitical agreement among the major social representations of the time: professional associations, unions and student and human rights groups (Loveman 1994; Otano 1995). Civil society organized under the military regime had inherited some characteristics of previous association with political parties. Though such parties, as organic structures, carried much less weight than in the past and had no institutional space for action, they still operated as referents and guidance for civil society. At the time, civil society was organized mainly against the regime and thus was political in nature, so activism and political discussion, together with the preparation of alternative projects and proposals, were components of civil society’s activity (Taylor 1996: 779). The over-politicization of the civil society organized in the second half of the 1980s partly concealed the internal transformation that Chilean society was undergoing. On the one hand, the large-scale private capital began to project itself beyond the military regime with increasing dominance, limiting the possibilities of purely political reform. On the other hand, social sectors whose bridges to Chilean society had been destroyed were less linked to the state, less organized and

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extremely fragmented. These sectors were therefore eager to participate in the new scenario, created for them as of 1987, of economic reactivation, increased employment and political acceptance of the constitutional framework imposed by Pinochet.

A Stable, Low-intensity Political Transition Following the restoration of democracy in 1990, the situation of civil society again changed in response to the political conditions of the transition and the profound socioeconomic transformations that had begun in the 1980s and gathered speed in the 1990s. During this period, civil society began to free itself partly from the state, diversifying internally and deepening the fragmentation within it that had originated in the socioeconomic sphere. The distinctive, original trait of the Chilean transition was that it took place within the framework previously established by the dictatorship, which allowed the forces that had supported it to preserve much of their influence and power in the economic, political and cultural spheres. In this context, the main transformation was the restoration of democratic institutional processes – though with limitations. Another change was the admission of a new political elite to manage government and dynamize public policies, especially in the social area. For these reasons the new political system – an incomplete democracy – lost its ability to interpret and channel the demands of civil society, and the break-off from the sociopolitical matrix that had prevailed in the past was consolidated. The political process had become radicalized from 1983 on with the cycle of mass protests. Notwithstanding, the opening to democracy did not take the form of an institutional break, nor did it lead to any significant economic reform. On the contrary, the political strategy was to defeat Pinochet in a plebiscite ordered by him, and then negotiate with his representatives. As the Constitution provided institutional safeguards for the order established under the military regime, proposals for change were restricted. The economic strategy continued to be based on opening to the foreign sector and the hegemony of large-scale capital. The expectation that a major sector of the opposition would achieve ample popular participation failed to materialize after 1990. Protagonism was restricted to the political and economic elites who negotiated the terms of the transition with the participation of the armed forces. The opposing social movement was deactivated and was not replaced by new forms of participation. The novel situation arising from the plebiscite of 1988, where the opposition defeated Pinochet under the terms of the transition he had designed himself, prevented him from continuing to head the government but did not

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affect the validity of his constitutional and legal framework. Neither did the adverse result accelerate the timing of the transition, whereby the outgoing administration had a year and a half in which to enact several laws, design the political space for elections, consolidate privatization of enterprises and so forth (Otano 1995; Boeninger 1997). Thus, in the course of transition in Chile, a civil society that had shown fairly high degrees of mobilization in the second half of the military period paradoxically underwent a major deactivation, producing disappointment and disaffection with democratic politics. Progressive depoliticization has also been observed in this civil society, traditionally associated with political actors (Posner 2003; Silva 2004; Tedesco 2004). The relative force of civil society during the military regime may have been overestimated in terms of its autonomy and its degree of internal coherence, but the fact remains that it changed substantially as the political scenario changed. The end of the dictatorship created a need to simultaneously reconstruct institutional democracy and the ties between the state and civil society on new bases after the prolonged transformation. The first task was only partly addressed and the second was postponed for several reasons, including the political negotiations that replaced institutional breakdown, and the economic transformation that fostered economic growth in the late 1980s. There being no institutional rupture, the legal framework after the military regime was consonant with the constitutional order of 1980 but was limited by military pressure. This involved granting the political bloc behind the military regime a kind of ‘veto power’ on state actions (Moulian 1997). During the first three concertacionista administrations, this veto power was wielded on the institutional political plane via right-wing political parties as well as outside such a plane, through what Andrés Allamand, leader of the Liberal right wing, described as the factic powers, that is, the summit of largescale business, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and the major daily El Mercurio. The reforms based on what were known as enclaves autoritarios (authoritarian enclaves) were not included in governmental plans. These authoritarian enclaves’ powers extended over the offices of designated (not elected) senators; a National Security Council entitled to participation of the armed forces and empowered to self-summon; the Commanders-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, or in practical terms, their removability; the faculties and composition of the Constitutional Court, and so on. As a result, certain clearly undemocratic provisions remained in effect for the next fifteen years, affecting the composition of Congress and the attributes of the President. The situation lasted until March 2006, when the first fully elected legislature took office and the Executive recovered the power to dismiss the chiefs of the armed forces.

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Notwithstanding the reforms agreed with the right-wing opposition, other, lingering provisions severely restrict the possibility of transforming the Constitution. The most important are the high percentage of votes required for constitutional change and the binominal electoral formula, which has enabled the opposition to win practically half the seats in Congress despite garnering only between 33 and 40 per cent of the votes. Binominalism has further transformed the Chilean political picture by structuring a political system where two coalitions fill all the elected offices and have a say in various other appointments: judges, ambassadors, directors of National Television (Televisión Nacional), members of the National Security Council, and so on, restricting the expression of other groups. In 2007, desertions from the Concertación at last seemed to foretell changes in the party system, but change may prove difficult because binominalism privileges electorally large coalitions (Huneeus 2008; Mardones 2008). Not only has the Chilean political order suffered legal constraints, but during the entire 1990s it also had to withstand military pressure, since Pinochet remained Commander-in-Chief of the Army. This situation changed abruptly with the addition of an external element unconnected with the transition: the arrest and prosecution of Pinochet in London in October 1998. The government and the right-wing opposition both actively sought his release and return to Chile, which was attained a year and a half later. Although Pinochet won judicial impunity by declaring himself mentally incapacitated, he had to give up his status as senator and withdraw from public life. He died in December 2006. Pinochet’s arrest in London brought implicit aspects of the Chilean political process to light. International political proceedings to bring him back to Chile were conducted in the name of the transition pact, ensuring governance and, implicitly, immunity for the general. Unlike cases like Spain, the political forces in Chile never arrived at any form of public and formal agreement. Nor was the transition expressed in an agreement to amend the constitution, as was the case in Brazil. The negotiation between the political leadership of the winning coalition in the plebiscite of 1988 and the Armed Forces, still in power, led to a consensual plebiscite in 1989, which introduced a few minor amendments but retained Pinochet’s constitutional architecture. The political stability of the transition, however, relied on unwritten agreements and diverse limitations ensured by institutional restrictions and those of the electoral system. Military pressure and the rules of the political system have not been the only advantages enjoyed by the right-wing opposition. Its veto power is also bolstered by the control it retains over the mass media, particularly the printed press and television, where its presence is strong. Practically, the daily

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press operates in a duopoly and all the media created by the opposition of the 1980s have disappeared (two daily papers, several weekly journals, audiovisual reporting media and others). Two economic groups control over 90 per cent of the circulation of dailies and journals in Chile: the media consortium Consorcio Periodístico Sociedad Anónima (COPESA), owned by businessmen linked to UDI; and the Edwards Group, which controls the El Mercurio chain and whose owners were organizers of the military coup and strong supporters of its regime. They have bought up numerous regional papers. Radio stations are concentrated in the hands of a few business groups, though they maintain greater pluralism. In television, only the position of Televisión Nacional has changed. Its board of directors currently reflects the composition of the transition’s dominant political forces. Its management is no different from that of a commercial channel, as it must be self-financing (Sunkel and Geoffroy 2001). The other open television channels belong to large business groups, including the Luksic Group, the late conservative entrepreneur Ricardo Claro, and businessman and President of the Republic Sebastián Piñera (2010–2014). (Piñera sold his television channel to the Linzor Capital investment group shortly after taking office). The political parties resurfaced during the transition, but institutional and political conditions no longer allowed them to fill the intermediary role they had traditionally played in Chile in the forty years before the coup (Fuentes 1999; Siavelis 1999). The parties were not the only losers in the new political space: universities, unions, mass media and even the Church were unable to recover the roles they had held before. Following the reactivation begun in 1985, the transition took place in an economic context of sustained growth. This led the economic policymakers of the democratic administrations to maintain the economic model of the military regime, leaving Chile open to the foreign sector and the predominance of large-scale financial and multinational capital. The democratic administrations nonetheless reactivated social policy to a considerable extent. This ‘well-tempered Neoliberalism’ consisted in an economy based on neoliberalism but showed results of sustained growth and advanced major social policy measures (Delamaza 1995). Furthermore, at the beginning of the transition to democracy in 1989, when the Socialist camp came to an end, capitalist globalization intensified. At the same time, a crisis struck the left-wing political options, which also supported continuity of transition to democracy in Chile. The situation described above sets Chile apart from other countries that have applied similar reforms. In Chile, the reform package was implemented more radically and consistently, encountering little resistance under military domination. The new democracy left the bases of the economic regime and associated social relations untouched. Meanwhile, improved income levels

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enabled individuals to participate massively in the new regime by the late 1990s, and social policy somewhat moderated the harsher traits of the neoliberal model. The transition resulted from convergence between civil society and political actors that destroyed the dictatorial governance and legitimized the change. However, the process itself led to the predominance of governance being increasingly understood as stability, which Fernando de la Cuadra (2003) called hyper-governance. Ensuring stability became the governing alliance’s overriding objective in its dialogue with the factic powers (economic, military and communicational) and the institutional power structure inherited from the previous regime. Thus the huge mobilization towards a social reencounter, which had begun in pursuit of a specifically political aim – recovery of democracy – ended, as journalist Rafael Otano graphically put it, ‘in a coitus interruptus, in the beginning of a civil absence’ (1995: 69). Why did a previously mobilized civil society put up so little resistance to this outcome? Tony Salman, who studied the processes in Chile under Pinochet and in Sandinistan Nicaragua, wondered why popular organizations ‘of a new kind’ that led the mobilization proved incapable of effectively opposing the reduction of the political process to its institutional dimension. According to Salman, the changes in popular Chilean political culture in the 1980s were expressed more in the sociocultural than in the socioeconomic field, owing to the ‘slowness or the temporary nature of the changes in which the subjects participate’ (1998: 101). The Chilean resistance movement and the Nicaraguan revolutionary change do not appear comparable in terms of the subjects’ potential for change. In addition, the consideration of cultural elements cannot omit discussion of the objective weakness of the subjects – in this case the pobladores or slum dwellers – at the time of the Chilean transition. Anthropologist Julia Paley, who researched health groups in southern Santiago in the early 1990s, blames intellectuals who encouraged the struggles in the 1980s but then ‘abandoned’ the pobladores and associated mainly with the administration. Indeed, she opens a chapter devoted to the new forms of legitimizing knowledge by reporting a conversation with a Chilean sociologist who followed that trajectory (2001: 182 ff.). The dynamics of civil society at this time are not fully understandable without an examination of the bases of redemocratization’s political legitimacy. Historically, the sources of legitimacy for political action in Chile were mainly either democratic-institutional or national-popular. The democratic-institutional basis was the myth of Chilean democracy before 1973, with its own two sources: the Estado en forma organized by Diego Portales in 1833, and the institutional continuity of democracy. Its democratic aspect was reflected in the progressive expansion of state space after 1925, expressed mainly in

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the strength and major representative presence of the political parties – what historian Gabriel Salazar called ‘the state of the civil political class’ (Salazar 1994). Salazar held that the pivotal issue was legitimacy of procedure rather than political actors’ substantive adherence to democratic values. Nevertheless, for forty years a subtle balance endured between representation of a wide range of corporate interests and adherence to a political system that encompassed the more highly organized actors while simultaneously justifying the exclusion of the less well organized. This political system concealed precisely these major exclusions as well as a tendency to question the political parties and adhere to a caudillo-type presidentialism, which itself had been a major presence since the 1950s. Reconstruction of the party system following the protests of 1983 was fully in line with the democratic-institutional tradition in that it prioritized formation of a political system. In other words, ‘here the identification between democracy and political system reaches its maximum’ (E. Valenzuela 1993: 119). This reconstruction, however, was less effective than that in the previous stage, owing to the effects of economic restructuring, reduction of the role of the state and lesser scope of institutional reforms negotiated with the armed forces. The complex fabric of links among political institutions and society was cut short by the dictatorship and never properly reconstructed. This led to a displacement of the component here termed national-popular, which became depoliticized as it was not framed in the logic of the transition and ultimately found more expression as a primary defence of popular identity and community. The confrontation with the new political system was neither easy nor effortless. It altered both the pre-1973 tradition and the recent experience of popular mobilization. According to sociologist Eduardo Valenzuela, the process ‘had to make its way in the midst of a radically different political experience, which we shall call technically “populist”’. The specific point of populism, in Valenzuela’s terms, is precisely the attempt to engage in politics on the basis of ‘rescuing the historic potential of the excluded’ and ‘recourse to a theory of the subject defined as historic subject’ (1993: 119–120). While making a balance sheet of the period, Edgardo Boeninger, himself a political player in the transition, referred precisely to the need to change what he also called populism: The end of social mobilization, marked by the failure of the populist attempt known as the ‘Demand of Chile’, raised by the ‘Assembly of Civility’ (1986), definitely placed on the parties the leadership of the opposition. The social organizations recognized the primacy of political matters and supported the new political-electoral strategy and its eminently conciliatory nature on the social plane. (1997: 170)

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The sources of political action’s legitimacy again came into question during the transition. In the 1980s action had sprung from the populist experience of democratization, which ended in the 1990s as an incomplete democracy that limited even the scope of the democratic-institutional policy created to direct it. The split between the political system and the social experience – including the experience of the popular political militants themselves, studied by Cathy Schneider – becomes significant when the legitimacy of populism in Latin America is understood as an excess of the democratic principle. This presents the challenge of Latin American democracy in another light: ‘The point is, assuming the political mechanisms of the democratic game, to take to an extreme point the consequences of what the rules of the game allow, to set up the “people” as an actor through political participation, and not to be restricted solely to mere institutional representation’ (Martucelli and Svampa 1993: 238) – which is precisely what did not happen in the case of Chile. As a result, Chilean democracy has lacked political spaces for the process of social participation and has found it difficult to transform and complete itself, even after more than two decades of development. All the while, power has remained concentrated in the groups that inherited a privileged position from the military administration. The groups who supported the coup and the military regime have met diverse fates. The military was displaced from political power when Pinochet was arrested in 1998, and a major proportion of those responsible for violations of human rights have been arraigned and prosecuted (Lira 2009). On the other hand, many civilian stalwarts of the military regime have retained most of their political, economic, academic and communicational standing.

A Fragmented Civil Society Moving Away from Politics Civil society gained autonomy as its links to politics grew fewer. However, it failed to overcome its internal fragmentation and the weakness of its organization. Having left the decisions about the transition process to institutional political actors – as had been the Chilean tradition throughout the twentieth century – Chilean civil society failed to establish spaces in which to strengthen itself. Over the course of the democratic transition, politics became institutionalized somewhat restrictively in the electoral field (under serious limitations to the electoral process itself). However, as Collier and Handlin point out (2010: 11), action in the political arena is not restricted solely to participating in the state through representation but extends also to obtaining public assets in the society, which provides a role for civil society. From this standpoint, political actors include both those who ‘seek to solve collective

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problems through society-targeted strategies of provisioning … as well as capacity-building’ and those who ‘attend to areas of social need that the state might address, but for a variety of reasons does not (or not sufficiently)’. Associative networks, which played a major role in fostering the democratic process, later lacked effective spaces for political participation and showed low levels of internal articulation. In an international survey of leaders in 2003, Chilean associations, though stronger than those in Venezuela, were more atomized and had weaker links than those in Argentina and Peru (Collier and Handlin 2010: 236). From the perspective of what may be termed civic commitment, that is, the citizens’ attitude towards democratic institutions, the political process of transition arose out of growing disaffection with institutionalized politics, particularly among younger people, who displayed a negative view of representative political institutions like Congress and generally lower adherence to democracy in opinion polls. The electoral register has grown older, given the low percentage of young people who register, despite being enfranchised (upon turning eighteen) (Luna and Seligson 2007). In 2008 only 62 per cent of adults were registered to vote, and those under thirty years of age accounted for only 6.7 per cent of the total. Participation in elections has dwindled steadily. In a sample of seventeen Latin American countries, Chile ranked seventh lowest for declared intention to vote in presidential elections (ibid.: 132). Opinion polls occasionally conducted in Chile show an ongoing trend towards discrediting party politics and the Congress, the two political institutions that rank lowest in acceptance and highest in rejection. According to the data in a study of political culture in Chile in 2006, the level of trust reached 39.6 per cent for political parties, 48.6 per cent for the Supreme Court and 51 per cent for the Congress, these three institutions being least deserving of confidence among the population surveyed (ibid.: 47). Other sources show the significant descendent path of confidence in political parties in Chile. Table 2.1. Confidence in Political Parties in Latin America (%) 1996–1997

2001–2002

2003–2004

Chile

31.1

17.3

16.6

Country with greatest trust

Uruguay 38.1

Uruguay 33.0

Uruguay 23.9

Country with least trust

Colombia 16.1 Venezuela 16.1

Ecuador 7.9

Ecuador 5.4

Average (18 countries)

24.5

16.5

14.2

Source: Latinobarómetro, in Welp (2009: 30).

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According to the polling agency Latinobarómetro, Chile went from having high confidence in political parties to being barely above the average in Latin America, in a general context of considerably decreasing trust in such institutions across the region (Table 2.1). Furthermore, despite the stability of the party system, only one-fourth of Chileans expressed sympathy for any one party, and 8 per cent of these did so for parties not represented in the Congress. In other words, only about 20 per cent of Chileans adhered to one of the six parties in control of the Congress and political power (ibid.: 150). This situation is comparable only to the very low opinion that the people have of the law courts. As for the democratic system per se, it lost adherents in the course of the transition and now ranks substantially lower than systems in the countries of long democratic tradition with which Chile is usually compared (Uruguay and Costa Rica). Whereas in Costa Rica (the most stable democracy among the countries examined), 87,7 per cent of respondents hold that such form of government ‘is always preferable to any other political regime’, in Chile a significantly lower percentage (though also a majority) agree with that statement (ibid.: 63).

In fact, in 2006 such support amounted to 70.5 per cent. On the other hand, ‘comparison with Costa Rica also emphasizes that 20 per cent less Chileans have “favourable” attitudes towards a stable democracy’ (ibid.: 63). UNDP data show that such approval and preference for democracy sank from 64 per cent in 1989 to 50 per cent in 2004 (and only 45 per cent in 1999). Indifference to both democracy and authoritarianism had already risen from 21 per cent to 31 per cent in 1999, and remained at a similar level in 2004 (PNUD 2004b: 254). Several explanations have been essayed for the above situation. Some point to a general trend in contemporary society, seemingly expressed by politics’ loss of central importance, at least at times when society is not manifestly in a crisis (Brunner 1998; Tironi 2003). Some social scientists have criticized certain aspects of electoral mechanics, including the paradox of voting being compulsory while voter registration is only voluntary, the lack of coincidence between presidential and Congressional elections until 2006, the insufficient powers of the legislature and the lack of financing for politics (Navia 2009; Campos 2009). From the standpoint of structuring social and political movements, the traditional intermediaries of social interests are in a serious crisis. Political parties no longer properly perform the function of intermediating and adding interests. The parties, in turn, have fallen away from traditional social organizations, whose intermediating function is also diminished. Unionism, for example, has lost social weight, and its maintenance of conflicting links

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with political groups and its action guidelines make it a appear more a limited interest group than a widely projected social movement. To some extent, Chile is advancing towards a model of a pluralist society where such functions would no longer be in the domain of politics. However, no institutionality has been designed to contain the new demands for participation and project them towards political action. For a long time this lack had no public expression, and it became common to think in terms of a cultural change that would have atomized collective action for the benefit of hegemonic individualism and market competition. The mobilizations that began in 2011 and the widespread citizen support they enjoyed show that the problem instead concerns relations between society and politics. The politics and institutionality that arose from the transition appear inadequate, in view of society’s demands. The relative weakening of social movements and social links is also an expression of socioeconomic transformation, which is the structural framework of political transition. A period of adjustment in which an exclusive, concentrating neoliberal model was adopted led to a period of growth sustained by the same model, whose more acute consequences were tempered by the addition of social action by the state. Growth is realized as a sustained increase in personal income (average wages, minimum wage and social security) and, more intensively, of capacity for consumption (also supported by increased working hours and indebtedness). This model, which improves the overall availability of resources but creates inequity of opportunity and increases social disintegration, has retained its dynamism for two decades. For a long time, social disarticulation failed to turn into collective mobilizations or political demands. It mainly took the form of fear and insecurity, political disaffection and weakened collective and community links. This appears to indicate a change in the very bases of sociability, marked by retirement to private and intimate spaces, mistrust of ‘others’ and a lack of shared projects. The UNDP 1998 Report on Human Development in Chile emphasized the weakening of the social link. Whereas Chileans ‘not only reproduce the established order but also legitimize it in practical terms’, this is apparently not enough to ‘give shape to the necessary “social capital”’. The UNDP data showed weak sociability in Chile, with a ‘high degree of mistrust, precarious associativity. Increasing instrumentalization of social relations, and even a certain weakening of the intergenerational cohesion of the family’ (PNUD 1998: 216). The report equated modernization in Chile with the subjective experience that goes with it, emphasizing its lack of articulation: The lack of complementarity between modernization and subjectivity, and difficulties in accepting this socially appear to be the main reasons for ob-

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jective and subjective insecurity in Chile. Chile today is characterized by the uncoupling of these processes, which, for lack of mediations, distorts both the display of subjectivity and the sustainability of modernization. All this may even affect democratic coexistence. (Ibid.: 29).

These comments enable a characterization of the frame of development of Chilean civil society: higher levels of socioeconomic inclusion through consumption, but maintenance and deepening of social inequity, weakening of internal integration mechanisms in social groups, and uncertainty about the future, all within an increasingly elitist political scheme that fails to stimulate participation. The conditions of the Chilean transition show the paradox of a society mobilized under highly restrictive conditions but demobilized and depoliticized in the framework of democracy (Silva 2004). It is worth noting certain differences between the Chilean situation and that of such countries as Brazil and Argentina, which also underwent transition from military government to democracy. Paul Posner, who studied the differences between the Chilean and Brazilian cases, points out that in Chile, the regime’s legacy reflects the military’s achievement of far greater consolidation of their reforms. Posner points out that ‘for ideological, political and pragmatic reasons, the Brazilian military left behind a legacy of state reform which was a far cry from the highly market-oriented model that the military rulers bequeathed to their democratic counterparts in Chile’ (2003: 55). Comparing the countries with regard to decentralization and spaces opened for local participation, they may be said to be opposites owing to vastly different starting points, institutionalities and political arrangements. In Brazil, popular participation has played an effective role in expanding government supply to major sectors, whereas in Chile public policies focus on low-income sectors, but with a top-down approach. Both countries show positive results, but the processes differ greatly. Thus, whereas Chile is weaker in terms of social democratization, actual decentralization and accountability, it boasts increasing legitimacy of government technocracy, which manages social programmes. Hagopian (2005) argued that although the starting point of democracy in Brazil was more difficult than in Chile, its advance has been more complete, including institutional changes ‘above’ and incorporation of society ‘below’. The ‘disappointment’ and depoliticization observed in Chile, which led to considerable debate in the late 1990s, did not cause a crisis of governance during the period of the Concertación (Tironi 2003; Silva 2004; Tedesco 2004; Van der Ree 2007). They were addressed by a few political reforms, including direct election of mayors, and above all by the deepening of social reforms. The latter were the seal of the last two Concertación administrations

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(Lagos and Bachelet) and, following the precedent established in the early 1990s, were set up and managed from the top. Accordingly, both president Lagos and president Bachelet completed their terms with extremely high levels of electoral popularity, close to 70 per cent for the former and over 80 per cent for the latter. The ‘individualist form of politics’ (Silva 2004) became consolidated in that context. Since 2005 this scenario has undergone some changes. The first mass demonstrations of social discontent broke out in 2006 among secondary school students. In the following year, a new form of unionism spurred demonstrations focused on subcontracted workers in the precarious labour category producing such export items as copper, wood products, farmed salmon. At the same time, social policy veered towards a system of social protection that included health care, childcare, assistance for the elderly and a social security reform. Although a few measures were enacted to increase labour regulation and economic activity, they still adhered to the prevailing social and economic supporting bases. The state behaved similarly in 2009 vis-à-vis the world economic crisis: the government released funds saved during the previous ‘boom years’ to strengthen social protection policy, but refrained from amending the economic and production systems that generated major social problems. Once the Concertación administrations ended in 2010, the unresolved educational conflict of 2006 reemerged in 2011 alongside various reactivated social and regional demands. This mobilization was accompanied by substantial mistrust and loss of prestige of democratic institutions, and support for political coalitions dropped. In such a context, in the short or medium term, withdrawal from politics may initiate a severe crisis of legitimacy and representation. Reconfiguration of the political elites was consistent with the picture described above. For one thing, an elite that cut across the administration and the right-wing opposition emerged, taking on nontraditional roles in these sectors but sharing management of the power arrangement while administering relations and links with the economic elite. The latter is not represented in the political area but directly impacts negotiation with the Executive to drive its agendas. In turn, the social forces led by the official parties have developed activity that, following a first period of agreements and negotiation, tends to adopt an opposition outlook with a leftward turn. Meanwhile, a large sector of government officials who rose from the higher levels of civil society organizations also take part in an ‘autonomous’ government policy, separate from its social origins, weakly representative and oriented according to the agreements and conditions that gave rise to the transition (Otano 1995; Delamaza and Ochsenius 2006).

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Social Policy as Major Innovation in the Link between State and Civil Society As noted earlier, in 1990 the democratic institutions in Chile recovered within the framework of a withdrawal of the armed forces – which had governed since 1973 – negotiated with them by persons newly responsible for managing the state. The left-of-centre Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia remained in office without interruption from 1990 to 2010. Their management generally continued the major economic policies designed to ensure macroeconomic balance, controlled inflation as a priority goal and was open to the foreign sector of the economy based on mobilization of largescale private capital. Also as of 1990, the government adopted active social policies, principally in the form of substantial investment in basic social infrastructure (education, health care and housing) and various innovative programmes designed to address specific social problems. This was accompanied by a slow but constant trend of introducing modernizing managerial reforms into public management, involving the entire government apparatus and focusing on justice, education and health care. In addition, from 2005 to 2010, policy tended towards the construction of a welfare system. The social area is precisely where the Concertación attempted to differ most from the policies of the 1980s. Since 1985 Chile has exhibited a dynamic of almost uninterrupted economic growth at rates higher than the historic figures prior to the military coup, and without the major recessions of the military period. The economy expanded rapidly between 1987 and 1997 at a rate of 6 per cent to 7 per cent per annum and then stagnated, dropping to an expansion rate of 4 per cent per annum until the crisis of 2009. Notwithstanding the increased income resulting from such growth, the results have been most uneven in social terms, and the distribution of income and opportunities has not become more equitable. Incomes have risen for various reasons, including the doubling of the GDP in the first ten years following reactivation of public policies – with a 160 per cent increase in social expenditure in the first fourteen years, longer working hours and excessive indebtedness of families. All of this has also led to gradual reduction of poverty, according to measurements of income and basic needs. Chile’s figures stand out in the Latin American regional context, where poverty does not diminish in aggregate terms. In 1990, 38.6 per cent of the population had monthly incomes below the so-called poverty line. In 2003, after two decades of high economic growth, that figure had fallen to 18.8 per cent. Although the drop is significant, it is less an improvement than a recovery, as the percentage of individuals living below the poverty line is still higher than it was in 1973, when only

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17 per cent of Chileans had poverty incomes despite feeble economic growth in the two decades prior. Only in 2006 did the figure fall as far as 13.7 per cent. Even so, the measurement method of poverty has been criticized as retaining the same reference base that was valid in 1986, despite the vast changes observed in the economy and local incomes. One study based on the Family Budget Survey of 2007 posits that updating the ‘basic basket’ of goods and services used to calculate the number of the ‘poor’ and the ‘indigent’ would push the percentage of the poor back up to 29 instead of the official 13.7 per cent based on the ‘basket’ of 1986. ‘Indigence’, in turn, would be 6.2 per cent instead of 3.2 per cent. In other words, poverty has been reduced, but the official figures do not reflect its magnitude and dynamics. It is therefore necessary to amend the method of calculation (Larraín 2008). Meanwhile, in 2008 Chile was second in Latin America (behind Barbados) in the UNDP Index of Human Development, showing the greatest advance in that respect in the recent past. Based on distribution of income and opportunities, however, Chile has established a trend of ranking high in inequity in the continent, surpassed only by Brazil, Honduras and Colombia (CEPAL 2004: 12). Accordingly, in the Chilean case it is important to clearly distinguish the evolution of poverty from that of inequality, which does not decline but only stagnates. Both trends have grown stronger ever since 1987. The sustained economic growth process has been based on the expansion of exports (copper, cellulose and timber, fruit, seafood), growth of services and increasing internationalization. The society shows increasing traits of dissolution and immense inequality between rich and poor. In the late 1990s the income of citizens in the decile of wealthiest homes was 37 times that of the poorest citizens, a situation that is practically unchanged today (Meller 1998; R. González 2008). The weakened socioeconomic integration manifests itself paradoxically: whereas the traditional mechanisms of integration (education and employment) show high coverage, their effect in terms of integration is diminishing because of the tendency to job precariousness, low wages and lack of appropriate social services. These conditions were behind the first major social mobilization after democracy was recovered, that of the secondary school students in 2006 and again since 2011. Women’s level of access to gainful employment has constantly trended upward. Nonetheless, it is marked by those same traits of substantial socioeconomic diversification. The poor sectors engage mainly in ill-paid, temporary jobs associated with agriculture and have informal links to the formal economy, such as temporary work during the fruit harvest for export, and piecework and other work at home in the readymade clothing industry. One deficit that began to diminish under the Bachelet administration is the unavailability of childcare, named as one reason for the still low level of women

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in the labour force. Major wage differences prevail between men and women (Caro and Cruz 2005). In June 2009 the average income of male workers under contract contributing to social security was calculated at Ch$464,418. The same income of their female peers was only Ch$403,227 (El Mercurio 11 October 2009: B9). These instances of labour exclusion, which also affect the young, raise problems both social and economic in nature in family and community circles. Thus, the major social achievements of the transition period have not led to guidelines for integration and active social participation. Employment has risen, but on precarious and inequitable foundations. Expanded educational supply and reduction of poverty coexist with maintenance of immense distributive inequalities. On the political plane, the paradox of the Chilean state is that despite political stability and good public management indicators, it has not succeeded in fully transitioning to democracy in the twenty plus years since the plebiscite of 1988. It has devoted an immense proportion of resources to the social area, but it has failed to rectify the structural inequalities of the society. One major reason is likely that the state of Chile is one of the smallest in the world, even among countries where free-market economy prevails. According to data from the Heritage Foundation, among the fourteen most liberalized economies, government consumption as a percentage of GDP (8 per cent) is the lowest in Chile, which ranks third for expenditure (24 per cent) and fourth for share of enterprises that are state-run (2.94 per cent) (Arriagada 2003).

Reactivation of Social Policies as a Priority of the Transition The institutional change of the early 1990s, though not accompanied by a reformulation of the development model, heralded a reactivation of public policies, particularly in the social sphere. Under the military administration, anti-state ideology had predominated and the state’s nonrepressive functions languished. During the transition, the state generally sought to ensure continuity of the strategy of international economic insertion, so the interests of large-scale capital were dominant. Upwards, the state’s connections with internationalized economic actors influence foreign policy as well as management of finance and development policies (mining, transport, telecommunications, agriculture, power, etc.). This strategy has been ratified and entrenched for the future through the execution of numerous commercial treaties and international agreements. Downwards, however, the links are primarily with underprivileged social groups, through focalized social policy. Reactivation of social policies has concerned the programme designs more than the underlying legal framework and institutional design, where major continuities with anti-state reforms of the 1980s persist. Between 2005 and

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2010 the ‘programmatic’ direction did give way to a second cycle of institutional reforms in such sectors as justice, health care and, more recently, welfare. However, the taxation structure established in the 1980s remains in effect, with few amendments. Since 1990, priority development in the social area has consisted of continuous growth in public-sector social expenditure and creation of new institutions and programmes, mostly in the purview of a new ministry: the Ministry of Planning (Ministerio de Planificación, MIDEPLAN), originated in the previous National Planning Bureau (Oficina de Planificación, ODEPLAN). Because of changes in management, public investment has been decentralized, mainly by transferring decisions on expenditure to regional agencies. Together with political and institutional democratization, the change in social policies is perhaps one of the key indicators of what the transition to democracy has meant for Chile. Reactivation and the partial reformulation of social policies are handled by a state deprived of many of its traditional functions that devotes more than 70 per cent of its budget to the social sphere. Social policies are seen as the principal factor in the relationship between the state and the citizenry. Because the Concertación administrations neither introduced amendments to the development strategy nor revised the privatizations of state-owned enterprises, they managed to ensure governance during the transition and secure the commitment of the dominant actors who benefited directly from the economic policy, although they were political opponents. Thus the first democratic administration (Patricio Aylwin, 1990–1994) was able to obtain Congress’s approval for a tax reform based on raising indirect taxes with which to finance the increase in social expenditure. This formula also allowed control of any possible social conflict emerging from the accumulated demands left unsatisfied during the lengthy military administration. Any appeal to social mobilization designed to create new power relations was avoided, so although calm prevailed throughout the transition, the agencies of democratic policy were thereby weakened and social participation was deprived of any major space (Boeninger 1997). Louis Bickford, a Canadian analyst of the first transition period, concluded that ‘[t]he overall structure of Chilean democracy is weighted against broadly reaching public participation, inclusion of citizens into governmental processes, as individuals or groups, and stakeholders in public policymaking’ (1997: 53). The second Concertación administration (Eduardo Frei, 1994–2000), which simultaneously attached priority to economic modernization and the elaboration of a national programme for overcoming poverty, attempted a ‘pro-growth’ policy, that is, a policy favourable to foreign investment and development of the increasingly transnational financial and export divisions of large-scale corporations. This policy took an intersectoral viewpoint, aim-

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ing to coordinate public initiatives to tackle extreme poverty (experienced by families whose income does not cover the average cost of a basic food basket). Apparently its various programmes – particularly those involving social infrastructure and public works – favoured a focus on the poorest communes of Chile (Raczynski and Serrano 2002). However, the policy was short-lived, and its effect was not assessed. In the second half of the 1990s, the sectoral emphasis was on education. A costly reform was undertaken to enable an increase in the number of school hours in primary and secondary school education by investing in infrastructure. As for poverty sectors, priority was given to implementation of three programmes respectively targeting women heads of households, unemployed youth and precarious urban settlements (known as camps). Only the last (Programa Chile Barrio) survived after 2000. From 1997 on, the rate of economic growth dropped, unemployment rose and discontent began to find political expression. During the administration of Ricardo Lagos (2000–2006), emphasis shifted to reforms to modernize the state and construction of the so-called agenda for growth, agreed on with the business sector. Health care was prioritized, as were new strategies focused on poverty, given the meagre results of the previous policy of subsidies to address extreme poverty. At this time the goal was to include the notion of rights in public policy. A minimum agenda was designed that guaranteed provision of health care, channelled through a plan for universal, guaranteed access (Plan de Acceso Universal de Garantías Explícitas en Salud, AUGE) and the Sistema Chile Solidario (preceded by Programa Puente). Another major push in the social area discontinued previous territory-specific employment programmes in favour of temporary employment programmes. In addition, in the administration’s first three years a Plan for Strengthening Civil Society was implemented with IDB funding. The Bachelet administration (2006–2010) focused on reforms to establish a ‘system of social protection’ to contend with social vulnerability as well as poverty. To this end, the Chile Solidario system was expanded to encompass a child protection system (with a significant increase in preschool education for additional aid to working mothers). Social security reforms did not fundamentally alter the private system but organized it better, ensuring a minimum pension to those who cannot contribute enough to obtain one – mainly women working at home, who do not contribute to the social security system, and male and female temporary workers – payable out of public funds. In the latter case, the state took over a private system that was unable to finance the pensions despite receiving the workers’ contributions. In the area of labour, subcontracting and seasonal work were restricted in defiance of strong opposition from large-scale business concerns. Shortly after taking office, a massive student mobilization forced the government

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to design a new General Law on Education to replace the law introduced by Pinochet. However, the new legislation, enacted as late as 2011, failed to respond to the students’ demands, reflecting instead the agreement of political forces in Congress. This provoked the far more massive, extended recrudescence of student mobilization since 2011 under the administration of Sebastián Piñera (2010–2014).

Local Management The local sphere has acquired growing importance in programme execution, and substantial public resources have been funnelled in its direction. From the 1980s on, public programmes and policies began to be transferred first to townships, then to regional governments. In 1981, the military administration took over primary and secondary educational establishments and then primary health-care clinics, with considerable erosion of assets in the sector. Starting in 1990, city councils began to implement the programmes of the new social agenda, a process that expanded in 1992 with the democratic election of mayors and city councillors in all 344 city councils. Under the 1999 reform to municipal law, city councils have new powers and duties in the areas of economics, production, environment and equal opportunities. At the same time, new local action instruments, including communal development plans, master plans and neighbourhood development funds, have been implemented to modernize municipal management. For its part, the central government implemented the Municipal Reinforcement Plan (Programa de Fortalecimiento Municipal, PROFIM) with funds from the World Bank. In terms of financing, city councils are still a minor item in the public budget. Actual public investment at the commune level has dropped as a percentage of total public investment, indicating a recentralization of public investment. In 1990 actual public investment in the communes was 17.2 per cent of total public investment, but by 1993, it was only 7.7 per cent. It rebounded in 2004, but only to 11.3 per cent (Leyton 2005). Furthermore, permanent municipal revenues, in constant currency terms, ‘have moved from Ch$ 173 thousand million to Ch$ 553 thousand million (currency of 2004). Comparing the share of this income in total municipal income, the proportion was lower in 2004 (42.4 per cent) than in 1990 (49.6 per cent)’ (ibid.: 14). At the same time, transfer from the centre to the communes remains practically unchanged; it was 6.3 per cent in 2004 (ibid.: 15). The 2009 OECD report on regional development in Chile pointed out that over the 1990s, regionally defined investment (IDR) rose ‘to a peak of 33 per cent in 2001. Since then, it has gradually declined. In 2006, the IDR accounted for 24 per cent of central government investment. In terms of municipal investment plus regionally decided investment it represents 30.5

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per cent of total public investments in Chile’ (OECD 2009: 151). Municipal investment therefore accounted for barely 6.5 per cent of total public investment in 2006, down from 7.7 per cent in 1996. The principal bottlenecks have been design and management of institutions, financing and management of resources, labour qualification of human resources – particularly administrative staff – and lack of qualified personnel, particularly in rural and small communes (Raczynski and Serrano 1999; Leyton 2005). Responding to another major management problem, the lack of community participation channels, the reform of 1999 redefined the levels of participation, requiring that municipal participation ordinances be issued. More flexibility and autonomy were granted for organizing communal economic and social councils (Consejo Económico Social Comunal, CESCO), consultative bodies composed of representatives of organizations. Plebiscites and communal consultations were regulated (and still quite restricted in application), and public audiences were made compulsory (E. Montecinos 2007). The Law on Regional Governments, enacted in 1993, allowed indirect election of council members in 1994 and extended their powers and resources in subsequent years. The regional councils (Consejos Regionales, CORE) have no executive functions; their main role is to allocate funds from decentralized public investment, especially the National Fund for Regional Development (Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Regional, FNDR). They are chaired by the Regional Intendente, who is appointed by the President. The mechanisms for generating regional representatives are significantly lacking in legitimacy, having been designed mainly for ease of management rather than local democracy (Angell 1999; Raczynski and Serrano 1999; Leyton 2005).

Action by Civil Society The situation described above has had different effects on the structure of civil society. Chilean society tends to form extensive networks of associations, as confirmed by the UNDP survey conducted in 1999, which registered 83,000 associations, not including religious ones (PNUD 2000). In Argentina, a survey using the same method registered a lower number of associations (79,000) for a population twice as large as Chile’s (Delamaza 2001a). Such networks, however, are mainly composed of small, weakly linked groups that depend on state financing to carry out government programmes and are not connected to larger networks (PNUD 2000). This form of association is found especially in sectors less affected by economic modernization. Other sectors, such as those of seasonal workers, communes undergoing considerable population increase and the labour sector linked to subcontracted services, show much less density of association and few innovative organizational instruments (ibid.).

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The NGOs organized in the 1980s have lost their identity. As international cooperation receded, they forged links with the government administration as subordinate implementers of social policies. In the process, they lost considerable proposal capability along with several years of institutional investment. The NGOs’ main demand is participation in the design, implementation and assessment of social programmes and policies, under a statute dissociated from government administration (Más Voces 2004). In local terms, there is also a crisis of social participation. Numerous forms of micro-local organizations survive; however, they have no links with one another and lack effective power to influence the principles of municipal management. Numerous groups meet only to obtain financing for projects, lacking any continuity over time or broader vision of local space. This is largely due to the activity of multiple localized programmes of the central and local government in poor areas, mostly based on competitive allocation of funds and restricted to short-term projects (not more than one year). Competing to obtain small amounts of funding dependent on available public supply is not the same as exercising rights and demanding answers to community problems, which requires mutual links to develop local strategies of wider scope. However, the concept of civil society underlying social policies fails to contemplate the political dimension of social action, which is reserved for the state and political negotiation (Taylor 1996: 781). The general purview of grass-roots organizations is micro-local initiatives supported by state agencies devoted to community management. The latter, staffed mainly by women, are devoted to rendering assistance and community improvement (Delamaza 2005a). Meanwhile, institutional participation mechanisms are remarkably ineffective. The communal-level CESCO, which is the most important, only has consultant status, lacks all legitimacy vis-à-vis the communal authority and is very little known among the population. Municipalities have access to a specialized bureau for linking to the community, separating the citizenry from any role connected to the increasing functions allocated to the city council. These functions are served by other units (and they do not connect the population with central services) (Greaves 2003; Delamaza 2005a). The problem becomes more acute regarding allocated services in education and primary health care, for not only is the city council confined to administrative tasks, but these services are often administered by semiautonomous corporations of the municipality, completely separate from citizen participation and control. Although social organizations engage actively with municipal authorities (Collier and Handlin 2010: 200), the city councils have no structures to process their participation. This chapter has defended the importance of studying the links between civil society and the state in historical perspective. Only thus is it possible

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to know the details of each one, avoiding inappropriate conceptual generalizations. In Chile, the preeminent national state is capable of imposing a relatively stable political order. Control of this process has tended to remain in the hands of privileged groups in society, which inhibits forms of local autonomy or sovereignty; further, no mechanisms exist for institutional participation beyond elections. In the twentieth century, political participation permitted a democratizing though inorganic expansion of the state, but this process was violently interrupted in 1973. Civil society played an important role in the reorganization of democratic forces, but the course of the transition was decided via restricted negotiation that ensured action by the military government in several strategic areas. This also reinforced the exclusivity of a political system favourably biased towards conservative forces and weak links with civil society. The profound socioeconomic transformations effected by the dictatorship over its long duration were not reversed and took a lasting toll on the configuration and dynamics of civil society. During the democratic period after 1990, the sociopolitical mediation matrix was transformed and partially replaced by technical management institutions. However, an extensive area remains in the hands of private parties, whose networks operate in an insufficiently regulated market. The link between civil society and the state is handled peripherally, via political parties. Because civil society has no autonomous, sustainable structures by which to reorganize the relationship in new terms, the manifold social activities and the actions concerted with the state, particularly at the local level, have no room to spare for a new relationship matrix. Yet a change has been perceptible since 2011, when major sectors of society began to mobilize autonomously, at a distance from the political intermediation of parties and traditional leaders. This points to a significant transformation whose potential cannot yet be adequately assessed (Mayol and Azócar 2012).

Notes 1. Details on the political dynamics of the twentieth-century discussion and implementation of labour laws and social policies are found in Morris (1967: 109–202). 2. The direct connection between intellectual preparation and political programme is documented in Arturo Fontaine, a former editor of El Mercurio who was directly involved with the military government. Referring to “El Ladrillo” Fontaine says: ‘Before noon on Wednesday 12th (September 1973) the general officers of the Armed Forces exercising government responsibilities will have the plan on their desks’ (Fontaine 1988, cited by Boisier 2000).

3

Social Policy Agendas in the Transition to Democracy

Since 1990, social policy has been the most innovative area of government action. Conceived as key factors ensuring governance during the political transition, these policies reinforce the economic model and restore some links between state and society. The importance of socially oriented public policy exceeds its considerable share of public expenditure—more than 70 per cent. In this chapter I argue that its importance is such that it has partly replaced the link between Chilean society and state that was historically the province of the political system and parties. The new link also has new consequences for society. Insofar as they remain in the field of governmentality, the new relations fail to achieve the greater social inclusion and expansion of citizenship offered by the democratizing process. They fail because they develop within an institutional framework created by the military administration and little modified afterwards, or else because they lack political expression in the unaltered model of governance set up for the transition. Taking an unusual approach, this chapter discusses some of the Chilean government’s political initiatives in various areas of social policy. The object is to understand how these social policies and programmes have affected the links that arose between Chilean society and the new state after the negotiations of the late 1980s. I start with an examination of the general approaches underlying the policies, followed by discussion of their various principles. The roots of differences among them include the conception and structure of the link with society, the notion of citizenship, presented explicitly or implicitly and the instruments used for participation. This analysis reveals five different policy trends that share certain traits but differ substantially in the resulting social link and impact on society.

Public Policies: Innovation and Restrictions in the Framework of the Transition Social policies are examined here as a deployment of the transition’s general political strategy in its most innovative form, and with the greatest direct – 104 –

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impact on social actors. Analytical variables are established to distinguish the directions and agendas under discussion, but such differences nonetheless operate in the common framework associated with the general conditions of the post-1990 period. The concepts of citizenship and participation used in the analysis are also discussed.

Conditions and Dynamics of Social Policies In general terms, the transition was designed to avoid conflict with the preceding economic model and based on a political agreement in the framework of the Constitution of 1980. Consistent with that design, social policy was a privileged field of innovative initiatives. The democratic governments accumulated a substantial body of studies and fieldwork done by policy institutes and NGOs, which supplied fairly well developed proposals for action upon taking over. Many of the professionals who drew up diagnoses and proposals filled posts in ministries and implemented the new agendas. An important association was forged between Chilean social policy agendas and those guiding the international field. The international reinsertion of Chile was a policy objective towards which the military regime had made few strides, if any. Action took the form of various initiatives with social impacts: execution of UN commitments and conventions binding on the state of Chile, creation of the Agency for International Cooperation (Agencia de Cooperación Internacional, AGCI), significant foreign funding of new government programmes, renewed and intensified connections with countries with which relations had deteriorated (Mexico, Cuba and several countries in Western Europe). Meanwhile, the international dynamic of large-scale conferences and world summits was particularly active in the 1990s and offered a privileged stage to the newly recovered Chilean democracy and its emphasis on social affairs. This period witnessed deepening structural adjustment – which was already over in Chile – the renewal of economic growth following the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s, the recovery of democratic regimes in practically all the countries of the continent, and peace processes in Central America (Van Klaveren 1998). The United Nations conducted a cycle of international conferences and summits on highly significant topics, establishing new referents in such areas as childhood and human rights, among others. In some cases, governments executed obligatory agreements. All of this emphasized the importance of a new agenda of development in various areas. Large international conferences were exceptionally abundant during this period: With the end of the cold war, the space of the United Nations took on new life, at the same time that the international agenda was renovated. At the

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successive world conferences – Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, 1992, Human Rights in Vienna, 1993, Population in Cairo, 1994, the World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen, 1995, the IV Conference on Women in Peking, 1995, and the World Conference on Habitat in Istanbul, in 1996 – the active participating NGOs directly or indirectly recovered the space gained earlier. (Rabotnikof et al. 2003: 67)

While still under Pinochet in 1989, Chile had executed the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Upon returning to democracy in 1990, Chile executed the Convention on the Rights of the Child and continued participating actively in international forums on social affairs. In 1995, at Chile’s initiative, the World Summit on Social Development was held in Copenhagen, chaired by the Chilean ambassador Juan Somavía. These activities vividly reflected the priority attached to an active social policy focused on vulnerable or disadvantaged groups. This policy was also meant to correct the effects of the neoliberal economic model and give the state a new role (Molina 1992; Raczynski and Serrano 2002). Furthermore, in this period’s national and international context, civil society and especially the development NGOs expanded their presence and gained permanence (Scherer-Warren 1999: 31ff.). Chilean social policy at this time aimed overall to introduce elements of equity into an economic framework that remained fairly unaltered after the military regime, admitting practically no amendment. Although this policy was in line what was taking place internationally, the constraints and unquestioned elements of the economic and political system inherited from Pinochet limited reforms. The 1990s saw progress, particularly in the increased public expenditure and priority devoted to the social sector; but certain basic aspects of the institutions inherited from the previous regime remained unmodified. Chile had already become part of policymaking internationalization with the reforms instituted by the military regime, such as private Pension Funds (Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones, AFP), and their subsequent export to other countries. The trend continued in the 1990s with the creation of social policies and programmes. The overall prestige of the transition was reason enough for the export of social programmes, regardless of their specific success, as in the early 1990s case of the Chile Joven training programme for young people, a complete failure, then with Sistema Chile Solidario, adopted elsewhere before it had even shown concrete results in Chile. Implementation of social policy differed internally according to whether a given administration after 1990 prioritized the international agenda, the existence or otherwise of organized social partners, or the institutional features of the sector—in other words, the geological strata of the Chilean state. The resulting different agendas promoted various forms of linkage with civil society, evolved in different ways and thus offered democratizing potential.

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This chapter discusses five modes or trends in Chilean social policy according to their leanings, management and types of links with social organizations. Two emerged from innovative outlooks applied in the 1990s, which also led to the creation of new agencies. A third trend associated with redirected policies in traditional areas had two identifiable stages. Until 2000, it was characterized by additional new programmes, significantly increased resources and lack of changes in institutional architecture or the regulatory framework established in the 1980s. Then, however, starting with the Ricardo Lagos (2000–2006) administration, a profound reform of health care reflected a changed outlook and partial modification of institutions. During the Michelle Bachelet (2006–2010) administration, secondary school students mobilized, forcing an amendment to the Constitutional Organic Law on Education even as a redesign of social security was debated and a partial reform enacted. This early stage of reform of social institutions will be discussed here only from the standpoint of health care, the only area of fully implemented reform at the time of writing.1 New, sustained mass mobilizations of university and secondary school students, as well as teachers and professors seeking profound institutional reform, began in May 2011. The last two of the five trends mentioned above concern interfaces between social policy and civil society in the local space. The first pertains to decentralized services and their role. The second trend, an endeavour to correct the difficulties of the existing institutions, involves two strategies for externalizing – that is, outsourcing – the link via specific organizations close to the state. In an earlier study, I discussed only the traditional social policies (health care, housing, education) together with innovating agencies (focused policies addressed to specific groups) (Delamaza 2005a). Here I will describe various models of links with civil society, and then examine a sample of agencies and devices – that is, programmes and services – embodying them. This method begins with the last link in the chain, that is, local programme implementation. This allows examination and assessment of the various models according to results rather than just proposed concepts. The discussion will also cover the period since the year 2000, when debate about notions of citizenship as agency was rekindled – mainly individually – as was participation in narrow areas of policy. This has put tension on the previously established governance design, which had been only weakly contested in the first decade of transition to democracy. The change is neither radical nor univocal. The actions taken stem from different approaches that do not necessarily link them. Nonetheless, they represent a change from the previously predominant approaches to overcoming poverty. This change is visible in the health care reform and the Sistema Chile Solidario programme, which both refer to explicit social guarantees that are

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demandable in court and thus appropriate to the traditional view of citizenry guaranteed by the state. Chile Solidario however, means a new combination of guaranteed social rights and policies targeting extreme poverty. Neither case contemplates a clear role for civil society or space for organized consultation, limiting the depth of the change (Contesse and Delamaza 2005). Meanwhile, the Law on Association and Citizen Participation in Pubic Management (Ley de Asociatividad y Participación Ciudadana en la Gestión Pública), debated as of 2002, was enacted in 2010. Its purpose was to endow the state with mechanisms for institutionalized participation other than forms of direct democracy. In a sense, the draft law originated in the promotional concepts of the 1960s, which then were adapted to fit the general design of current governability. Rather than proposing a new system of governance and amending citizenship regimes, the law focuses on strengthening organizations and their access to government structures through forms of consultation (Delamaza 2005a). A particularity of the focus on construction of democracy is that it extends beyond the institutional sector, linking the institutional dimension with a sphere of social actors who are closely associated at various levels of power and points of public interest. From a social-action standpoint, such a concept, gradually shaped by practices within the state, provides a superior foundation for an extended citizenship regime not limited to a passive dimension (recognition of rights) but incorporating active and deliberative citizenship (Jones and Gaventa 2002). Because such a regime of citizenship entails a relationship between citizenry and state, this framework sets up mechanisms for participation by actors who do not exercise direct institutional political power. These individuals help define interests, priorities and oversight of public affairs, seek to influence decision-making, debate agenda items of concern to the political community and coordinate efforts to generate and expand public goods that neither state nor market can ensure on its own. This rather normative framework prompts several questions. When facing dilemmas – that is, the debate on allocating limited resources, establishing priorities and seeking answers to collective problems – do the new forms of linkage between state and civil society point to a process of opening and a democratic expansion of the state with lasting effects? Conversely, do they contribute (or not) to overcoming the fragmentation of civil society actors and help generate new capabilities for acting in the public sphere, such as association, autonomy, dialogue, negotiation and drawing up proposals? Lastly, and importantly, do they succeed in transforming political and civil service culture in favour of ‘empowering’ society in the conduct and orientation of public affairs (Bebbington et al. 2005)? Cristina Zurbriggen refuses to regard the state as ‘another actor’ in governance structures because the state possesses resources that other actors lack.

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These include the monopoly of force, obligatory nature of legal norms and legitimacy of democracy. She adds that ‘beyond owning certain resources, the government has to take over certain special tasks, based on the principles of representing the public interest or safeguarding democratic values’ (2004: 8). If this is so, then it must be admitted that today, the ‘special tasks’ are an object of dispute in Latin America, and that despite endeavours to recover the role of the state, it continues to give way before the market. The addition of new participation practices to state action in Chile has been much more restricted, given the framework of low-intensity democracy and institutional creativity on top of substantial social inequalities. The strategies and policies for social or local development that were proposed in the 1980s and reformed in the 1990s mainly set up participation practices and systems on a micro-social or territorial scale (Taylor 1996; Guerra 1997; Greaves 2003). Some of these spaces have, with neither interference from the political system nor formal belonging to it, evolved towards direct forms of dialogue, concerted action and public deliberation among segments of government and civil society actors. Comparatively speaking, Chile shows intermediate levels of association and an ample variety of forms of collective action. A distinctive trait, however, is the low density of links among organizations and lack of access of these organizations to policy decisions through established channels, especially at the local level (Collier and Handlin 2010). Available studies on associativity, legal instruments of local participation, innovative experiences and citizen perception present a set of fairly homogeneous conclusions worth summarizing (PNUD 2000; SUBDERE 2004; Más Voces 2005; Gerber 2007; Delamaza and Ochsenius 2010b; Foster 2010). First, Chile boasts a high degree of associativity. Particularly in the first degree, particularly in rural areas, though with little intercommunication or effect on policies or the directions taken by public management. Second, the instruments of participation provided by law are scant, little known and unevenly and incompletely used in the great majority of municipalities nationwide. In turn, the population’s expectations clash with the reality of prospects for participation. Regarding the instruments employed, case studies on innovation in local social management and the introduction of instruments of concerted action linked to public policy permit characterization of the overall picture (E. Montecinos 2005a, 2007; Espinoza 2004; Ochsenius 2006; Fernández and Ordóñez 2007). Actual instruments follow various models of participation and share no common pattern. From the standpoint of sustainability, their institutional standing and durability over time are quite low. Participants are mostly members of formal institutions; informal organizations and individual citizens are very seldom represented. Formal ties are mostly cultivated in face-to-face meetings with authorities and public agencies rather than me-

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diatized events. For instance, little use is made of information and communications technologies. Participation normally takes place at the informative and consultative levels, rarely reaching the stage of deliberation and/or social control. Finally, efforts concentrate mainly on implementation of services, programmes and management funds. Little or no participatory influence reaches other decisive phases of public policy, such as drawing up the public agenda or defining policies, measures and public decisions. The results of a given participatory agenda thus depend on the model it has adopted, particularly the type of associated social and territorial partners. Civil society actors and public policy agencies are linked in various ways, and the consequent policy networks differ widely in scope, sustainability and effect. The various administrative sectors define their own citizen participation agendas by designing programmes and specific actions. Various factors carry weight: their own institutional traditions, the existence or lack of counterparts and clearly defined social demand, the way negotiation with them was conducted (or not) at a given time (i.e., the beginning of the transition) and international political actors’ influence on the agenda. Agencies, designs for institutions and political viewpoints have overlapped within the Chilean state at various times in history. To this day they coexist, with varying degrees of power and influence, like so many ‘geological strata’ of the public apparatus (Oszlak 1994). State action still holds traces of the agendas and agencies of the old, socially and economically mightier democratic state that preceded the military dictatorship, a state more or less changed by the reforms of the 1980s. These agendas survive mainly in individuals’ expectations and the vindication of organized social actors, as was observable in the student mobilizations of 2011 and the ample support for increasing state presence and ending for-profit operations in education. Additional agendas, agencies and forms emerged from reforms enacted in the military period, such as the transfer of educational and health-care institutions to municipalities in 1981. Forms created in the original transition design elaborated by think tanks and NGOS in the 1980s are also identifiable. Last on the scene were the actions and programmes hammered out under the influence of international organizations and agreements in the context of Chile’s international reinsertion in the 1990s, together with the new generation of social reforms instituted in the early twenty-first century under the Lagos and Bachelet administrations.

Public Policy Agendas in Relation to Civil Society Identification of civil society’s roles in the various forms of policy action is key to distinguishing meaningfully among policy agendas with differing char-

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acteristics, designs, implementation strategies and results. The first localized policies, which arose in the early 1990s in response to social movements’ explicit demands, were based on pre-1990 policy negotiations with social movements within the anti-dictatorship mobilization. These movements succeeded in placing their demands on the social policy agenda, though with varying results affected by subsequent legislation and political management, as well as their own evolution as movements. Newly formed sectors whose demands reached the state in this way and resulted in new government agencies are of particular interest. The union movement also negotiated its demands with the new administration at the beginning of the transition, but because it was not a new movement, its presence had always been considered in the political agenda of democratization. It generally followed the political pattern of political negotiation, institutionalization and links to the political parties. It did not originate new public agencies but channelled its efforts through traditional government structures, specifically the Ministry of Labour (Collier and Collier 2002). Regardless, union membership was also affected by Chilean civil society’s fragmentation, as I will show below in a discussion of two cases that arose in the 1980s and were present in the early days of the transition: the women’s movement and the indigenous peoples’ movement. A second distinction concerns innovative policies focused on atomized, vulnerable groups. These policies comprise institutions and programmes organized in response to what was called the ‘social debt’. They were not backed by organized social movements but rather emerged from the agenda itself when actors incapable of projecting themselves adequately in the new scenario seized attention. Such was the case of the most massive, visible movement of the 1980s, that of the urban slum dwellers known as pobladores, who were unable to establish themselves as an organized interlocutor at the time of the political transition and left the initiative mostly in the hands of the government and its agencies (Taylor 1996; Salman 1998; Paley 2001). Thus, focalized policies fully defined at government level prevailed in cases of extreme poverty. Homeless pobladores as well as the disabled, micro-entrepreneurs and the jobless were all targeted by policies oriented to the paradigm of overcoming poverty. Until 2006, when a new welfare agenda was attempted, their link with policy in general was weak, as was that policy’sits general tendency to strengthen civil society and citizenship.2 A third variety of policy aimed to reconstruct passive social citizenship by applying rights-oriented institutional reforms to sectors of traditional social policy. Contrary to measures taken until 1999, the administration of Ricardo Lagos ushered in an institutional reform of the health-care sector that redefined the standards of the citizenship regime according to a neo-universalist approach to social policy. The system of Explicit Health-Care Guarantees

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(Garantías Explícitas en Salud, GES), initially known as Plan AUGE, entails a state obligation to ensure health care according to specific protocols for a wide, pre-established roster of pathologies. It is the absolute opposite of focalized policy, which is limited to the resources available. GES is an assurance established by law, which the state is bound to fulfil – or, if incapable of doing so, to pay for health care under the private system. The reform’s implementation was not geared to the participation or management of health-care networks previously developed in the sector. After 2006, major institutional changes proposed for social security led to reform. Similar proposals for education failed to obtain Congressional support, despite the secondary school student mobilization. The case of social security resembles the health-care reform in its approach and in the state’s guarantee of certain basic rights, but not in This reform was not achieved through broad citizen deliberation but by calling together a Presidential Advisory Commission. The same procedure had been attempted in the case of education (Aguilera 2009). In practice, however, this decision to call the commission involved negotiating the state’s role with the opposition during the pre-legislative stage while expediting the legislative procedure to make it more viable. A fourth form of linkage between the state and civil society goes through decentralized social policy agencies, municipalities and local communities. Although Chilean political institutions are unitary and centralized in nature, both primary health-care and primary and secondary education were transferred to municipalities in 1981. Municipalities were assigned additional responsibilities in the 1990s, and in 1992 these responsibilities were combined with those of regional institutions; Regional Councils were elected in 1993. To design and implement policy, the partly decentralized institutions were combined with central government services. These adhere to a centralized design but act by means of local agencies, often constituting new municipal agencies and programmes without setting up new decentralized institutions. Their evolution and effectiveness thus generally depend on their ability to set up local development programmes and create extensive associated networks with extra-local ramifications and direct political and sectoral links not focused solely on access to financing. A fifth trend comprises attempts to externalize links with civil society to mitigate the rigidities of institutional design and construct a more flexible interface. It is not a matter of new state institutions, but exclusively of allocating funds to quasi-official or interagency bodies with civil society’s participation in channelling public policy actions not in the purview of traditional institutions. In other words, this agenda is handled indirectly by externalizing certain functions to ad hoc, professional sections of civil society. It involves

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transferring resources to self-managed agencies that are nonetheless sustained by public funding via funds and programmes, for example, the environmental agency Fund for the Americas (Fondo de las Américas) and the Foundation for Overcoming Poverty (Fundación para la Superación de la Pobreza), particularly its Nationwide Service Programme (Programa Servicio País). Though their institutionalization has proven difficult, these programmes achieve more intensive participation dynamics and involve larger numbers of actors, partly ‘correcting’ the distortions in the political environment. The significance of these five distinctions is as follows: citizen participation agendas (policy trends and institutions), together with the public policy networks organized around them (spaces, mechanisms and content linking the state and social actors), become major components of democratic reforms of the state when they are able to connect the citizenry’s views with policies and practices involving civil society participation. However, as we have seen, such components have tended instead towards disconnection within Chilean public policy. Together with the traditional areas of social policy, new, specialized, socially oriented institutions were created to take over the innovative programmes intended to mark the difference from the military government. Such institutions focused on populations that were considered vulnerable and had not been specifically targeted by programmes and policies. A potentially multi-sector approach thus developed and a new ministry was created to oversee such institutions. This was the National Planning Ministry (Ministerio de Planificación Nacional – MIDEPLAN), based on the earlier National Planning Bureau (Oficina de Planificación Nacional (ODEPLAN). ODEPLAN was set up in 1967 by the Eduardo Frei Montalva administration (1964–1970) as a bureau in the purview of CORFO (the Chilean Development Corporation). Initially it was responsible for incorporating the planning function into the public apparatus, but after the military government discontinued that function in the 1980s, ODEPLAN managed the network of social subsidies directly linked to the Secretariat of the Office of the President. MIDEPLAN kept the reference to planning in its name but continued performing the same function it had during the military administration. Thus, despite its name, this ministry has no planning responsibilities. It is in charge of assessing and including projects in the public investment system and, since 1990, harbours institutions focused on vulnerable and extremely poor sectors. In 1998, President Frei announced the closing of MIDEPLAN, given that it filled no necessary role. The announcement did not materialize, however, and the agency took over the Sistema Chile Solidario in 2003 and Sistema de Protección Social in 2006, both forms of social security. Under Sebastián

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Piñera, whose administration began in 2010, a new institutional arrangement based on MIDEPLAN became the new Ministry of Social Development, which would again attempt to unite the various agencies involved. In the first post-transitions stage (1990–1991), various institutions were founded to target specific social sectors considered vulnerable: the National Youth Institute (Instituto de la Juventud, INJUV), the National Women’s Bureau (Servicio Nacional de la Mujer, SERNAM); the Special Commission for Indigenous Peoples (Comisión Especial de Pueblos Indígenas, CEPI), later the National Indigenous Development Corporation (Corporación Nacional de Desarrollo Indígena, CONADI); and the Solidarity and Social Investment Fund (Fondo de Solidaridad e Inversión Social, FOSIS) for social assistance to the very poor. The mid-1990s saw the birth of the Senior Citizen Bureau (Servicio del Adulto Mayor, SENAMA) for elderly people in need of assistance, and the National Disability Fund (Fondo de la Discapacidad, FONADIS) for the disabled. MIDEPLAN was also entrusted with the AGCI, which handled international social assistance and was later transferred to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Agencies specializing in new fields of public action were added some time later. They included the National Environmental Commission (Comisión Nacional de Medio Ambiente, CONAMA) and the National Narcotics Control Council (Consejo Nacional para el Control del Consumo de Estupefacientes, CONACE). Both agencies were placed in the purview of the Secretariat of the Office of the President, emphasizing the difference between the approaches taken by President Frei’s government and President Aylwin’s. Another agency established at the time was the National Consumer Bureau (Servicio Nacional del Consumidor, SERNAC), in the purview of the Ministry of Economic Affairs. Innovative institutions have generally been fairly ineffective at altering the main life circumstances of the groups they were created to assist; moreover, they have not managed to link effectively with one another, despite the fact that several belong to the same ministry. Nor are they adequately coordinated with traditional social policy, which still takes a sectoral approach as it lacks both social authority at the ministerial level and definite institutional location in the public sector. Nevertheless, by introducing concern for previously unconsidered actors into the civil service, these innovative bodies have participated in making such actors visible, expanded the governmental agenda and established direct relationships with the social sectors involved. Thus these institutions enjoy immense importance in the link with civil society – in contrast with their lesser importance in redirecting policies – as in the cases of the Law on Indigenous Peoples and the Law on Domestic Violence. They represent institutional responses to structured social demands negotiated at the beginning of the transition period. Enacting specific legal provisions has

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involved negotiation and transaction between government and opposition, considerably reducing the scope of the laws as originally promoted. This is elaborated below in a discussion of the Law on Indigenous Peoples. Social policy institutions founded in the 1990s keep up more permanent links with civil organizations in the sector and have set up many forms of participation at various levels of policy implementation. Notwithstanding, the commonly short-term format of projects open to competition reduces this participation to a purely instrumental dimension – being awarded the project – and precludes organization of more permanent forms of association. Meanwhile, the goals, times, modalities and results expected from participating activities tend to become technocratic or – at times – clientelist, inasmuch as they adjust to the agenda of the agency concerned, whose participation remains undefined. The multiplicity of specialized institutions calling on civil society independently contributes to ephemeral and fragmented associativity. What the analysis must consider, more than the creation of agencies, is the specificities of their widely varying designs and implementation. Such a focus results in a redefinition of civil society from the standpoint of state policy rather than that of the actors involved. In this perspective, a civil society with forceful political leanings in the 1980s has transformed into small groups associating to deal with specific problems. Policy thus returns to being dealt with exclusively in state surroundings. According to Lucy Taylor, the new definition is based on ‘finding local solutions for social problems perceived from an analysis of particularities of the local environment’ (1996: 780). Edmund Greaves (2003) follows the same line of reasoning. Such institutions have all operated in a system of bidding and competing for funds, mostly involving local nonprofit, professional or membership organizations. As a result, the public funding for small-scale projects has increased in view of manifold ‘funding windows’. This has significantly increased civil organizations’ co-funding of government programmes, as the projects almost invariably involve a major component of co-financing and/or volunteer work by the executing organization. In terms of financing, state-managed institutions have contributed to the subsistence of various social organizations involved at some point in project execution. Yet the system has exhibited remarkable limitations vis-à-vis development of an autonomous, more capable civil society: low total amounts committed and excessive project fragmentation, continual changes in competition requirements, brief project duration, the instrumental nature of participation and multiplication of windows. The situation is particularly acute for programmes that assist vulnerable groups, but somewhat less so for those responding to the social demands of the early 1990s.

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Policies in Response to New Social Movements The first set of policies addressing the concerns of new social movements arose from pre-1990 political negotiations with social movements that had joined the mobilization against the military regime. This mobilization was deeply rooted in the activities of organized civil society and, from 1983 on, in mass mobilization beyond the organizations. Political parties played a major role, though they were undoubtedly less influential than in the period prior to the military coup, given the repressive conditions. Social networks organized around the Roman Catholic Church, NGOs and trade unions reconstituted since 1978, among others, supported this mobilization. Notable among the movements were those representing interests and sensitivities previously unknown in Chilean politics; their subsequent treatment in the public agenda was also nontraditional in form. Not all these movements shared the same fate. The union movement, traditionally linked to centrist and left-wing politics, became a key player in designing governance during the transition and behaved accordingly. The new government, business and tunion representativeshammered out explicit, public, compulsory three-party agreements containing public policy decisions. Accordingly, organized workers explicitly supported the transition and obstructed any form of mobilization that might compromiseit. In other words, unionism recovered its previous role as a social actor, recognized as such. At the same time, as had happened regularly in the period prior to 1973, it subordinated union strategy to the political strategy that brought benefits from the state (Campero 1998: 411; Delamaza 1999: 387ff.). Notwithstanding, the old ‘urban, popular interest regime’ (Collier and Handlin 2010: 4) was not recovered, and union associativity also suffered the effects of the fragmentation discussed below. Other movements that had not taken part in politics prior to the mobilization of the 1980s lent novelty to the transition. They were not set up as political actors and lacked a history of association with political parties. The transition to democracy offered a chance to insitutionalize some of these groups’ demands, depending on factors examined below. In terms of classification, the important point is that such movements attained negotiation capabilities in the context of the political mobilization that fuelled the return to democracy. The forms of relationships they established vis-à-vis the new policy agendas are therefore worth examining. Each of the above cases had a different result owing to the interplay of political restrictions in Congress, forms of implementation, the roles of the various players – especially politicians and technocrats – and the ways in which the relevant groups’ participation was institutionalized. The cases of women and of the indigenous movement, discussed below, are the main instances of

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new actors institutionalizing forms of relationship with the state in the new political environment that followed the military regime, in terms of their origin, institutionalization and later evolution.

Women and Gender Equity: The Movement Leads to the Policy The women’s movement has perhaps most successfully institutionalized its agenda in public policy. SERNAM, the National Women’s Bureau, was created in 1990. Although it retained the name Servicio from the start, its female director was given the rank of minister, which did not happen in any of the other cases discussed below. In the policy sphere, tangible progress is evident in the implementation of resolutions adopted by the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, enactment of the Law against Family Violence as well as a National Equal Opportunity Plan (1994) with the respective regional specificities, and agreement on the terms of binding negotiations with other public agencies. Organization of SERNAM followed directly from actions by women’s organizations in the mobilization against the dictatorship (CEM 1993; Matear 1995; Franceschet 2003). In practice, however, the partial institutionalization of demands from the feminist movement weakened its organization considerably. Moreover, lack of consensus about the organization within the Concertación led to major divisions and hampered advancement of the movement’s goals. This situation persisted until the administration of Michelle Bachelet (Baldez 1999; T. Valdés 2002; M. Ríos 2003). With time, though, advances were consolidated and gender equity became part of mainstream administrative reform through the Improved Management Programmes, which equated meeting goals with salary raises for officials, applicable to all government agencies. These measures were enhanced under the Bachelet administration, and the gender equity policy acquired continuity and greater depth. Despite this progress, Congress has not passed legislation against discrimination, other initiatives regarding positive discrimination, or a law on quotas in political parties and Congress. Nor did the Concertación reach agreement on such matters as sexual and reproductive rights, so progress in that area remains minimal. For example, distribution by the Ministry of Health of the contraceptive known as the ‘morning after’ pill was thwarted by a resolution of the Constitutional Court at the request of right-wing members of Congress. The gender equity agenda and SERNAM’s institutional action have established specific forms of relations with civil society that are not based principally on the link with grassroots organizations. Most of these links depend on what has been called ‘an institutional base for gender equity’ (Guzmán

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2005) – a ‘multiple interface and cooperative institutionality’ set up between a public institution (SERNAM) and feminist think tanks, and supported by international cooperation and strong links with feminist movements in other countries (Varas 2006). This form of association enabled professional and technical personnel to move among the governmental sphere, think tanks and international organizations in the field throughout the two decades of the Concertación administration. On the other hand, the institutionalization of women’s demands is also clearly a cause of the weakening of the movement that bred it. Conceptually, this pattern is a variant of the relationship between social movements and state, specifically the one concerning ‘influence and institutional change’ (Goldstone 2003: 22). The part of the leadership that joined the new government agency was precisely the fraction that had been part of the political leadership, and of the Concertación superstructure, through the ‘Comando de Mujeres por el NO’, organized for the 1988 plebiscite, followed by the Concertación de Mujeres por la Democracia in the late 1980s. Another professional segment remained connected with the NGOs and think tanks, while the grass-roots organizations mostly joined the new municipalities and began to cooperate in local management. But whereas SERNAM called on the think tanks’ specialized consultants for policy formulation and implementation, both the NGOs and the grass-roots organizations suffered the loss of international financing and had no space for dialogue with the government. In the mid-1990s, starting with the summons to attend the 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995), various women’s groups still supported by international aid succeeded in reorganizing. The Iniative Women’s Group (Grupo Iniciativa Mujeres) monitored and assessed international agreements signed by the Chilean government at various international meetings (T. Valdés 2002).Other important organization was the Chilean Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights (Foro Chileno de Derechos Sexuales y Reproductivos) emerged in a more specific field. The Concertación government failed to support women’s demands in face of active opposition from the political right wing, sectors of the Roman Catholic Church and the DC. Supporters of a conservative agenda for women’s rights had become active in the field of civil society, developing their own network of NGOs self-styled as ‘pro-life’. Congressional discussion of the Divorce Law was stopped until resumed 2003. Approval required negotiations with the Roman Catholic Church and inclusion of the civil validity of Roman Catholic marriage. Typifying the difficulties involved in debating and formulating public policies in this field was the formation of the Pro-life Bench in the Chilean Congress. This bench, which cut across the political spectrum, existed to prevent debate on an initiative to depenalize abortion submitted by Concertación congresspersons.

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The elected legislators on the bench threatened to leave the governmental coalition if the initiative was put up for discussion. In general, women’s demands have become partly institutionalized and their activists professionalized, not only through the selective legitimization worked by government programmes, but also because questions of gender equality have penetrated the agendas of international organizations. The resulting active process of international networking has led, in the words of Chilean sociologist Marcela Ríos, to ‘weakening the links and associations among the various components and individuals circulating in the feminist field, and between these and other actors in civil society’ (2003: 322). While the professionalized sector with international connections retains considerable capability to influence debate and policy proposals – within the limits discussed above – the sector of grass-roots organizations must adapt to government supply without being able to influence it. In other words, in the case of women policies and institutions the agenda is a ‘strong’ one in terms of citizenship, as it possesses juridical support and state policy backing. Participation, however, is weak owing to the preceding social movement’s diminished relevance and lack of institutional structures. Nevertheless, public policy and intervening civil entities carved out a field of dispute to deal with gender equality, enlisting the participation of political actors, state agencies and civil organizations with multiple internal links. An institutions like SERNAM – or, much more so, CONADI – suffers constant tension from being at once a specialized government agency devoted to a specific sector of the population, and a space for that same sector’s representation or expression within the state. In the case of SERNAM, tension was acute when the women’s movement was more important, especially early on. The conflict, however, did not reach the institutional level, for SERNAM – unlike CONADI – has no mechanism at all for representing its main beneficiaries. In general, women’s organizations have found ways to ally with gender equity policy as they confront the right-wing opposition’s attempts to restrict its scope, as in the case of the ‘morning after’ pill (Franceschet 2006). Conservative groups have also intensified their action in civil society – mainly through the so-called pro-life groups and the Roman Catholic Church – concentrating on policies relating to sexual education, contraception, family planning, divorce and therapeutic abortion. Their strategy combines cultural and media influence with judicial action to restrict the scope of government action. In general, they direct criticism at the Ministry of Health (and secondarily that of Education) without directly confronting SERNAM and the innovative programmes. New relationships are thereby forged between policy, social movements and state, in this case through the link with the political opposition (Goldstone 2003).

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Political Weakness Gives Way to a New Indigenous Movement Another example of policy agendas that was negotiated with organized forces at the beginning of the transition is the indigenous movement and the gradual institutionalization of indigenous claims on the state. Initially, these claims fell within the purview of the Special Commission for Indigenous Peoples (Comisión Especial de Pueblos Indígenas, CEPI), the agency that drew up and achieved enactment of the Law on Indigenous Peoples. It also gave rise to the National Indigenous Development Corporation (CONADI) in 1996. As a policy area, it is strong in institutionalized participation but interacts inorganically with the prevailing model of governance and the policy implementation admissible under the political agreement. At the same time, it is weak from the citizenship standpoint, for it has failed to obtain the legal support proposed in the draft Indigenous Law. The situation began to change with the adoption of ILO Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in 2009. At this time, there emerged a new form of indigenous movement based on territorial claims, distanced from the national political parties and possessed of complex strategies for linking between local, national and international levels. It has triggered new government initiatives in terms of both programmes and political dialogue, with active support from international cooperation, particularly the IDB (Contesse and Delamaza 2005). In the early 1990s, there had been no reason to expect that by the end of the decade the indigenous movement would gain such importance in national life. In the course of the military administration, the land held in common by the Mapuche people had mostly been turned into individual property as part of an assimilation policy. In 1989 the new democratic administration, even before taking office, reached a formal agreement with the indigenous leaders at the so-called Parliament of Nueva Imperial. Authorities representing the various indigenous peoples, including the country’s largest ethnic group, the Mapuche. The commitment was to accommodate their demands and amend the ancestral conflicts between the Chilean state and indigenous peoples (Bengoa 1999a). Conversations and agreements at this parley, as at those held between Spaniards and Mapuches at the time of the conquest, were devoid of legal force and noncompulsory. Such agreements had political weight, but negotiation in Congress considerably reduced their scope. The Mapuche movement pursues vindication and recognition from three standpoints. They are not identical, do not bear the same weight, and are not uniformly embraced by all organizations or communities. Government policies have addressed each one differently, with different results. They are the peasant view, which privileges redistribution and is associated with poverty, landlessness and lack of control over natural resources; the ethnic view,

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which includes demands for multicultural citizenship, respect for their own culture and conditions for reproducing it, including control over their territory; and the ‘ethno-national’ view, which emerged in the 1990s and refers to demands for autonomy as a people or nation (Foerster and Vergara 2000). The Mapuche movement’s relationship with the state has been marked by the evolution of government responses to the demands for land and recognition. CEPI was organized in the first year of democratic government and worked to transform the Parliament of Nueva Imperial’s agreements into legal initiatives and policy instruments. The Indigenous Law, however, failed to represent the political project of the first administration of the transition period, which included constitutional acknowledgement of indigenous peoples, ratification of ILO Convention 169, and a draft law on development of indigenous peoples. The right-wing Senate majority rejected the first two initiatives (which were again rejected during the second administration), and the law was reduced to participation rights, land and access to and control of natural resources (Bengoa 1999a; Aylwin 2000). The creation of CONADI, albeit with less indigenous participation than originally planned, and the establishment of the Fund for Indigenous Territories and Waters (Fondo de Tierras y Aguas Indígenas, henceforth Land Fund), created to revert a process of land despoliation under way for more than a century, counted as major achievements. In this period, the strongest motivations for conflict included restrictions contained in the Law on Indigenous Peoples, the contradictory indigenous policy and the very evolution of Mapuche demands in an unmodified institutional context where the crux was control over the territory and natural resources (Mallon 1999; Aylwin 2000; Toledo 2001). For this reason, Mapuche organizations’ demands in the second half of the 1990s referred primarily to claims to usurped or ancestral lands, which the Land Fund policy had proved insufficient to address. Conflicts also arose over the skyrocketing expansion of the wood-based industry and later mining and infrastructure projects (for roads and hydroelectricity, both public and private). A final point of conflict was the lack of full recognition in terms of both resources and citizenship, which was part of the international platform of indigenous peoples (Toledo 2005, 2006; Silva and Rodrigo 2010). Whereas the vindication the Mapuche seek has been formalized in various ways by several Latin American states (Nicaragua, Colombia, Bolivia, Panama and Mexico after the Maya/Zapatista uprising), in Chile certain elite groups still consider it a serious threat to the country’s territorial and political unity. After sixteen years before the legislature, ILO Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples came into force as recently as September 2009, a year after its ratification. Chile is the thirteenth Latin American country to ratify that convention.

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Chilean solicitor José Aylwin described the evolution of indigenous demands as follows: ‘from a demand focused on the Mapuche rights to the land and participation of the state in the resolution of their affairs, there is now a demand focusing on recognition of indigenous territories, which had been denied so far in Chile, together with the right to autonomous political and cultural development inside such territories’ (2000: 11). The movement, however, is not only seeking territorial autonomy but also exercising a significant degree of autonomy regarding political parties. This is a major difference from the past, when each political party set up an indigenous front and each indigenous association then joined one of these parties or entered into an agreement with it. Meanwhile, the emergence of groups associated with specific territorial identities within the Mapuche world is an increasing trend. There are, for instance, the Lafkenche Territorial Identity and the Arauco-Malleco Coordinator, and others, connected to the various territorial groups of the Mapuche people: the Pehuenches, the Huilliches, et cetera.3 The conflict has involved episodic violence by Mapuche groups that have recovered land, other agricultural landowners and the police (Lavanchy 1999; Toledo 2007; Centro de Derechos Humanos 2008). Government policy has addressed the conflict with various strategies, including use of police. Whereas the Lagos administration resorted to Pinochet’s Antiterrorist Law to pursue the most radical groups, the Bachelet administration committed to refraining from enforcing it, following a report from the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples (Anaya 2009). The promise was not kept, and several cases of increasing use of police forces to handle the conflict have been observed. In addition, the political right wing and business associations persistently call for a strong hand in Mapuche territories (Toledo 2007). In the social field in the late 1990s, the faltering performance of the Land Fund inspired an ambitious development programme set up to empower it. This programme, however, did not deploy the regular instruments of indigenous policy, nor was it attached to CONADI. It was instead made possible by an IDB loan to the Chilean government. The Origins (Orígenes) programme is described as a ‘contribution to the development of Indigenous peoples … through their capabilities’. By means of this model, the communities ‘will consolidate a model of development that does not depend on a paternalistic subsidy but is based on the potential of the communities – which are responsible for forging their own development and destiny’ (MIDEPLAN 2005). But although the programme focused on participation and emphasized it, the IDB’s programme description lacked an explicit approach based on rights. Instead, it declares that the IDB’s main goal in Chile is to ‘support increased competitiveness, reduce social and regional inequalities, as well as

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deepen democracy through strengthening a more participative society and a more modern State’ (BID 2001). CONADI is the sole innovative social policy agency whose executive board is composed of a representative of the President of the Republic and representatives elected by the indigenous peoples named in the Law on Indigenous Peoples. Since its inception, this council has faced several conflicts initiated not only by the indigenous councillors but also by the presidential appointees, when they have disagreed with the official policy. Even the various Mapuche directors of CONADI have ended up facing off with the same president who nominated them. Institutionally CONADI has also undergone successive crises (further exacerbated during the Frei administration) set off by the construction of hydroelectric power plants in the Upper Bío Bío, which required the resettlement of Pehuenche families (Mallon 1999; Namuncura 1999). Faced with successive crises in indigenous institutions, the Lagos administration resorted to the same political dialogue mechanism employed in other conflicts and problems: the appointment of a pluralist commission of personalities. In this instance it was the Commission on Historic Truth and New Treatment (Comisión de Verdad Histórico y Nuevo Trato), chaired by the former president Patricio Aylwin. Government appointees of various political stances sat on the commission, together with leaders of the Mapuche movement, also appointed by the government. The commission issued a report in 2003, but the only one of its resolutions to be widely disseminated was the minority opinion of councillor Felipe Morandé, a right-wing economist and eventually Minister of Transport under Piñera. As before, Mapuche organizations did not support the report, even though their leaders had helped write it. For several months the government did not issue an opinion on this report that it had itself requested, and the document slipped into irrelevance. Though more acute, this situation recalled the delivery of the Report on Poverty and Equity, prepared by the National Council for Overcoming Poverty during the Eduardo Frei administration in 1996. This council, also appointed by the president, had issued a report that did not fully agree with government policy and lacked the support of the political right wing and the business sector, even though their representatives had written it (Bengoa 1999b). The Bachelet administration pushed for adoption of ILO Convention 169, which the Congress ratified in in September 2009. It also promoted the Nueva Imperial Agreement II, established an Indigenous Agenda and an inter-ministerial coordination body, and in 2008 named a Presidential Commissioner for Indigenous Affairs (Comisionado Presidencial para Asuntos Indígenas) responsible for proposing new actions to deactivate the conflict and enter into a Social Compact for Multiculturality (Centro de Derechos Hu-

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manos 2008; Programa Orígenes 2008). The commissioner had to resign in August 2009, and the matter was taken up by the Minister Secretary-General of the Office of the President. All these initiatives exceeded the capacity of CONADI, revealing institutional inadequacy.4

Similarities and differences between the Women and Indigenous Movement Regardless of differences between the cases of women and indigenous peoples, they exemplify the breadth and direction of political responses to conflicts of social origin. The negotiation tools included adoption of some of their demands in legislation and public policy instruments, new institutions, relatively broad policy trends, programmes and funds. In neither case was an adequate relationship successfully forged with the social movements behind the specific policy agenda or citizen reinforcement fully ensured, particularly in the case of indigenous peoples. In the case of women, the institutional achievement is greater and the policy more coherent. Nonetheless, it came at the cost of deactivation of the movement and fragmentation of demand. Moreover, the successes entailed a sort of coalition of gender policies, with comparatively more protagonism by a political-technical elite inside and outside the state, involving even President Bachelet. In the indigenous case, by contrast, institutional, legal and political instruments have been highly inadequate, and the movement is restructuring itself in accordance with new organizational and political guidelines not reflected in the political representation system based on the agreements of 1989. As Goldstone (2003) argued, social movements do not follow a general model but depend very heavily on institutional policy and its evolution. Agendas also differ in their triggers of conflict. In the case of women, the agenda of sexual and reproductive rights causes the most intense dispute, between the feminist movement and the Roman Catholic Church and conservative sectors. This conflict reaches into civil society itself, whose advances are limited by the positions of the conservative elites and whose feminist elite act inside and outside the government. In the case of the indigenous population, specifically the position of the Mapuche people, the dispute has major economic implications in the context of natural resources and territory. Thus the conflict is greater and includes more intensive police repression, all in the environment of a compulsive modernization of the Chilean economy based precisely on exploitation of natural resources and lacking sufficient juridical protection of ethnic minorities’ citizen and territorial rights. The historical and political origins of the conflict, which evidently exceeds social policy’s capacity to resolve it, must also be borne in mind. Accordingly, the initiative

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has passed successively from established institutions to other forms of political negotiation (Bengoa 1999a; Toledo 2001). Finally, the presence of international support for the public agenda is important. International agreements signed by the state of Chile and cooperation programmes too have made it possible to overcome some of the more significant institutional limitations and introduce innovations. Moreover, the international element has furnished backing and support for the demands of civil society via the women’s and indigenous people’s movements’ cooperative links with other countries, influential groups in developed countries and management strategies vis-à-vis international organizations. They have pressured the Chilean state to comply with international commitments in effect and have placed conditions on the development of certain projects. The Chilean government’s international strategy, which aims to position Chile among the currently ‘emerging’ nations, has played a part in this situation and increased the validity of current international standards.

Policies Focused on Vulnerable Groups: From FOSIS to Sistema Chile Solidario The other variant of innovative social policy comprises the institutions and programmes created in response to what was known as the ‘social debt’ (Raczynski et al. 1995). These government initiatives are not supported by social movements. They are less institutionalized; indeed, several are only funds for financing projects, so their links with policy overall are few. Moreover, the respective amounts of financing are much lower than those of traditional social policy, weakening their effect. Unlike the cases discussed above, this type of social policy defines actors by acknowledging a need to pay a ‘social debt’ by including them in an environment of better opportunities. The military government’s policy focus on poor and vulnerable groups was retained; this time, however, additional focus criteria included specific groups as well as the categories ‘poor’ and ‘extremely poor’, which refer not to actors but to heterogeneous aggregates. The case of the Solidarity and Social Investment Fund (FOSIS) is an interesting one. Organized in 1990 as an agency in the purview of MIDEPLAN, it was responsible for taking action against poverty by supporting the efforts of the beneficiary community itself – the urban and rural poor – consistent with NGO trends in the 1980s. In the switch from mobilization against the military regime to social policy in a democracy, the main type of organization of pobladores failed to become an interlocutor in new policies, as had been proposed in the 1980s. Social policy was reactivated nonetheless, and the housing policy significantly increased the number of soluciones habitacionales

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(housing solutions), reducing the housing deficit that had grown under the military administration and completely modifying the panorama of cities and towns as well as the urban movement itself (Segovia and Daskal 2000; Rodríguez and Sugranyes 2005; Aravena and Sandoval 2008). FOSIS, in contrast, was organized to solve the problems of the poorest sector using a strategy based on local and community participation (Taylor 1996). Once the social movement was deactivated, the government initiative gained strength, utilizing strategies that fragmented the movement further. FOSIS began with financial support obtained through international cooperation, which was replaced by budgetary allocations as of 1993. Benefiting from the methodological contributions of many professionals from the nongovernmental sector of the 1980s, it expanded the supply of government resources. It supports government-sponsored programmes and also welcomes community initiatives arising from participatory planning processes. In general, amounts of financing are very low and support short-term projects based on competition among social organizations and NGOs. Accordingly, FOSIS aid cannot feasibly support permanent activities but only the start of a project or its reinforcement at a given point in its development. FOSIS was a Chilean innovation based on the fondos de inversión social (funds for social investment) created in the context of palliative social policies for structural adjustment in Latin America. Such funds were widespread on the continent in the early 1990s. When they diminished, however, FOSIS endured because it was the sole fund in which foreign financing was not a major budget item (Siri 2003: 2), among other reasons. It owed its survival within the government mainly to its special focus on the ‘extremely poor’ and its way of linking with the community. Despite their minor effect overall, focalized programmes and funds have played a major role in structuring associativity, particularly in the poor sectors, where government activity is concentrated. In practice, these focused programmes provide poor groups with structured incentives and underline their position vis-à-vis the state as the last link in the chain of public policies. The Human Development Report of 2000 (PNUD 2000), pointing to the large number of various associations in Chile, described this associativity as fragmented, unconnected to networks and exercising little influence on the course of public policy. Social programmes designed for priority sectors, together with such government agencies as Chiledeportes (for sports and games) and the Agriculture and Livestock Development Institute (Instituto de Desarrollo Agropecuario, INDAP), work with forms of association among poor groups. In budgetary terms, the programmes that have expanded most since 1990 are those associating directly with popular groups. Their action, however, is not properly designed to ensure the target groups’ duration over time or the sustained de-

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velopment of their capabilities. Regardless of limitations in their institutional design, their main contribution to the development of civil society might well be something else altogether. According to Lucy Taylor, the redefinition of civil society via public policies since 1990 has utilized ‘the twin strategies of incorporation and marginalization’. She refers to the incorporation of local community groups and the exclusion of the political leaders of the pobladores. The policies applied appear to have been decentralization ‘and self-help projects set up through the auspices of FOSIS’ (1996: 780). The first attempt to coordinate a set of policies to combat poverty was the National Programme for Overcoming Poverty, coordinated by MIDEPLAN in 1994–1995. Adopting a territorial approach, it selected ninety-one highpriority communes for organizing public investment. Innovative programmes contributed methodologies for participatory diagnosis and formulation of unified communal demands (coordinated by the provincial governments). Nonetheless, the lack of a social authority capable of redirecting public provision towards the territories and the difficulty of obtaining results in the short term deprived this programme of the necessary political support, and it was quickly dismantled without assessment of its results (Bengoa 1999b; Raczynski and Serrano 2002). After 2003, the agendas of antipoverty programmes focused on the funding allocation system known as Sistema Chile Solidario, which initially operated through the Programa Puente managed by FOSIS (Palma and Urzúa 2005). The Ministry of Finance designed the system to curb the rising costs of social action, seen as haphazard and uncoordinated, and to freeze the number of persons living in ‘extreme poverty’ and ‘indigence’. The results of the Socioeconomic Description Survey (Encuesta de Caracterización Socioeconómica, CASEN) were first published in 1987, and since then the percentage of homes and individuals living below the so-called poverty line has steadily declined. However, survey results from 1996 onwards show that the percentage of families living in ‘extreme poverty’ remained stable and even tended to rise, despite the overall reduction in the number of ‘poor’ families. This finding led the Ministry of Finance’s Budget Department to critically assess antipoverty policies applied to date, focusing particularly on the network of assistance benefits granted by the public sector. It diagnosed a form of hard poverty that did not benefit from economic growth and failed to access public services owing to ignorance, isolation, lack of coordination and inadequate service coverage. The need to improve coordination of assistance benefits was recognized, as was the need to ensure service availability to extremely poor families. Cash bonuses to supplement family incomes and enable families to rise above the ‘indigence line’ were also discussed (Ruz and Palma 2005).5

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Simultaneously, FOSIS modified its operations, the better to focus its action against poverty. Its in-house assessment found scattered territorial scope, low levels of investment, many groups with small projects, and too much diversity of action (FOSIS 2002: 9). Its rearrangement, including the partial adoption of the conceptual Social Risk Management approach developed by the World Bank (Holzman and Jorgensen 2000), gave rise to Programa Puente, applied gradually to 226,000 ‘indigent’ families. It was mainly a psychosocial support strategy for female homemakers involving execution of a contract between the woman representing the family and a professional aide – usually a woman too, called a ‘family supporter’ – representing the government. Under the contract, the state granted the family priority access to subsidies and services, while the family undertook to send the children to school and complete the necessary applications, among other duties. The Ministry of Finance’s efforts to ensure supplementary income and subsidies to enable families to overcome indigence converged with FOSIS’s attempts to establish some form of protection from social risk and were designated a priority by the President of the Republic. The Chile Solidario social protection system was combined with Programa Puente as a means for families to access the system. Chile Solidario is not designed to overcome poverty but to ‘include extremely poor families in the social protection network of the State granting them guaranteed or preferential access (in accordance with the benefit). This requires interaction, readapting, and actual linkage of the entire existing programme supply.’ Chile Solidario is expected to ‘provide minimum guarantees for extremely poor families to live with dignity’ (FOSIS 2002: 6). Benefits include psychosocial support for a period of eighteen months, a Family Protection Bonus in decreasing amounts across four semiannual periods, guaranteed monetary subsidies and preferential access to promotion programmes, employment and social security benefits (Arenas and Guzmán 2003; MIDEPLAN 2004). A major innovation of Sistema Chile Solidario was introduction of the notion of guaranteed rights. But these rights are not universal, as in the traditional social democratic concept, but focused on people who have previously been defined as beneficiaries. In terms of its orientation to civil society, this approach to overcoming poverty targets scattered family units without considering territorial or community extension of the relevant social policy. That is, the system fails to contemplate the element of associativity and local networks in any of its actions. Instead, it provides direct assistance under contracts between the state and families living in poverty, provided their condition has been previously certified as such. Being basically a mechanism for rationalizing and focalizing social expenditure as much as possible, initially it also failed to contemplate a specific role for municipalities, which only channelled the services. In 2007, however, Programa Puente operations began to be transferred

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to municipalities. The paradox of Sistema Chile Solidario is that whereas it places families at the centre of the policy, obliging the state to respond to their needs in compliance with minimum standards, it also fails to provide for these same subjects’ participation in citizenship construction, leaving the fulfilment of needs to the public sector. In other words, the poverty agenda is split along the lines of citizen participation (Contesse and Delamaza 2005). The above system, once a major innovation in public policy implementation, has now been in force for twenty years. It applies particularly to the intersectoral linking of government services and establishes explicitly guaranteed aid for families understood to live in conditions of ‘extreme poverty’. The government agency itself seeks out the beneficiaries, that is, families previously identified through the Ficha CAS (socioeconomic description card), later known as the Ficha de Protección Social (social protection card). Having made contact, diagnosed the situation and executed the agreement, the family supporter becomes responsible for activating the relevant government offering. The guaranteed aid that the state commits to provide – doubtless the most novel feature – arises from a notion of rights. Though it lacks a universalist formula, it is conceptualized in terms of focalization, social integration and equity. To some extent, the rights assured under the programme are still bound to the focalized concept of programmes against poverty, so they cannot be formulated from a universalist standpoint. However, the capacity for innovation is limited by the scant institutional transformation of public policies and programmes. Indeed, the programme has featured no innovations in the contents or definition of aid offered by the government, or in the constitutional forms of managing social policy. It maintains and deepens the approach based on the poverty line, restricting it even more to the line of indigence, and focuses more on empowering the poor to act in the market and access social services than on transforming this market to make it more socially inclusive. The very diagnosis of hard poverty at the base of the system arose from a static definition of poverty. The first panel study to th Chilean population commissioned by MIDEPLAN, which compared 1996 and 2001, challenged this definition by revealing the extreme mobility of poor families (Castro and Katz 2004: 7). A subsequent study comparing 1996 and 2006 confirmed the diagnosis that poverty is not a static niche. In those ten years, some families remained in that condition (chronic poverty) while others entered it and left it (transient poverty). The former group accounts for only 4.6 per cent of Chilean population, according to the three CASEN studies for the period. The latter group, however, includes 31.2 per cent of the persons surveyed (Arzola and Castro 2009: 73). Subsequent development of Chile Solidario under the Bachelet administration included promotion of a ‘social protection network’ covering other

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forms of social aid, particularly to preschool children, and guaranteeing and raising pension minimums. Guaranteed social, economic and cultural rights are not yet stipulated in the Constitution and are not binding on the market but mainly support increases in cash benefits and government assistance. These social protection measures are backed by a dynamic, nonstatic diagnosis of poverty in view of the risks and vulnerabilities that cause an individual’s or family’s income to drop to the poverty level. The programme takes an ambivalent approach to the issues of citizenship and social participation. Its design and formulation omit all mention of citizenship, it contains no mechanism for social participation and its design is clearly top-down. Yet its tenets contain elements of social citizenship and emphasize aspects of what is known as passive citizenship. That is, they actually acknowledge the rights formally embodied in legal texts. Unresolved tensions exist between views based on rights and those concentrating exclusively on the focalized supply of public funds. Beyond this, however, the aspects of social deliberation and decentralization associated with so-called active citizenship are omitted. Introducing participative approaches like these would involve opening the debate and social dialogue on protection from risk and redistribution of welfare for development, two untouched areas of social policy in Chile. Change will depend on political conditions suitable for incorporating popular sectors, rather than on the mere redirection of a social programme (Collier and Collier 2002). The system finds inspiration in a notion of social rights that it seeks to extend to extremely poor families, although, as other studies have observed, ‘this does not mean that the specific objectives of the system should include strengthening citizenship, or that an explicit definition thereof should be included in the design. Indeed, none of these things happen’ (Ruz and Palma 2005: 97). Linking the supply of cash benefits to performance of certain activities to which the families are committed involves advancing beyond the concept of passive citizenship and approaching the parameter of active citizenship, even if under other conditions inimical to the notion of social rights (M. Sepúlveda 2009). According to Chilean sociologist Vicente Espinoza, the most important innovation included in Chile Solidario … is the introduction of ‘contract rights’. This approach to the integration of the most seriously disadvantaged persons dignifies and legitimizes the group receiving aid, because it shows in practice its willingness to integrate. Solidarity takes the form of a provision for amending an inequality and does not victimize the beneficiary group. (2004: 176)

The system places various limitations on the notion of citizenship. On the one hand, there is its implicit nature; on the other, its focalized approach

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makes access to benefits depend on technical-administrative identification of beneficiaries and participation in a standardized service format. The minimum conditions a family should meet to be in a position to leave the programme were decided with no political or technical public debate on the subject – in fact, the definition resulted from negotiations among government agencies and concerned forms of implementation, not the content of services or ‘minimum conditions’ for either the beneficiaries or the implementers, municipalities or professional persons acting as family supporters. Contrary to events during the Ricardo Lagos administration, shortly after the Bachelet administration took office it conducted an extensive consultation with political actors, technicians, local institutions and beneficiaries on amendments to the social description card called the Ficha CAS, later the Ficha de Protección Social (MIDEPLAN 2006). However, in 2010 Felipe Kast, Minister of MIDEPLAN under the Piñera administration, announced a further amendment to the Ficha de Protección Social, showing the weak institutionalization of such efforts. In 2011 the proposed amendment sparked various street demonstrations by pobladores who actively opposed it. In this setting, the agenda for overcoming poverty was reduced to indigents’ access to the public network, separate from the agenda of citizen participation elaborated in a draft law on voluntary association, enacted in early 2011. The Bachelet administration worked to expand the Sistema Chile Solidario into the Social Protection System (Sistema de Protección Social) by means of a programme designed to increase care for preschool children (Sistema Chile Crece Contigo), homeless persons and senior citizens. The resulting Social Reform of 2008 assures a basic pension to all Chileans irrespective of their ability to make contributions in the course of their working life, including women who have not engaged in gainful employment. This plan is clearly inspired by a notion of universal citizenship. The change appears to suggest a fresh link between innovative programmes and traditional social policy, connected by the notion of social ‘protection’. In time, such a notion might overcome the major limitations observed in innovative programmes (MIDEPLAN 2004). The Sistema Intersectorial de Protección a la Infancia Chile Crece Contigo was enacted on 1 September 2009. The novel social policy agenda addressing extreme poverty had no organized political counterpart for the entire period under discussion. It has evolved from working with communities organized at the micro, local level to emphasizing families detached from the social network where they belong and selected according to their ranking in poverty surveys. Its flexibility has enabled it to promote different organizational dynamics to face neighbourhood and local problems. However, it has been unable to affect the structuring variables of its beneficiaries’ poverty or empower their participation, other than in carrying out neighbourhood works and programmes.

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In sum, Programa Puente and Sistema Chile Solidario have made it possible to manage the tension among the antipoverty policy’s focuses, that is, the focalized subsidies implemented during the military government, the notions of mobilizing the resources of the affected sectors themselves and the recent emphasis on social protection effected through social management of risk. Later, based on this design, the government supply of services was expanded through the Social Protection System, which is making progress in terms of guaranteed social rights. Under Piñera’s government this system was partially abandoned and substituted by a new design: the Ethical Family Income (Ingreso Etico Familiar), which uses a mix of different subsidies.6 The guidelines of these policies and programmes do not stress the notion of citizenship, focusing instead on notions of overcoming poverty, social empowerment, or equal opportunity. Under the Bachelet administration, attention shifted anew to the notion of social protection. All these terms convey the assumption that there is a labour market that people join once they have achieved certain minimum conditions enabling them to act for themselves. The programmes’ guidelines do not mention construction of citizenship as a political category implying deliberation in public affairs. Even the implementation of Sistema Chile Solidario, partly based on a notion of rights, restricted citizenship to a matter of individual action, basically expressed in access to public benefits and more autonomy to go into business or take a job. Of course, the administration of Sebastián Piñera reinforced this last viewpoint, labelled as access to more opportunities, without completely discontinuing the system.

Reconstruction of Citizenship through Institutional Reforms Focused on Rights: The Case of Health Care As of 1990, the traditional sectors of social policy – health care, education, housing and social security – were prioritized for allocation of resources, mainly for construction and improvement of infrastructure, increased availability of care and personnel wages. However, the forms of institutions established by the military regime remained unchanged in terms of allocation of resources, private sector participation, legal regulations and municipal responsibility for services (Delamaza 2005a; Fernández and Ochsenius 2006). The municipal responsibility for primary health care and educational establishments was not altered, nor was the National Health Service (Servicio Nacional de Salud, SNS) restored. No change was made to the system of educational grants or to budgetary allocations for health care. Meanwhile, the Health-care Insurance Institutions (Instituciones de Salud Previsional, ISAPRES), privately managed and serving higher-income sectors, were retained. Publicly aided private education, funded by the state but under pri-

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vate management, was also kept intact. Here, nonprofit organizations, mostly linked to religious orders, appear side by side with ‘education entrepreneurs’ who also manage public primary and secondary schools. In these sectors, therefore, innovative forms of association with civil society are not reflected in new social institutions but remain tied to specific programmes with little institutional or political effect and no clear links to the general objectives of the sector. Great differences divide the sectors. Whereas health care has developed manifold participative initiatives, education has hardly advanced at all. In the health-care sector, for instance, creation of the Healthcare Programme and Fund for the People (Programa and Fondo de Salud con la Gente) (1995), the Hospital Development Council Programme (Programa de Consejos de Desarrollo de Hospitales) (1995) and the Committees of FONASA Members (Comités de Usuarios FONASA) (1997) was accompanied by numerous programmes targeting specific sectors of the population and including forms of participation. Information was made available, and public debates addressed the sector’s reform (2001), as well as the Bureaus of Information and Complaints (Oficinas de Información y de Reclamos), the Participation Unit (Unidad de Participación) (2002) and the Intersectoral Councils of the Assistance Network (Consejos Intersectoriales de la Red Asistencial) established under the reform in all regional services (Fernández 2006: 40). In education, however, the first school councils, regulated by law, were not set up until 2005. Although they are a form of participation by the entire school community, they have no say in school decisions. The Ministry of Education’s official presentation of the supporting materials for establishing the councils reads as follows: ‘The functions of the Council shall be of a consultative, informative, resolutive and purposeful nature (only when the supporter so decides)’. After summarizing matters on which the council should be informed and consulted, it adds: ‘Important: the school council has no powers over technical-pedagogical matters, which are the responsibility of the supervisory or management team [original emphasis]’ (Ministerio de Educación 2005). Instituted as a formality, these councils contrast with school councils elsewhere, for instance in Spain, where the school council shares in the selection of the headmaster, adoption of the budget and many other school decisions (A. Martínez 1996). They also differ substantially from their counterparts in Argentina and Brazil, which provide local-level guidance in educational matters and links to the appropriate public institutions. In Chile, the participatory trend generally evolved at the margins of traditional social institutions, occasionally supported by international cooperation projects. However, the institutional reform of health care implemented in 2000 had an institutional outlook based on rights and operated on a basis of social guarantees, introducing notions of universalism not previously con-

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sidered. The focus on rights stems from the universal, progressive nature of economic, social and cultural rights. In addition, the literature discusses various sets of principles guiding policies of this nature: identification of the poor, equity, nondiscrimination, participation, empowerment, accountability and transparency of concepts and practices (Nyamu-Musembi and Cornwall 2004; Abramovich 2006; Sengupta 2006). Although the Chilean reform is based on citizen rights, its implementation followed a top-down model unconnected to the innovative programmes addressed to civil society that the sector itself was carrying out. Notwithstanding, the focus on rights and the emphasis on health care’s role in citizen participation led to a needed reformulation of sectoral objectives and integration of efforts. The ensuing debate focused on the appropriate institutions for the purpose. Accordingly, the problem has gone from marginal or secondary status to inclusion in the mainstream of the sector’s reform. The organizational culture of the health-care sector should be examined together with the basic concepts behind the health-care reform. Players remaining in the sector with some degree of power, even after the privatizing reforms of the 1980s, were key to promoting the reform. Also warranting emphasis is the presence of a critical mass of university graduates and users of the system who gave the system a different momentum from that in the case of education. This critical mass formed in relation to certain remaining traits of the historical institutional practice of social insertion, which has been associated with state health care since 1952, when the National Heath Service was organized. The health-care sector clearly exhibits the various geological strata of the state – or, according to one assessment of modernization in Chile, it reveals the remnants of past modernizing projects in the present Chilean State (Van der Ree 2007). The state, however, does not act by itself, and reform must be fought for and negotiated with the powerful private interests present in the sector. ISAPRES, the private health insurers covering the wealthiest 20 per cent of the population, defend for-profit health-care. The College of Physicians defend public health-care but also protect their own corporate prerogatives and freedom in the market. Other health-care associations, working in the state sector only, also play a role in labour affairs and defence of a public healthcare model in which the state predominates. Unlike poverty policy, this sector involves numerous actors inside and outside the state (Puentes 2010). They are a source of dissent and consent, as in discussions of the reform conducted by the Ministry of Health, College of Physicians and professional associations, examined in Quiero (2005) and also in Infante and Paraje (2010). These considerations call for a reconstitution of the genealogy of sector policy, including discussion of the ongoing divergence between the focus on rights and the focus on participation, and the difficulty of combining both

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in a mixed (public/private) health-care system. This again elicits comparison with the education sector, which appears to have no tradition, organizational culture or link with civil society, nor any form of major citizen participation, its dialogue and bargaining being based on grievances vis-à-vis the College of Teachers. The health-care reform is part of a general Latin American movement influenced by the weakness or strength of the historical construction of the state, the degree of opening to private sector participation in the services supplied or insurance coverage, the extent of poverty, the degrees of exclusion and the levels of inequality in the various countries. The Chilean reform’s overall approach partly contends with the consequences of the privatizing reform of 1981 and partly uses the models of other countries in the region as a reference (Aedo 2001; Annik 2005). It is designed to roll back the liberal changes promoted in the 1980s, which undermined basic solidarity and universality, deconcentrated health-care functions and severely weakened the public sector. As a result, citizens faced the rise of a private market supplying better services but subject to minimal regulations (Sojo 2001; Fernández and Ochsenius 2006). Corrections introduced in the 1990s, associated with policies and instruments of recovery and improved effectiveness in management, did not necessarily improve policy quality or resolve social inequalities but led to further transformation processes designed to establish new social balances towards the end of the decade. The reform introduced regulations setting performance targets for the market as well as for public institutions that supply health-care services. It also established a system of explicit health-care guarantees (GES) – that is, guarantees that are demandable, including in court – applicable to increasing numbers of prevalent pathologies among the population (Arrau 2002; Erazo 2004). The novelty of this approach is that it reintroduces the notion of universal rights, which social policy strayed from in the 1980s by adopting the focus approach. The state commits to providing care for a given set of pathologies in compliance with designated protocols of time, cost and quality, and is bound to seek out and finance private health-care if it is unable to meet its commitments. The requirement that the state purchase health care from the private sector whenever it is itself unable to provide it was what neutralized the opposition of the private health-care sector, as it thereby gained a sizeable ‘business niche’. The right-wing opposition in the Congress did manage to scuttle parts of the health-care reform and curtail its scope. The two portions of the law not passed were the Solidarity Fund (Fondo Solidario), meant to reform the purely individual nature of health-care insurance, and the Statute of Patient Duties and Rights (Estatuto de Deberes y Derechos del Paciente), which strengthened the rights guarantee of male and female citizens (Fernández

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and Ochsenius 2006). The latter was eventually approved in 2012. Paradoxically, health-care technicians guided the process of setting priorities and establishing guarantees, whereas the citizenry played no part. In other words, citizenship was strengthened by legal protections, but it was done without citizen participation. Amendments to management included the introduction of promotion and prevention in health care; the family health-care approach; follow-up for the duration of a person’s or family’s life cycle; networking among administrative levels of health care; and citizen participation in development, follow-up and control of public policy. The appointment of regional health-care authorities supported by consultative councils and the promotion of hospital autonomy by way of pilot cases emphasized the decentralization of authority (Aedo 2001; Fernández and Ochsenius 2006; Vergara 2007). The context of institutional reform offered different possibilities for citizens’ participation and linkage with civil society, aimed at increasing institutionalization and effectiveness. This point was partly considered in designing the reform, but the pressure to set up new forms of participation arose from the dynamics of the reform itself and took various shapes. To begin with, the very fact that the system of explicit guarantees established enforceable rights opened the possibility of actual enforcement of such rights – possibly by court order, which obviously would increase the system’s costs exponentially. Setting up new forms of participation to ensure the entire system’s more effective operation is in the interests of the health-care services themselves, though this normally is part of the rights-based approach anyway (García and Miranda 2011). On the other hand, an interesting set of local experiences furthered and operationalized several of the overall goals of the reform, some of which became referents for the sector (Fernández and Ochsenius 2006; Fernández 2007). The half-term assessment of the 2000–2010 health-care objectives, performed in 2005, showed high performance levels in medical care, vaccination and general coverage by the system as a whole. However, results were highly deficient in regard to personal conduct and prevention (of obesity, alcoholism, addiction to dangerous substances, at-risk behaviour, mental illness, environmental risks, etc.). In response, the course of efforts was altered in two directions: improving and increasing regulation to provide an effective protection framework accounting for so-called social determinants of health; and strengthening mechanisms for involvement and participation by the general population and other major public policy sectors, including education, environment and labour (Ministerio de Salud 2002; Jadue and Marín 2005). The Bachelet administration deepened citizen participation in the healthcare sector. The initial concept had been restricted to improving the handling of unresolved problems, so the next step was to incorporate various mecha-

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nisms for organized community participation. In practice, these mechanisms mostly involve direct users of the system; some experiences, however, have tended towards more extensive composition. For example, the Coquimbo Consultative Council on Health Care (Consejo Consultivo de Salud) led the call for a communal plebiscite and was the first of anyone in Chile to collect the large number of signatures and meet the legal protocols necessary to force a city council to hold a plebiscite.7 The case of participatory health-care budgets is an interesting one. Initially an adaptation of the Brazilian method used to manage the health care service in Talcahuano, they were adopted as a national policy by the Ministry of Health and put into practice in many other agencies across Chile (Fernández 2007; Delamaza and Ochsenius 2010a). This process was reinforced institutionally by forming participation units in all agencies and training civil servants accordingly. However, the change of government in 2010 set back the incipient development of a policy of participation in health care. The new priorities are to introduce private management techniques into hospital organization and reduce hospital debt. According to another announcement, users may now choose private or public health care. The participation unit was deactivated and large numbers of officials laid off, leaving the future of the participation measures uncertain. Health care reform is an ongoing process that primarily emphasized recovery of the rights-based approach and pursuit of an understanding with the private sector, without relinquishing the mixed form of the sector. Paradoxically, its implementation has been top-down, despite its emphasis on building . Nevertheless, the health-care sector’s institutional tradition, along with the relevant civil servants’ favourable disposition to participation, has opened wide spaces for formulating participative policies in health care. Though still mostly addressed to direct users, these policies have tended towards more extensive, binding, public forms of citizen participation.

The Complex Interface between Society and State at the Local Level The main traits of the post-1990 decentralization process reveal several features of the governance model. The communes recovered their ability to elect mayors and city councillors, who makes up the political structure of commune administration. Yet the institutional architecture of the municipality remained unchanged, and both the municipal management of services allocated by the military regime and the internal structure of the municipality were retained. As for forms of institutional participation, only the semi-corporate types of mechanisms created in the 1980s were adapted: the communal development

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councils (Consejos de Desarrollo Comunal, CODECO) were replaced by communal socioeconomic councils (Consejos Económico Sociales Comunales, CESCO). Newly established regional councils (Consejos Regionales, COREs) represented a level of regional administration based on indirect democracy with little legitimacy. Transfers of investment funds gradually increased, however, and the intendencias – regional representatives of the President of the Republic – were supplied with professional staff who composed regional governments (Gobiernos Regionales, GOREs) The GOREs and COREs became the techno-political interlocutors of public policy, challenging citizen participation, effective regional management and links among levels of management.

Chile: Exceptional Decentralization in Latin America Chile’s characteristically centralized political structure has subsisted despite various decentralizing and federalist movements, particularly during the nineteenth century. Liberal fractions supporting a more even distribution of power between Santiago and the other provinces were defeated on the battlefield in 1828, 1851 and 1859 (Salazar and Pinto 1999). Since 1925, decentralizing efforts have aimed to foster overall economic development, and political decentralization, that is, the redistribution of power between the centre and the regions, provinces and communes, has been shelved (Angell 1999; E. Montecinos 2005b). Chile is thus an exception in Latin America, as its decentralization has not gone hand in hand with political liberalization and democratization. As British analyst Alan Angell said, ‘even at times of the worst political crisis in Chile, there has been very little questioning of the central state and defence of decentralization has not been proposed by any side as a means to control the crisis’ (1999: 135). Angell’s statement has been particularly valid since 1859, as no more regionalist rebellions have taken place. What did take place, as of the mid-1960s, was a set of initiatives commanded by the technicians of the Executive, who sought to establish measures leading to more balanced development (E. Montecinos 2005b). The military government took the same direction, with added concern for populating the territory, frontier control and other conditions of a geopolitical nature. With slight amendments, the military technocracy took over the technicians’ developmental proposal to reduce the number of regions in the country, putting an end to the traditional administrative political division into twenty-five provinces. The proposal prepared by the developmentalists of the Frei Montalva administration entailed dividing the territory into eleven regions and one metropolitan area, according to urban development criteria, and the existence of one urban hub for each region, together with an associated urban space

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(Boisier 2000; E. Montecinos 2005b). The ODEPLAN technicians who had elaborated this regional division in the 1960s continued their work under the military government, and the military took up their proposals with geopolitical designs (Boisier 2000). The same technicians, more or less (Sergio Boisier, Esteban Soms and Juan Cavada, among others), would handle issues of decentralization under the Concertación administrations (ibid.). At the time of the military coup, Chile was divided into twenty-five provinces that had been slowly created according to the rules for peopling territories set forth in the Constitution of 1925, until the entire national territory was divided (E. Montecinos 2005b). In the 1960s, the developmental aim of creating macro-development regions did not necessarily involve dismantling the provinces’ political structure; the goal was rather to group them in terms of economic development. The military regime carried this proposal out to a considerable extent, turning it into a new political-administrative order. In 1976, eleven macro-regions and one Metropolitan Area became twelve regions and one Metropolitan Area. Obviously, during this period the regime had neither political opposition to contend with nor representation variables to consider. Two provinces that lost their status as such succeeded in ranking as regions again in 2009, i.e. Los Ríos (formerly the province of Valdivia) and Arica-Parinacota (formerly the province of Tarapacá). In accordance with the decentralization policy, which reduced the functions of the central government, in 1974 the military regime established regional planning secretariats as agencies to collaborate with the Intendentes. Subsumed under MIDEPLAN in 1990, these secretariats again became part of the regional governments as of 2005 (Secretaría Metropolitana de Planificación 2009). Iron control of local politics accompanied these measures. High-ranking officers of the Armed Forces and carabineros were appointed to head the regions as well as the provincial gobernaciones, while civilian supporters of the regime, also appointed, took office as mayors of the communes. In this highly restrictive, controlled political environment, local political contexts – products of historical development, albeit centralist – gave way to an administrative system focused on geopolitical and development goals through an act of political will of the administration at the time. The neoliberal component found expression in the transfer of health care and education services to the municipalities, which reduced the size of the central state and relieved the pressures on it. After 1990, democratization covered only municipal reform, focusing mainly on modifying the electoral system to restore traditional local authority. The democratic government’s plans did not include regional reform, nor did the stance of the opposition. In practice, ‘the regional reform … took place as an unlooked-for result of this [democratic communal]restoration’

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(Mardones 2006: 19). According to Mardones, the makeup of regional governments was in fact a government concession to the right-wing opposition, which sought to recover its reduced powers in municipal terms, an outcome that seemed inevitable. This led the right wing opposition to propose the creation of a new type of body, the CORE, in which the governing coalition would share power with it, thus compensating for its loss of the monopoly it had enjoyed over the municipalities until 1992 (Boisier 2000; Mardones 2006). The COREs and GOREs were neither part of the democratizing project nor an attempt to restructure political power. They were designed to deconcentrate public investment and modernize the government apparatus. Meanwhile, the structure of the Executive – the presidential system reinforced by the Constitution of 1980 – ensures central political control and control of economic policy. For this reason, Angell wrote, ‘in the government there is no autonomous agency with the power and the will to deepen the process of decentralization and counteract the power of the central ministries’ (1999: 145). In fact, the body in charge of decentralization, the Office of the Undersecretary for Regional and Administrative Development (Subsecretaría de Desarrollo Regional y Administativo, SUBDERE), is in the purview of the Ministry of Interior, which obviously is not an agency inclined to decentralize power. Therefore, throughout the post-1990 process, ‘the need to place decentralization on the immediate political agenda was quite meagre [and as a result] was an administrative reform rather than a governmental reform’ (Angell 1999: 36). José Antonio Ábalos (1993), another specialist on the subject, is of the same opinion. This decentralization was designed according to the needs of the model of governance: a transition negotiated by a reduced elite that needed to retain central control of the process, the predominance of technicians’ decisions over citizen deliberation, a ‘low intensity’ democracy with little space for uncertainty, and a set of successful social policies that weakened the decentralization motive for equity’s sake. The decentralizing process, initially imposed from above, has nonetheless produced subnational actors – especially the municipalities – as well as a growing demand for democratization of the regional governments. In September 2009, for example, Congress approved a constitutional amendment allowing direct election of regional councillors in 2013, twenty-one years after the first subnational democratizing reforms. But whereas regional governments’ structure remains separate from civil society, municipalities have developed in a way that identifies them as spaces where relationships with civil society occur, and a given model or tendency of linkage between civil society and citizenry is apparent. The municipal level has acquired increasing importance in programme execution and channels

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considerable public funds. Decentralization, with its varying features and timing, has affected local spaces, bringing increasing degrees of self-management and complexity to their operation. Diverse policies and public programmes have been transferred to the local sphere. The transfer in 1981 of primary and secondary schools and primary outpatient clinics to the municipalities caused major underfinancing in the municipal sector (Rufián 2005). In terms of resources, the Chilean municipalities account for 2.8 per cent of national GDP and 13 per cent of general government expenditure. Local expenditure averages 14.8 per cent in OECD countries but only 6.4 per cent in the countries of South and Central America. In other words, the Chilean municipalities are the smallest link in a very small government (Garrido 2007). As municipalities underwent political democratization in 1992, implementation of the new social agenda’s various programmes began. In 1999, city councils acquired new powers in the fields of economics, production, environment and equal opportunity. Local action instruments became generalized as Communal Development Plans, Indicative Plans and Neighbourhood Development Funds, a change that technified local management even as the central government, with World Bank funding, developed successive programmes to strengthen and modernize local administrations (A. Díaz 1998; E. Montecinos 2007). Only in 2012 was the structure of municipal participation modified by introducing communal socioeconomic councils (CESCOs), consultative bodies composed of leaders of grass-roots, special-purpose and other major organizations in the communes. The CESCOs are in fact an adaptation of the communal development councils (CODECOs), which the military government modelled on corporate, depoliticized participation (A. Díaz 1998; Greaves 2003). However, these bodies lack legitimacy vis-à-vis both the population and the authorities, and their powers are very limited. In 2005, only 19 per cent of the population surveyed in six regions of Chile said they knew of a CESCO in their commune. A survey conducted on a sample of local leaders in 2003 had a similar finding (Collier and Handlin 2010). In both rural areas and cities, the municipality has become the referent for a major portion of associative action in popular sectors. Given the lack of institutions, it is not a place of confluence or territorial expression of popular demands. However, following the state reforms of 1981 and later, the municipality emerged as a possible venue – in occasions the unique one – for citizen’s demands now that health care and education, management of the assistance network and the new social policy programmes were channelled through it. A survey conducted in two communes in Santiago found that the predominant action taken by neighbourhood leaders was to come to city hall, specifically to the community development bureau (Dirección de Desarrollo

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Comunitario, DIDECO) to seek solutions to their various problems, while nothing similar went on in agencies at other levels of the state (Greaves 2003). A DIDECO, however, is a specialized structure responsible for managing the link with organizations – helping them to obtain juridical status, for instance – and granting assistance. Accordingly, it remains disconnected from the agencies that process and solve the inhabitants’ traditional problems involving municipal works, garbage removal, taxes, housing permits, security, traffic and so on. The DIDECO’s are even farther removed from municipalities’ new responsibilities as of 1981 – health care and education – which are often managed by autonomous corporations chaired by the mayor but lacking accountability mechanisms and citizen control. The DIDECOs usually cover all new agencies that target specific groups – women, seniors, youth. The transfer of functions to the municipality and greater linkage and contact with the community, especially the poor groups in the commune, have caused a manifold associativity, critically narrow in scope and lacking interlocutors beyond the municipal DIDECO itself. Groups of pobladores tend to take a petitioner attitude towards the municipality, with requests that the latter is far from being able to meet. Meanwhile, local administrations are ruled by assistentialism (charity made by public services to the poor, without any development strategy, producing dependence on the municipality) and forms of clientelism within the margins of the scant available resources. Local government performance is not subject to any oversight or citizen control. Mechanisms established by law are lack teeth, and associated tradition or culture is absent among both organizations and staff. In 1999 it became mandatory to issue communal ordinances on participation, including public accountability and other mechanisms to promote transparency in management, but so far no methods have been devised to actually incorporate such instruments into citizen oversight. An investigation of several gender-related municipal programmes in the Metropolitan Region showed that only one (Oficina de la Mujer, in Lo Espejo) had built up the women leaders’ capacity to assess the office budget and compare it with the municipal budget (Provoste and Valdés 2000). Experiences like that of the La Granja Communal Regulatory Office, founded in the early 1990s, were discontinued and have not been replicated elsewhere. Other experiences funded directly by international cooperation have not gone on long enough to have lasting effect (Hewitt 2004). The homogeneity of municipal institutionality throughout Chile makes it difficult to tailor participation to suit the traditions and styles of each locality. Rural municipalities, for instance, are at a disadvantage because the model in use is urban. Political inertia is an additional factor. For instance, even though regulating the CESCOs and issuing ordinances for citizen participation according to local circumstances is in the purview of current municipal

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law, very few municipalities have put this into practice. Instead most have followed the format proposed by the Chilean Municipalities Association (Asociación Chilena de Municipios). The resulting effect is inevitably participation not involving a commitment for a community not originating the ordinance. In February 2012, at new type of consultative body, the civil society organizations council (Consejo de Organizaciones de la Sociedad Civil, COSOC) began to replace CESCOs.

Local Innovations In various Latin American countries, the local sphere is undergoing rapid transformation as it copes with more extensive functions, new funding mechanisms, greater autonomy of indigenous municipalities and other changes. This has happened in Bolivia, with the Law on People Participation of 1994; in Mexico, with the reforms of 1996 and 1999; and in Peru, where in recent years participatory budgets have been established as a requirement for obtaining funds (Salman 1998; Oxhorn 2001b; Remy 2005; Canto 2006). Municipal public policy agendas have expanded significantly in term of fields covered, administrative functions, participating actors and resources involved. The traditionally restricted situation has tended to shift towards an extended and ‘integral’ agenda (Cabrero 2004: 79). Insofar as the agenda grows and becomes more complex, ‘it requires the participation of more actors. That is, it becomes denser’ (ibid.: 75). A ‘citizen’ approach to management inform some innovative experiences that fortify citizens’ capacities for deliberating and participating without sacrificing effectiveness of results, for these experiences’ ‘dynamics and results depend very much on the appropriate competencies of the actors for the tasks they undertake’ (Bebbington et al. 2005: 14). The depth of participation in a township or locality is not only a function of the force of social mobilization. Other critical factors include coherence between the authorities’ powers and political will; availability of funding as compared with demand; links, coordination and bargaining capability to implement bottom-up policies; capacity building for civil servants; appropriate technical instruments; and the capabilities of the organizations and social networks themselves (ibid.: 15). Municipal innovation in Chile takes place in a general context that, as stated, limits its processes. But despite obstacles, the trend has persisted and developed over time. The five successive competitions for the Innovation and Citizenship Prize (Premio Innovación y Ciudadanía) from 1999 to 2006 indicate that innovative initiatives with a citizen-strengthening component are in effect in nearly 30 per cent of Chile’s communes (Delamaza and Fernández 2006). These include various types of municipality differing in size, economic resources, geographic area and political leadership. Though only a

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limited number of townships generate manifold and reiterated innovations, the latter have a much more extensive range, in one way or another. That is, innovative trends that empower citizensare emerging across the nation, but they take the form of specific units, sometimes isolated from each other even inside their own city hall. Rather than adhering to political hypotheses that are or supported by the central government, local initiative has inspired the work of many civil servants of various ranks and mayors of varying political trends, as well as the presence of certain public programmes and prior organizational traditions (Delamaza and Fernández 2006). In Chile, innovative local initiative is clearly linked to new functions that combine with the central government and/or groups of civil society, and leave their mark on programmes and specific municipal bureaus. Such new bureaus include those for environment, women, youth and ethnic groups. The local policy of the 1990s also originated ‘participative planning’ in the form of communal development plans, discussed below. One of the hindrances to promoting these experiences is the insufficiency of the conceptual redefinition of the traditional relationship between municipality and citizenry. The clientelist, populist model of this relationship, strengthened by the prolonged military government, is still extant. It projects itself through the figure of the community’s caudillo-mayor, supported by legislation that concentrates power in the municipality’s highest authority. This trend is strongest in crisis-stricken communities threatened by the macro trends of economic modernization, and in isolated communes suffering from weakness of production. Here, the mayor plays the role of defender of the community while dispensing favours and benefits in return for absolute loyalty. A survey conducted in fifteen municipalities disclosed several instances of this trend’s persistence, particularly in small communes under traditional leadership that are hardly touched by public social action enacted by the central government, outside the network of subsidies (Cannobio and Jeri 2007). And Stephanie Alenda’s (2004) investigation of four innovative experiences reveals the many difficulties of introducing citizen participation in previously clientelist contexts. The management model has also evolved vigorously. Based on the notion of the municipality as efficient administrator of services, it predominates in the forms of municipal modernization promoted by the administration and does not contemplate citizen reinforcement (E. Montecinos 2007). The management model is highly compatible with the notion of depoliticizing public decisions and with modernizing approaches to management. In practice, it assumes subordination to the dominant trends in the economic environment and focuses on rationalizing the use of resources and assuring efficient responses to ‘clients.’ The introduction of business methods in mu-

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nicipal management – a general trend in public administration – takes for granted that the democracy is consolidated and that guaranteed citizen rights are in effect in various forms. Several innovations are framed in the managerial notion of public modernization. In this context, political scientist Egon Montecinos (2007) compared two methods that he defined as participative – the communal development plan (Plan de Desarrollo Comunal, PLADECO) and participatory budgets – and found more differences than similarities. Indeed, whereas participatory budgets operate with a citizen empowerment approach, the PLADECO is informed by the managerial notion of municipal modernization – the same managerial notion underlying the model of service quality on which SUBDERE based its Quality Assurance System for Municipal Services, which considers each citizen an individual user, known in the model as a ‘client’. For each user, the accredited service must acquaint itself with that person, ensure access and service, supply information, handle complaints and suggestions, and measure levels of satisfaction (SUBDERE 2007: 22). Meanwhile, an initiative’s promoter may have other motivations, including deliberation and social control as factors of democratic construction, that redefine forms of management. Every participatory budget originating in Brazil has been preceded by geographic reconstruction of territory, with a corresponding form of administration. In the case of the city of Porto Alegre, the administration and the social movements debated the logic of dividing territories into regions each with its own budgetary assembly, and the view of the organized movements prevailed. More advanced cases of participatory budgets involve negotiation of budget preparation rules as well as a partial allocation of funds to popular deliberation. Following each budget cycle, the Porto Alegre Participatory Budget Council meets to assess operations and amend its procedures (Avritzer 2002). From another angle, participatory budgets are singled out as a tool for involving sectors traditionally excluded from local decisions in budgetary decisions. Surveys conducted among budget assembly attendees in Porto Alegre show that their profile is poorer, more female and less educated than the average population (Avritzer 2002). The introduction of forms of delegation, such as election of proxies, weakens this inclusiveness and requires constant training of leaders and extension of participation to avoid constituting new elites. Comparable international experience shows that the term participatory budget conceals highly diverse concerns, and that the most highly developed participatory budgets respond to strong stimuli – social participation as much as training and requalification of municipal civil servants (Blanco 2002; Filgueiras 2005; Sintomer 2005). In the case of Chilean municipalities, the paramount limitation on participatory budgets is the meagreness of available investment funds, which

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reduces the impact of local participation. Experience in the rural commune of Illapel pointed to an incipient solution. Numerous initiatives prioritized by the community – organized and trained by an NGO allied to the municipality – demanded a sectoral investment from the Executive rather than the municipality. Accordingly, in Illapel had no specific budget items put to joint discussion; instead, demands from the community were heard and referred to the appropriate level of decision. How can the participatory nature of an investment project also become a prioritizing criterion enabling the municipal planner to negotiate on sounder footing with the central or regional levels of government? The answer depends as much on the political will of the municipal administration as on the adoption (or not) of ‘top-down’ criteria such as the Instructivo Presidencial de Participación (Presidential Instructions for Participation) and the associated commitments undertaken by the sectors involved (E. Montecinos 2007). The legal framework, where there is one, furnishes significant support, but it is not effective alone, as experience has shown. In Colombia, where norms favouring participation are similar nationwide, results are very diverse, depending on the community’s political will and prior organizational tradition (Velásquez 2005). In Chile, the scant utilization of the mechanisms provided by the reform of 1999 (public hearings, participation ordinances, communal referendums) shows that simply reforming the law is not enough to change an older political culture. And the pro forma participatory budgets in effect in Peru do not necessarily bolster actual participation (Remy 2005). This fact reinforces the hypothesis that where decentralization is insufficient, the innovative initiative springs from many sources or is especially closely associated with specific programmes, often in conjunction with civil society organizations or other innovative public programmes. On a much smaller scale, this initiative emerges from views associated with the political system of municipal management that hampers dissemination and scale enhancement. Since 2005, participatory budgets have expanded to various Chilean municipalities. Initially, and with varying approaches and targets, they were adopted by the municipalities of Negrete, Illapel, Cerro Navia, Talca and, in a slightly different form, La Pintana. From 2007 to 2009 SUBDERE fostered them as part of the pro-participation policy of the Bachelet administration. Existing evidence from mid-2009 shows that except in Negrete, all such experiences have been discontinued.8 The SUBDERE programme achieved coverage of twenty-five communes, little more than one-fourth of the original target, and was discontinued by the Piñera administration. However, new initiatives have arisen in towns of intermediate size, such as San Antonio, La Serena and Puerto Montt. Whereas some communes laid out their methodology in a participation ordinance and institutionalized it, others subordinated the initiative to the

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will of the mayor. Current municipal structure allows mayors to use this participation mechanism as a way to evade the city council or even the communal organization network (Ochsenius 2005). Moreover, implementing such an innovation is difficult in a context of insufficient fiscal decentralization and an inadequate body of rules. The local interface includes sectoral initiatives at the local level, which normally makes the municipality a necessary though subordinate actor, since programme design and funding remain in the purview of central-level sectoral agencies. This is a key point, because in a poor community the prospects of local concerted action are strictly limited unless it succeeds in renegotiating extra-local conditions in order to allow its development. Moreover, the continuity and sustainability of participatory experiences depend heavily on their capacity to extend their achievements and their impact on living conditions (Bebbington et al. 2005; Panfichi and Dammert 2005). In his study on an indigenous township in Ecuador, Anthony Bebbington stresses: It is not possible to think of concerted action without thinking of poverty and political economy at the same time … the possibilities of concerted action are very much influenced by the distribution of assets together with the productivity of such assets … [If] growth is lacking, [that] ends by limiting the possibility that citizens could or would participate. With time, both legitimacy and sustainability are lost to the spaces for local public concerted action that have been won. (2005 et al.: 15).

Municipal-level public policy networks, however, tend to be fragile and volatile (Cabrero 2004). Neither the institutional architecture nor the political culture of relations between the administration and civil society in which they are embedded has undergone the required evolution. In this case, too, citizen participation and commitment are determining defences against the top-down pressure exerted on municipalities by politics, central government agendas and other factors. For the interface to work, it must develop in an adequate context, and here heterogeneity predominates. The state political structure and the centralist and homogenizing tradition hamper the process (Cabrero 2005: 392), raising political challenges that may favour or inhibit practices of this kind, determining their continuity over time. It is often said that it is easier to achieve concerted action in local contexts, because actors are closer together and problems are less complex. However, local systems also present the difficulties of insufficient independence in decision-making, scarcity of funds of their own and inadequate linkage with central-level policies or cases of national decision. In this situation, multilevel linkages must be forged to enable effective local concerted action (Blanco and Gomá 2002). It is easier to agree on concerted action than to ensure it will have an impact.

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Certain innovations in the local execution of sectoral programmes have successfully established adequate linkage based on certain differentiating features. For instance, some initiatives propose local economic development targets for poor, particularly rural, communes. Their common feature is having been designed specifically for rural poverty with an intersectoral approach, solid linkage among local actors and support from programmes, in some cases of nationwide scope. Such initiatives combine income generation targets with goals for sustainable development and preservation of the environment, normally fostered by civil society organizations. Public agencies, however, still show substantial limitations in these areas, as evidenced in a study of initiatives that received the Innovation and Citizenship Prize. The study concluded that ‘in the public sector there is no mention of other approaches, such as sustainable development, environmental rights, indigenous territorial self-determination’ (Ochsenius 2004: 26). In such cases, the reconversion of economic activity is not meant to enable mere access to benefits under public programmes; rather, these cases are attempts to conquer economic autonomy through diversification, access to the market and sustainability. Emphasis is laid on sustainable economic development, addressed directly to the satisfaction of basic needs, social inclusion and strengthening of moral identity. In other words, these experiences point to public-private cooperation and redefine options for local development, apart from the easy choice of attracting investment as a way to link with the external market. These options take time to mature, but are directly intended to overcome poverty and improve the quality of life of the inhabitants involved (Delamaza 2002). Innovations inspired by civil society and supported with public funds have led to some achievements. Mainly, they have empowered new capabilities for local development with local actors: municipalities, indigenous communities, fishermen’s unions and so on. Inserted in local strategies designed in conjunction, such strategies are realized as coherent portfolios of projects for overcoming poverty. They also contribute to institutional reinforcement and innovation, particularly in municipalities, and to the holdings of organizations that carry out various functions. Normally, they are alliances in which the weight of local actors attaches new meanings to national public programmes and makes them more functional. Yet few national programmes have embodied these notions in their design and operation, and actual experiences along these lines are rather exceptional. A programme such as Chilemprende, intended to develop production through local business associativity, represents an intersectoral, territorial perspective emphasizing concerted action by actors, especially in the local entrepreneurial sector (Gómez, Lanzarotti and Vásquez 2006; González et al. 2007). Under the Piñera administration, however, Chilemprende was discontinued as of 2010.

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Attempts to Outsource Links with Civil Society As noted above, the institutional architecture of the Chilean state was modified very little after 1990, except for the creation of agencies devoted to specific groups under the aegis of MIDEPLAN. Available resources were increased and new programmes begun, but the ministries’ and agencies’ preexisting structure remained unaltered. Exceptions, discussed above, included regional governments, created under pressure from the opposition – that is, not organically but in response to calculated short-term power – and the transformation of ODEPLAN into a ministry, with the subsequent founding of social policy agencies in its purview. Eventually, new agencies or bureaus were set up as new issues arose. This was the case of CONAMA for the environment, SERNAC for consumer protection, SENAMA for seniors and CONACE for narcotics control. More than a decade elapsed before a major amendment passed: the creation in 2003 of the Chilean Council for Culture and the Arts (Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes), a body of ministerial rank addressed to a topic previously diffused across the administration. Implementing new programmes preferably involved competition for funding and calls for bids to externalize services to the private sector. A major part of government activity was channelled in this way and is no longer performed directly as in the past. At present the procedure is to call on the private sector – sometimes including organized civil society – to carry out the tasks stipulated by public policy. In certain cases, the institution organized was a fund for financing initiatives, such as FOSIS, FONADIS and the National Art Development Fund (Fondo Nacional para el Desarrollo de las Artes, FONDART), reducing the entire policy to a form of funding. Some of these institutions have remained funds without embodying a policy as such. FOSIS is in this position, whereas FONDART led to the creation of the Chilean Council for Culture and the Arts, mentioned above, becoming one of its funding instruments. The political use of funds open to competition as the main instrument for solving complex problems has been a crucial factor in the fragmentation of organized civil society. This approach encourages the formation of associations geared the acces to the funds and action based on fundable projects, normally of short duration, restricted resources and variable territorial focus. In other policy areas, such as education and cases of children at social risk, the system of subsidies set up in the 1980s was retained (Delamaza 2005a: 76–79). Accordingly, the present relation between state and civil society is restricted and unilateral, even though at times the projects financed have arisen from the local communities. One expert in planning development, whose doctoral thesis assessed the impact of FOSIS, pointed out that because this type of relationship ‘focused on project financing, other mutually beneficial

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forms of relationship are neglected. … A broader concept ought to cover functions of identification, production and funding initiatives in association with social organizations’ (Salamanca 2002: 273). Two initiatives have acted precisely to correct this situation by creating agencies that advance the development of forms of joint action with major civil society organizations. These agencies were not deliberately planned, their objectives and results differ and neither has deployed the potential that their joint origin might have given them. Through these agencies, the state sought to externalize the link with civil society by allocating resources to functionally autonomous, publicly financed bodies, fostering more direct action by civil society. The two agencies are the Council of the Americas (Consejo de las Américas) and National Council for Overcoming Poverty (Consejo Nacional para la Superación de la Pobreza) (which subsequently became a foundation), especially through their Nationwide Service Programme (Programa Servicio País). Empirical evidence shows the different actions of these two bodies, their different institutional directions, and the link they formed between state policy and social organizations.

Public Funds for Co-management with Civil Society on Environmental Issues The Fund for the Americas, created in 1992, was one of a series of environmental funds in Latin America established as of 1990 in the framework of the Initiative for the Americas promoted by the U.S. administration. It resulted from an initiative to reduce bilateral debt between Chile and the United States so as to set up a fund devoted to environmental issues. This policy partly forgave and/or redirected the interest on public debt between the U.S. government and Latin American governments in order to finance the creation of agencies specializing in conservation of biodiversity, socio-environmental protection and sustainable development of degraded and pauperized areas in the region. The funds were co-managed by representatives of the public sector, civil society and the U.S. government. In 1998 they grouped together in a Latin American and Caribbean network (Red de Fondos Ambientales de Latinoamérica y el Caribe, REDLAC) with a view to enduring over time and obtaining further resources. In 2008, REDLAC encompassed twenty-one funds and stated that it managed about U.S.$700 million and had funded more than 3,000 projects.9 In Chile, management of the fund fell to the Council of the Americas, which was organized in 1993 and began its relationship with society in 1995. Notably, this council’s members included representatives of four ministries concerned with the environment, six elected representatives of civil society organizations – mostly development NGOs participating in the fund – and a

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representative of the U.S. Embassy. NGOs made up a majority on the council, and the chairman was elected from their number. The fund was endowed with U.S.$18.7 million for activities over a ten-year span, and this sum was entirely allocated to civil society organizations working in the environment area. In time, the Fund for the Americas came to handle the funds of CONADI and CONAMA, taking advantage of the accumulated knowhow. The fund financed eight project competitions (1995–2002), twenty-six proactive projects and six programmes in various areas, from 2000 on. Investments focused on project execution, reinforcement of NGOs, public-private collaboration strategies and development of innovative methods to face environmental problems. The Fund for the Americas instituted a form of transferring public funds to a co-managed agency with a civil society majority. The agency was dedicated to working with CSOs allied in turn with municipalities and other public bodies, thus complementing government policy. The financing of the Fund for the Americas stands out among innovative initiatives rewarded with the Innovation and Citizenship Prize, showing the positive effect of its design. Many outstanding sustainable initiatives at some point received support from the Fund for the Americas, including the Taller de Acción Comunitaria (Community Action Workshop) in Valparaíso, Junta de Vecinos de Pichasca (Pichasca Neighbourhood Association) in Río Hurtado, Unión Comunal de Huertos Orgánicos (Communal Union of Organic Vegetable Gardens) in Tomé; Asociación de Recolectores Independientes (Association of Independent Pickers), of Santiago and Asociación Pu Lafkenche (Pu Lafkenche Association) in Tirúa (Programa Ciudadanía y Gestión Local 2000, 2001, 2003; Programa Ciudadanía y Gestión Pública 2005). The Fund for the Americas was the sole instrument available to the government for performing the above functions. Accordingly, when the exhaustion of the allocated financial resources was imminent, the fund authorities began negotiating allotment of a ‘second-generation’ fund with the same initial mechanism. The U.S. Embassy lent its support, but the Chilean Ministry of Finance opposed further debt conversion or budget allocations from the national treasury, and the Fund for the Americas ceased to exist as such. Nonetheless, the Council for the Americas took up other projects, such as management of the Global Fund for Prevention of HIV/AIDS. Meanwhile, in 2003 some of the NGO representatives on the council joined with the Secretary General to organize the Citizen Foundation for the Americas (Fundación Ciudadana para las Américas), a private, nonprofit agency. In 2007, a lawsuit was initiated over misuse of resources managed by the Global Fund for Prevention of HIV/AIDS and entrusted to the Fundación Ciudadana by the Council for the Americas, as well as other irregularities in the council’s

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management. At the time of writing, legal proceedings are ongoing and neither institution appears to be active. The Fund for the Americas, arising from an international cooperation effort, was highly successful during its first ten years of operation. It played a unique role in supporting CSOs’ work on environmental issues, as shown by the numerous actions and institutions supported with these resources. Yet it failed to become actually institutionalized, as FOSIS and other firstgeneration institutions had done in 1990. Despite the support of international cooperation, the Chilean state did not incorporate this mixed form of co-production of actions designed to strengthen the CSOs, apparently because a criterion of macroeconomic stability ruled out Chile’s acceptance of more funds for cooperation. But given the amounts involved and the existence of other cooperation projects, this argument does not appear definitive. Experience suggests that policymakers did not support the institutional model. The administration did not consider support of environmental NGOs a priority, so it was deemed preferable to end the initiative. Without the necessary public support, the fund evolved towards a ‘privatized’, poorly regulated form, leading to probity problems, misuse of resources and finally the discrediting of mixed funds involving the state and civil society. Some of the difficulties encountered in congressional passage of the Law on Association and Citizen Participation in Public Management were due precisely to a provision establishing a Fund for Strengthening Civil Society administered by a mixed council including representatives of CSOs.

Public-private Cooperation and Volunteering to Overcome Poverty The form of the second corrective initiative also changed from a publicprivate council into a private, nonprofit foundation, though more permanent and acting along different lines. The National Council for Overcoming Poverty, later a foundation, was initiated by President Frei Ruiz-Tagle in the framework of the priority that his administration initially assigned to overcoming poverty. The government created the National Programme for Overcoming Poverty and entrusted it to two collegiate organizations. One, the Social Interministerial Council (Consejo Interministerial Social, CIS), was composed of all ministries connected in any way with fighting poverty (not only those traditionally known as social ministries) and chaired by the president himself. The executive secretariat was in the hands of MIDEPLAN, which also coordinated the National Programme and, within it, a Special Plan for Poor Communes (Plan Especial de Comunas Pobres). The second initiative, the National Council for Overcoming Poverty, consisted of twenty members of civil society whom the president appointed to cooperate in the task of overcoming poverty. In contrast with the Council for

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the Americas, council members were not elected but appointed, and did not come mainly from CSOs but from various sectors of society, mostly big business, volunteer organizations, Christian churches, NGO leadership and other professions connected with social matters. The council was initially chaired by Alberto Etchegaray, entrepreneur, former Minister of Housing and Urban Development and right-hand man of the Roman Catholic Church. For purposes of public spokesmanship and public-private cooperation on poverty-related issues, the council met occasionally with CIS until mid-1996, when the National Programme for Overcoming Poverty was deactivated. Its results were not assessed. Minister of Planning Luis Maira resigned, and CIS was suspended. In response, the council published a report titled La Pobreza: un desafío de equidad e integración social (Poverty: A Challenge of Equity and Social Integration). It was not welcomed by the government and aroused opposition from several of the council’s entrepreneurial representatives, which led to their exclusion from the council and the practical deactivation of the latter (Bengoa 1999b: 106–111; Raczynski and Serrano 2002). This outcome prompted some of the council members to form a private nonprofit body, the Foundation for Overcoming Poverty (Fundación para la Superación de la Pobreza). This organization has lent some continuity to the formulation of proposals for social policy.10 The foundation would have met the same fate as many others, but for one element of continuity since the council’s outset: government funding via transfers from the national budget. The proposal for dialoguing with the government, described above, was not supported by this funding. Such proposals have largely failed to redefine public policies, despite the government’s having suggested them itself and kept in constant contact. Funding was earmarked for execution of a single programme – the Nationwide Service Programme – and its extension to other youth volunteer programmes. Each year, the Nationwide Service Programme recruits a couple of hundred young professionals to work for one or two years in poor rural communes, supporting plans drawn up at the request of municipalities and, rarely, governors’ offices, NGOs, indigenous community associations or other bodies. These professionals’ work includes organizing the communities, helping to structure local demands, drawing up projects for financing and coordinating public agencies and civil society to implement them. In other words, they develop the local interface between the community, the municipality and public agencies, building the missing link of the social policies described above. The use of young professionals increases the governamental interest in support the programme, as the youth is particularly disconnected from participation in politics. A new programme launched in 2005, Community Services (Servicios Comunitarios), issues six-month contracts to young people from poor sectors to

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perform community services with the support of NGOs and teams composed of the former professionals of the Nationwide Service. The Foundation for Overcoming Poverty has also carried out other programmes that have not proven as significant or enduring. In financial terms, the two programmes described above take up more than 90 per cent of the funding received.11 In 2006 the foundation had a budget of U.S.$9 million consisting almost entirely of transfers from the state (93 per cent from MIDEPLAN and the Ministry of Labour). This yearly allocation is equal to 50 per cent of what the Fund for the Americas spent in ten years. Another comparison is with the Fund for Strengthening Civil Society (Fondo de Fortalecimiento de las Organizaciones de la Sociedad Civil), in the purview of the governmental Social Organizations Division (División de Organizaciones Sociales, DOS). In 2009 this fund received U.S.$2 million, the highest figure in its brief history. Like the Fund for the Americas, the Nationwide Service crops up repeatedly in the execution of innovative undertakings. It was present at the start of the Development Council for the Huichas Islands in Aysén, the Sustainable Development Centre of Caleta Buena in Tocopilla, activities of the Pu Lafkenche Association in Tirúa, the Small-scale Miners’ Association of Cabildo, the participatory programme of the Municipality of Alhué and many others. (Programa Ciudadanía y Gestión Local 2000, 2001, 2003; Programa Ciudadanía y Gestión Pública 2005). The paradox of the Foundation for Overcoming Poverty is that whereas it was a fully private undertaking arising from the failure of the original council, it preserved a privileged link with the government. Unlike the Fund for the Americas, which worked to strengthen civil society, the Foundation for Overcoming Poverty mainly mobilizes civil society to assist the state, particularly the rural municipalities, with the support of professional, compensated, temporary volunteer work.

Public-private Cooperation and Outsorcing Strategies The attempts by the two organizations discussed above to outsource the link with civil society have contributed to the development of models for intervention in the areas of poverty and the environment. Accordingly, links were established between organized civil society groups and public institutions and municipalities. However, the Fund for the Americas forged these links to execute projects of brief duration and was discontinued for lack of political will on the part of the government. By contrast, the Nationwide Service Programme, despite the lack of an organic political framework in the state, enjoys more extensive, constantly growing community and support in a less controversial area, without soliciting direct support to strengthen civil society.

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In fact, in 2005, the Foundation for Overcoming Poverty unlinked from programmes directly designed to strengthen civil society (Citizenship and Local Management, and Social Networks) that were not publicly funded but supported by international aid. It is a private foundation, so its function has not been institutionalized in the public sphere or participated in redesigning public policies and programmes or the role of citizen participation. Its work has not entailed institutionalizing the instances of local concerted action arising from Nationwide Service activities. In 2003, President Lagos appointed Cecilia Pérez – then Executive Secretary of the Foundation for Overcoming Poverty – Minister of Planning, and endeavoured to appoint professionals from the Nationwide Service to regional public posts. However, these actions failed to institutionalize programme inclinations and action criteria because the government, which was undergoing a severe crisis at the time, intended them solely to inject a fresh style of action into its social policy. In both cases, pursuing an external factor to form a link with civil society led to numerous innovative initiatives and reinforced the links between the state and civil society in the local sphere. But these links are not institutionalized, nor has the public sector been reformed to expand its capability in such issues. Instead, the trend has been to pass such initiatives on to private entities – not including co-management models – that lack clear goals for strengthening their social partners in the public sector. This chapter has investigated five social policy agendas pursued since 1990 that have, in various ways, modified relations between the executive branch and civil society. The variety confirms the notion that the state’s behaviour vis-à-vis society is not homogeneous but an object of political dispute. Institutional arrangements should be understood as the result and expression of this dispute, which gives the state a plural character. Nevertheless, the state’s behaviour also reveals common patterns important for the study of public policies’ potential to foster democratization. One is the lack of institutionalized mechanisms for citizen participation in the local environment, one of the most elementary institutions that can be developed. Another common trait is forms of links that tend towards depoliticization, concentrating on programmes supplying services targeting the poorest populations. The most ambitious reforms advocated by the citizenry (the Law on Indigenous Peoples, gender-related policies, health-care reform) have not been fully enacted, owing to limitations embedded in the political framework of the transition. Nor has it been possible to associate the agenda for strengthening passive citizenship (guaranteed rights) with forms of active citizenship and strengthening of civil society. Instead, all of this reinforces an even older pattern: top-down reforms, homogeneously conceived for the entire nation and thus

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decided by the governing class, with little space for the opinions of social groups or specific local communities.

Notes 1. Social security reform was enacted on 11 March 2008, exactly eighteen years after the first democratic administration took power. The General Law on Education – the first body of law on the education reform – was enacted in March 2009. It is still too early to assess performance in either of these cases. 2. The Sistema Chile Solidario introduced in 2003 to address extreme poverty, which was expanded to include a Social Protection System as of 2006, covering children and social security for seniors, needed changes to conform to this agenda. They mostly involved the introduction of neo-universalist criteria, albeit still combined with policies for overcoming poverty. This is an instance of ‘the incremental logic of social protection’ (Robles 2009: 61). 3. Differences in geographic location are in some cases associated with economic activities: the Huilliche are ‘people of the south’; the Pehuenche live off the pehuén (araucaria or monkey-puzzle) growing in the mountain areas of Bío Bío and Araucanía; the Lafkenche, ‘people of the sea’, fish and collect seafood along the coast of those regions. The expansion of the woodworking industry and industrial fishery have affected these territories in different ways. For a discussion of these issues, see Toledo (2001). 4. When Sebastián Piñera took office as president in 2010, his appointee to direct CONADI had to be removed a few days later for dishonesty. The government was facing a prolonged hunger strike by thirty-four jailed Mapuche activists demanding derogation from the antiterrorist law and better terms of judgment and detention. Again, the person in charge of negotiating and then announcing the Plan Araucanía (Araucanía Plan) and organizing an Office of the Under-Secretary for Indigenous Affairs was the Minister Secretary-General of the Office of the President. 5. The poverty line reflects the ratio of family income to the average price of a family basket of commodities, calculated according to the Survey of Family Budgets of 1986. If income is less than the average price of two baskets in urban locations or 1.75 baskets in rural areas, the family is ‘poor.’ If income is less than the price of one average family basket, the family is classed as ‘indigent’ or ‘extremely poor.’ 6. http://www.ingresoetico.gob.cl/. Retrieved 10 July 2013. 7. http://www.innovacionciudadana.cl/portal/despliegue.php?ID_SECCION=11&ID_ CONTENIDO=56. Retrieved 4 July 2014. 8. Egon Montecinos, personal communication. 9. http://redlac.org/. Retrieved 4 July 2014. For a comparative description of these environmental funds, see Sangüeza-Pardo (2007). 10. http://www.superacionpobreza.cl/que-hacemos/propuestas-pais/. Retrieved 5 July 2014. 11. http://www.superacionpobreza.cl/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Cuenta-P%C3%BAbli ca-Institucional-20131.pdf. Retrieved 5 July 2014.

4

Civil Society, Public Policy Networks and Participatory Initiatives

This chapter empirically analyses the various ways in which civil society liaises with and influences public policy agendas. I have opted for a bottom-up approach, seeking to identify the spaces, issues and dynamics in which social actors have managed to install their demands and interests. This in-depth analysis does not cover the dynamics of social movements but rather the impact that different forms of social organization and collective action have on public policy. It first presents data on the characteristics of the Chilean civil society, stressing the organizational characteristics of different sectors. This is followed by an analysis of state policy for strengthening civil society and promoting citizen participation in public policy, insofar as this defines approaches, opportunities and restrictions affecting the impact of organized civil society’s efforts. The analysis shows that participation initiatives have a relatively weak impact on the orientation of policies and the institutionalization of participation, although there are no strict parameters for this. The low influence is mainly due to the structural weaknesses of civil society itself as well as the nature of the spaces it occupies in the cycle of public policies. These spaces mainly further the creation of instruments that are nonbinding and restricted to specific programme areas. To properly contextualize the weakness of the impact, I present the main guidelines followed by political initiatives on citizen participation and the strengthening of civil society, as well as the conditions under which debate about the governance model’s scope and limitations has taken place, particularly since 2005. This chapter will also examine different types of public policy networks in which civil society participates, which show a clearly differentiated impact. It will analyse data on ‘local implementation networks’ as well as on other networks that have major impact on the national political level. These differences are probably due to civil society’s nature as a heterogeneous reality intersected by the factors that determine the distribution of power. Some networks link with actors that are privileged by the governance model and thus have more power and greater impact. Others fail to do so. Hence the concept of public policy networks is useful as an analytical tool to understand – 157 –

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the connections between the actors engaged in modern governance. These networks link different actors – united by interests in a given policy sphere – with varying degrees of intensity, normalization, standardization and frequency of interaction that result in various impacts on public policy (Knoke 1990; Le Galés 1995; Börzel 1997; Zurbriggen 2004). The chapter begins with a brief account of changes in Chilean society that have significantly affected collective action patterns and the expression of citizen demands, emphasizing organized civil society and the associated forms of collective action. Then it presents the evolution of the citizen-participation political agenda. Taking this background information as contextual conditions, the chapter goes on to formulate the problem of structuring public policy networks with civil society’s participation, chiefly by analysing an empirical sample of local innovative experiences and then of another, more effective type of network that has involved sectors of the civil society in various ways.

Trends in Social and Cultural Change Chilean society has undergone profound changes in the twenty years since the democratic transition began. An upturn in life expectancy and a declining growth rate have transformed the demographic structure, reducing the younger population and increasing the proportion of senior adults. The birth rate dropped significantly and steadily in almost every age segment until 2005, with the exception of adolescent mothers, in which the decline is much more moderate. Currently, the majority of children are conceived out of wedlock and couples get married later in life. Family diversity has increased, with more households headed by women. At the same time, households are shrinking, driven by a housing policy that has enabled more than 70 per cent of families to own a home, most of them very small in size (Cerda 2008; Méndez 2008; Schkolnik 2008; Tironi 2008). At first timidly, but now more rapidly, women have been joining the job market, getting short-term jobs like men, although in a larger proportion. This is because the jobs created in Chile last on average only a few months. As Jorge Marshall (2006) observed, ‘We have a labour market with low employability, high turnover, low productivity and a tendency to segmentation … 70 per cent of contracts are fixed term, half of them for less than six months. Of the 30 per cent indefinite-term contracts, more than half last less than a year.’ However, women earn less than men to perform the same tasks – a difference that increases as the woman’s socioeconomic status rises. In general terms, average per capita income has risen steadily over the past twenty years. Although income distribution remains almost as unequal as it was two

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decades ago, minimum and median wages and pensions have increased, particularly the small pensions guaranteed by the state. At the same time, social benefits of every kind, mainly for the poorest Chileans, have grown because of a steady rise in social spending by the government. The cultural trends are also profound. Firstly, the educational level has reached high standards in terms of coverage: in 2003 secondary education coverage had reached 93.8 per cent (Brunner 2006), and enrolment in higher education has burgeoned. Higher education in Chile is funded by the students and their families themselves and largely supplied by private institutions operating in a still weakly regulated market. The growth of education reflects both a generational gap and, given the structure of inequality in Chile, a social gap, even without factoring in the huge differences in quality of education (Brunner 2006). Public debate about secondary education has largely concerned differences in quality between municipal public education, ‘private subsidized’ education and private education. Municipal public education is exclusively government-funded and does not exclude any student; ‘private subsidized’ education receives public funding but selects its students and augments its income with payments from parents. Private elite education is paid for by parents. Parents’ financial contribution to private secondary education easily amounts to five or six times the state funding for public education, though the students benefiting from it represent only 7 per cent of the country’s total enrolment. According to the 2003 CASEN survey, young people aged 15 to 24 had an average of 11.2 years of schooling, whereas people between 65 and 74 years old had only reached 6.5 years. The percentage of the population that had at least some secondary education was 95.3 per cent in the highest income quintile, but in the lowest quintile it was only 52.4 per cent (ibid.). Other important changes in consumption and cultural expression patterns include the very rapid penetration of new media and, in general, the ‘mediatization’ of culture in Chilean society. This change also reflects socioeconomic inequality, which is somewhat mitigated by the impact of mass media (radio and television), which have become widely available. All other spheres of consumption and cultural expression, however, reproduce the availability of goods and services and the participation and consumption frequency shown in Table 4.1. The overall trend is towards greater cultural integration as participation in education and access to mass media increase. But even though mass communication is becoming more uniform, the differences in the quality of education and access to cultural expression goods reproduce material inequality. Chile’s evolution is a rather extreme case of a Latin American trend in which access to symbolic goods is more universal than access to material goods and social services (Hopenhayn 2005). But although inequality of access in Latin

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Table 4.1. Cultural Appurtenances in the Home (%, Metropolitan Region, 2004) Socioeconomic Stratum Equipment

Low

Middle

Upper-middle

Materials for visual arts

5.3

17.2

46.0

Musical instruments

7.4

37.2

71.8

Software for composing music

0.0

6.9

43.4

Audio amplifier

0.9

9.0

31.6

Video camera / camcorder

0.0

10.2

51.3

16.9

55.5

79.0

Digital camera

1.3

10.5

48.4

Image and sound editing software

0.0

3.9

49.6

Graphic design software

0.0

2.9

47.3

Web design software

0.0

3.1

45.7

Nondigital camera

Source: Brunner (2006).

America is greater for material than for symbolic assets, these two types of assets are at the same time dissociated. That is, greater availability of information does not result in a more equal distribution of power, just as overall progress in education does not alter the uneven pattern of employment (Hopenhayn 2009). Data from the 2004 Cultural Consumption Survey showed no significant differences between socioeconomic strata in the three prevailing behaviours related to culture, that is, listening to music, watching TV and listening to the radio. But in every other studied sphere of cultural consumption – reading newspapers and magazines, using the Internet, reading books and going to shows – the highest stratum’s was double the middle’s and four times that of the lower stratum (Brunner 2006). Five years later in 2009, these data had changed very little: compared to the lower stratum, the upper stratum read newspapers 80 per cent as much; it also showed triple the attendance at dance and music performances and attended audio-visual exhibitions, theatre and cinema ten times as much (Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes 2011). These differences among the Chilean population mean that the aggregate figures underpinning the usual diagnoses about cultural change in Chile should receive less emphasis, for the general trends of change in consumption patterns and greater availability of goods and services conceal still deep differences in the pace, depth and impact of change.

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The various interpretations of the social and cultural transformations depend on the emphasis different authors place on the advances or respective deficits in social issues. The process is generally conceptualized as a variant of modernization, a process that is also common to different countries at different times. The reference points of evaluative analyses are, on the one hand, the continuity with or divergence from relevant economic, political and social processes set in motion by the military government, and on the other, the new issues emerging from the modernizing process. The narratives of the political and economic Right generally assume continuity as a given and consistently point out the dangers of departing from the path laid down in the 1980s. Academic examples of this are the works of Larraín and Vergara (e.g., 2000) and of the influential think tank Instituto Libertad y Desarrollo, created by Hernán Büchi, Pinochet’s former Minister of Finance, which receive broad, constant media coverage. In these analyses, the positive value of the Chilean democratic transition lies in refraining from substantive economic and constitutional reforms and accepting changes introduced by the military regime. By contrast, the arguments of the Centre and the Left present various interpretations of the tension between the changes since 1990 and the unchanged fundamentals in the economy, institutions, politics and social relations. In the late 1990s, a flurry of debate within the Concertación divided the ‘self-complacent’ from the ‘self-flagellating’, that is, those satisfied versus those dissatisfied with the changes that have marked the democratic period (Van der Ree 2007: 179–185). Narratives of the changes in Chile are also a field of contention. The narratives privileged by the mass media and, in general, by the discourse of the political elites, regard the transition as a process of national reconciliation. The proof of this reconciliation is the very capacity for cooperation between forces that only yesterday were at loggerheads, namely, proponents of democracy and supporters of the military government. This interpretation no doubt serves the needs of political governance based on a government with no effective congressional majority, in which, therefore, negotiation and a ‘doctrine of the possible’ prevail. The stability of the political setting has endorsed this line of analysis. However, disaffection with democracy and the weakening of political participation has been evident since the late 1990s. Despite the general political stability, every presidential campaign since the election of 1999 has been driven by the idea of change, not continuity, even though the same two political alliances still prevail. In 2009, the candidate of the Right (Coalición por el Cambio), Sebastián Piñera, defeated the Concertación coalition government precisely by brandishing the idea of change after twenty years of successive Concertación administrations. And even the Concertación candidate, Eduardo Frei, voiced the need for a new political constitution. The remaining two candidates – both Concertación

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dissidents belonging to the Socialist Party – suggested launching a period of more radical change in the country. This situation contrasted with President Michelle Bachelet’s high popularity and popular support exceeding 80 per cent approval during the second half of her first term (2006–2010). Pressure for political change intensified after 2011. Bachelet ran with success for a second term in the 2013 presidential campaign, calling for a new constitution along with all the other leftist candidates. In response, the right-wing parties proposed changes to the binominal electoral system, one of which was promoted by the National Renovation Party (Renovación Nacional, RN) and the Concertación, and the other by Piñera’s government and the UDI. The social movements pressed for a constituent assembly. The question seems to lie in the role of politics in relation to society – that is, whether politics will remain circumscribed within the current boundaries set by the transition agreements and restricted by an institutional framework with little capability for transformation, while a private economy with few regulations prevails. The hegemonic narratives refer to the period’s achievements to justify articulation of very partial transformations that will preserve the economic and political core operating in recent years. Thus, for example, Piñera’s platform in the 2009 presidential election emphasized the need to improve the way the state is run. He therefore prioritized the modernization of governance and, in the social sphere, the fight against crime. Meanwhile, the Bachelet administration and Frei, the official Concertación presidential candidate in 2009–2010, emphasized maintenance of a state-funded social protection policy to mitigate the inevitable costs of an open, sparsely regulated market economy. Other proposals, reflecting greater satisfaction with the current situation, deem the basic stage of the modernization process complete and argue that it is time to deal with the problems of ‘advanced modernity’. Eugenio Tironi’s ‘progressive-conservative’ idea is one example. His proposal disregards the ideas of collective action and socioeconomic transformation, focusing instead on ‘community demand’ in the face of an excessively accelerated modernization. Response to this demand should centre on strengthening the family and ‘reinventing the nation’ to cement social cohesion (Tironi 2005: 13– 37). In other words, this response promotes both a micro-social and a symbolic dimension in the classical Chilean top-down tradition. However, this proposal ignores the political dimension itself by assuming that the current modernizing process is an unchangeable fact of the Chilean situation. Thus Tironi projects the governance model of the transition period as a permanent element in the future. On the other hand, the intense student-led social mobilizations since 2011 have highlighted the need to modify the institutional foundations that govern education by demanding substantive political change and a redistribution of resources to make it possible.

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Public Space and Civic Participation Have civic orientation and society’s participation in the public space changed? Periodic surveys and polls track the Chilean population’s opinions and attitudes, but specific information on participation in civic activities in the public space is scarce. In particular, the participation agenda has long been relatively absent from academic research in Chile, and there are no centres specializing in this topic. A survey of the data obtained in polls in Chile from 1990 to 2010 shows that they pertain only to voter turnout and participation in organizations (in quantitative terms), and that the bulk of opinion polls conducted do not include questions concerning this issue (Foster 2010). Consistently declining voter turnout figures have been interpreted as a weakening of the public space. Given the legislation in effect during most of the period, which does not permit renunciation of voluntarily assumed voter status, low participation is more marked among young people who choose not to enrol as voters. A comparison of age strata shows significant differences in percentages of registered voters: in January 2009, 91 per cent of those over forty years of age were enrolled in the electoral registers, versus only 38 per cent of those under forty. And only 7.7 per cent of young people aged eighteen to nineteen were enrolled (J. Saldaña 2009: 68). In December 2011, after the massive student demonstrations, automatic voter enrolment became effective and compulsory voting was eliminated. The reduction in voters’ numbers has been a constant trend over the twenty years since the transition began, and the voting universe has gradually grown smaller with respect to the total potential voters. Counting write-in votes, as well as those abstaining, appears that as early as 2001, voters expressing ‘electoral disaffection’ exceeded the number of voters that chose one of the competing options on the ballot. The registered voter population fell from 89 per cent in 1989 to 68 per cent of the total population of voting age in 2008 (ibid.: 61). Moreover, valid votes cast in the 2005 parliamentary elections – that is, ballots on which one choice was marked, excluding spoiled and blank ballots – totalled only 58 per cent (versus 80 per cent in the 1989 elections), reflecting a persistent drop. Finally, the electoral disaffection index rose from 23 per cent in 1989 to 57 per cent in 2005. This index is calculated as the sum of the number of nonregistered potential voters, the number of spoiled and blank votes and the number of abstentions, divided by the number of people enrolled in the electoral registers (Joignant, 2010). This situation overwhelmingly characterized the municipal elections of 2008, in which 84 per cent of all registered voters went to the polls. ‘However, if we consider the four million citizens of voting age who chose not to be part of the process, the participation figure drops to 56 per cent’ (J. Saldaña 2009:

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61). After the reform that made voting voluntary, only 39 per cent of adults participated in the first municipal election of 2012. As for social participation, a 2005 survey covering six regions established three major orientations distributed unevenly among the population. These orientations do not reflect a single response but derive from combinations of several that reveal a similar pattern. The largest group, about 37 per cent, can be termed reluctant or little inclined to participate – that is, the members of this group do not put participation into practice, do not think associating with others is a priority for problem-solving and tend to be more critical of social leaders. Another 33 per cent understand participation as a relationship with the authorities and thus are part of the instrumental and, ultimately, clientelistic trend. Finally, 25 per cent of respondents showed a consistently positive attitude towards participation (Más Voces 2005). Historical data on the magnitude and distribution of attitudes to participation are entirely lacking, so the explanations for the survey data are merely hypothetical. However, it would be no surprise if the depoliticization and organized repression of participation under military rule turned out to be factors in the attitudes of the group most reluctant to participate. Another likely factor is cultural trends that increasingly tend towards individual or highly instrumental action. Finally, these data probably also relate to the weaknesses of public participation channels during the post-1990 period. One can also postulate a historical hypothesis concerning the most widespread, yet insufficiently justified, hypothesis about the military coup. According to this hypothesis, the coup was ultimately due to excessive participation – that is, the historical evidence would show that after a period of intense participation like that of the Unidad Popular, there follows a period of great repression. Although this hypothesis has not been studied, it is plausible to suppose supporters and opponents of the military government may have considered it. Supporters of the regime would probably blame the breakdown of political order on ‘excesses’ and ‘loss of control’, whereas opponents of the military government would attribute the effects of the repression they suffered to their participation in the previous political process. Though direct, massive social mobilization has been relatively uncommon since the political transition started, it has spiked at least twice in recent years. In 2006, high school students throughout the country engaged in two months of massive protests that forced the political system to reform Pinochet’s last law, signed on March 10, 1990, which dealt with education. However, in 2011 the same sector – this time with the participation of university professors, students and authorities – took to the streets once again to demand more radical reform to reverse acts of the dictatorship that remained unchanged under democracy. Important protests have also been organized against major infrastructure works (power plants) and in defence

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of the environment, as well to demand an end to discriminatory legislation towards homosexuals. A common trait of all these mobilizations is that political parties hardly participated in them at all. The Communist Party – which suffered serious defeats late in 2011 – had some links with student leaders and teachers, but overall these massive political mobilizations were the first in Chile to express strong criticism and disdain for institutionalized parties and the representative system (Mayol and Azócar 2012). These mobilizations resurfaced in 2013. More generally, the issue to be clarified is the contrast between the country’s obvious economic and social achievements and the subjective evidence of the people’s disillusionment or disaffection with public affairs and political participation. In a comparison of different variables of democratic governance in Latin America, Chile stands out for its high performance in the control of corruption, rule of law, regulatory qualities and validity of civil liberties. In all international rankings, Chile is first or second among twenty countries (Mainwaring and Scully 2008: 118). However, as regards the variable ‘satisfaction with democracy’, Chile ranks well below countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, Uruguay, Costa Rica and other Central American and Caribbean countries. Likewise, regarding preference for democracy over other regimes, only 46 per cent of Chileans prefer it under any circumstance. In countries like Argentina, Venezuela and Uruguay, these percentages reach 75 per cent; the Latin American average is 56 per cent (ibid: 124). Patricio Silva (2004: 91–93) has emphasized the importance of the cultural impact of neoliberalism – a product of its success in Chile – and of the Chilean elites’ political decision to deactivate the mass movement of the 1980s to make way for moderate forces. Unlike the collective action of previous periods, this decision led to the prevalence of a more individualistic way of engaging in politics, detached from the political parties. Lucy Taylor (1996) highlighted the redefinition of civil society as a depoliticized notion in the new social policies of the 1990s. There are grounds to argue that changes in the modes of representation of society, which have taken place in other countries too, can be expressed in different ways, some more participatory than others in different contexts and circumstances. In connection with these changes, Laura Tedesco (2004: 38–39) mentions the experience of a sudden reactivation of citizen participation in Argentina in 2001, and the situation in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where the most important instance of citizen participation takes place at the local level. The Más Voces survey (2005) has shown relatively positive perceptions of the usefulness of organization in eliciting a response from the authorities. However, these figures decreased when respondents were asked about concrete actions undertaken. This information can be interpreted as indicating greater willingness to participate than there are real possibilities to do so, and

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it is corroborated by data on effective participation in social organizations and knowledge of local institutions. Most surveys have included the question about inclination to participate, and the data are consistent among different studies. Several studies that have discussed the adult Chilean population’s participation in organizations demonstrate a relatively stable range of associative participation. These studies, which despite differences permit certain kinds of comparisons, offer the following picture of nonparticipants (Table 4.2):1 While some surveys find rather constant figures or variations that tend to balance out, others show increased nonparticipation since 1990. Also relevant is the scarcity of data series, which makes it hard to know whether people currently participate more than before. However, the available information seems to indicate that that today, people participate more than before – not vice versa, as the dominant sociopolitical interpretation suggests. More surprising than a significant change is the relative consistency of the data, which in the case of the UNDP survey show a return to the figures of 1970. However, the rest of the surveys found no significant differences for about thirty years. As for people’s attitudes towards organizations and their willingness to participate, the UNDP established that 23 per cent were oriented towards defending their rights, mainly by participating in organizations; these people appreciate organization and are willing to take on leadership roles. Another 44 per cent participated only in issues involving community solidarity, and 33 Table 4.2. Percentage of People Not Participating in Any Organization Survey

Date

People not participating in any organization (%)

Eduardo Hamuy – Greater Santiago

1964

72.6

Eduardo Hamuy – Greater Santiago

1970

65.7

Eduardo Hamuy – Greater Santiago

1973

57.9

FLACSO – Greater Santiago

1986

57.0

FLACSO – Greater Santiago

1988

61.8

FLACSO – Greater Santiago

1992

55.9

World Values Survey

1990

54.9

Department of Sociology, Catholic University

1999

53.0

UNDP

1999

66.5

UNDP

2001

63.6

DOS (government)

2002

58.0

Más Voces (six regions)

2004

56.0

Sources: Gerber (2007: 23), PNUD (2000: 139), Recabarren and Aubry (2005: 64)

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per cent did not take part in collective actions to defend common interests or negotiate collective matters (PNUD 2004b: 221–222). These results do not much differ from those in the aforementioned categories in the Más Voces Survey of 2004, which registered 25 per cent, 40 per cent and 37 per cent, respectively (Mas Voces 2005).

The Archipelago of Civil Society Chilean civil society encompasses many diverse forms of association, contradicting in part the popular idea that the recent modernization has eliminated the previously existing tendency to associate. However, despite their number and variety, associations have a fragmented nature: there are no links between organizations or bodies to facilitate aggregation or intermediation with the state. The social policy focused and based on project management, the outsourcing of the tasks of implementation and the co-financing of public programmes have produced several effects. Among them are the proliferation of small, powerful associations, mainly micro-local in range or linked to very specific interests; the fragmentation of the associative network; and the professionalization and semi-clientelistic depoliticization of popular leadership, particularly in the municipalities (Greaves 2003; Delamaza 2005a; Ochsenius 2005; E. Montecinos 2007; SUR 2007).2 When the UNDP tried to develop a National Map of Associativity for its 2000 Human Development Report, it found few sources. This deficit seems to signify the low value the political institutional framework (as well as the social sciences, administration, economics and other disciplines) assigns to the practice of collective action. In fact, the Human Development Report can be considered the first systematic attempt to somehow get to know the dimensions of this phenomenon. The Chilean situation contrasts with the advances in other countries of the region. In countries like Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia, the academic capacity to address issues of civil society is exploited in specialized research centres, academic departments, postgraduate education and college curricula. This practically does not happen in Chile. The UNDP aggregate figures record 83,386 associations, excluding religious ones. Despite the aggregate figure’s multiple problematic aspects, it clarifies a fundamental point by disproving that ‘people no longer join organizations’. Do more Chileans take part in organizations than before? This question cannot be answered, as the lack of data to compare present and past prevents certainty about whether there are more or fewer organizations. But in comparison with other countries, the number is high. In Argentina, with twice the population, a study by Johns Hopkins University reported 51,750

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foundations, associations and not-for-profit organizations, whereas the socalled Social Capital Index (GADIS) reported 78,392 (Luna 1998; Roitter 2005). Colombia, with a population of around 40 million, reports 135,599 (Villar 2001). In another context, using the same methodology, South Africa reports 101,289 (53 per cent of them informal and voluntary) for a population three times larger than Chile’s (Swilling and Russell 2002). At a later stage, the Johns Hopkins University study on Chile reported 86,723 (Irarrázaval et al. 2006: 62). Considering the magnitude of the aggregate figures, the next step is to determine Chilean CSOsinternal structure, their evolutionary trends and, more importantly, their present and future social and political significance. As no exhaustive studies on the proportion of organizations involved in political or decision-making processes are available, the figures on organizations are merely descriptive. The UNDP Human Development Report establishes a classification for the organizational universe, in which the categories can be aggregated according to the scheme in Table 4.3. Table 4.3. Number of Organizations in Chile by Type of Organization Type of organization

Number

%

11,402

13.7

Sports clubs

8,549

10.3

Parents’ associations

8,096

9.7

Unions

7,374

8.8

Committees of allegados (homeless people)

4,455

5.3

Senior citizens’ clubs

3,470

4.2

Guilds

3,264

3.9

Paving committees

3,063

3.7

16,845

20.2

7,101

8.5

Most numerous organizations (over 3,000) Neighbourhood associations

Between 1,000 and 2,999 associations Water user communities, women’s institutes, artistic groups, clubs, corporations, indigenous communities, health organizations, workshops, co-ops, firefighters Between 100 and 999 associations Cultural centres, foundations, scouts, youth centres, entrepreneur associations, women’s organizations, NGOs, agricultural organizations, public safety committees, students’ organizations, community relations, professional associations, indigenous associations, drinking water committees, local development committees, housing committees

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Fewer than 100 associations Ecological organizations, advancement committees, de facto organizations, consumers’ organizations, homeowners associations

,244

0.3

9,505

11.4

83,386

100.0

Others TOTAL

Source: Our own elaboration with data from PNUD (2000: 302–303).

How should we classify this diversity? Even more important, what is its significance? There are several answers. The results of a UNDP classification of the objects of associations are shown in Table 4.4. Table 4.4. Object of Associations in Chile Object

%

Strategic empowerment

25.2

Socializing

22.1

Advancement/life quality improvement

18.1

Development/promotion

13.7

Mutual support

5.8

Administration/management

4.1

Assistance

2.9

Artistic/spiritual expression

2.8

Other

2.0

Data not available

3.3

TOTAL

100

Source: Our own elaboration with data from PNUD (2000: 130)

Classifying these associations by type of object permits confirmation of the continued existence of a high percentage of traditional, materialistically oriented organizations. This type prevails in the associations formed in Chile. Table 4.5. Typology of Civil Society Organizations (%) Materialistic

Post-materialistic

Total

Traditional

66.7

7.3

74.0

Emerging

13.3

12.4

25.7

Total

80.0

19.7

Source: Cáceres and Jeri (2001).

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The data show the undeniable preeminence of traditional organizations like neighbourhood associations, sports clubs and unions, versus emerging organizations’ dynamics, which correspond, at least in number, to just one-quarter of the existing associations. Among them are senior citizens’, productive development and ecology associations. Similarly, associations are prevailingly materialistic in orientation, that is, their aim is obtaining material goods. This contrasts with data from highly developed countries, where the post-materialist orientation to objectives related to personal development and general quality of life has grown as materialistic objectives decrease. In addition, the UNDP has determined that 58 per cent of the organizations aim to benefit their members. However, there are no historical series of data, and the available figures sometimes hide more than they reveal; therefore data from different sources must be cross-referenced to draw conclusions. Aggregate figures have many limitations, mainly due to the low availability of reliable, updated information extending over time. However, the necessary historical series on trade unions are available because of the work of the Dirección del Trabajo (Labour Office). As shown in Table 4.6, they indicate a slight growth in the number of unions even as unionization rates among Chilean workers have stagnated or even declined. Table 4.6. Trade Union Affiliation in Chile

Year

Active unions

Population affiliated to active unions

Affiliation rate (%)*

Population affiliated to dependent unions**

Affiliation rate (%)***

1990

—

606,812

13.4

515,825

19.2

1994

7,891

661,966

12.9

547,862

18.0

2000

7,659

595,495

11.1

467,835

14.8

2006

9,424

703,706

11.0

568,856

14.5

2008

9,340

851,251

11.9

685,763

16.1

* Affiliates / Employed workforce. ** Dependent unions are those that can conduct collective negotiations. *** Affiliated to dependent unions / Workforce employed in the private sector Source: Dirección del Trabajo (2009: 7–8).

Table 4.6 also shows a rather negative evolution of union affiliation in recent years, despite an initial rise at the beginning of the democratic transition. Thereafter, a steady decline was interrupted only in 2008, which saw an upturn that, though significant, is far lower than the rate at the transition’s outset and indeed, similar to the affiliation rate during the military regime. In practice, unions are present mainly in large companies but not in most of them. According to the 2006 Labour Survey, 46.7 per cent of large com-

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panies had unions; the figure dropped to 22.3 per cent in medium-sized companies and to a mere 3.9 per cent in small ones (Dirección del Trabajo 2006: 79). Company unions – the ones that can negotiate collectively – appears to have evolved similarly. In 1991 there were 5,048, and in 1994 they amounted to 5,138. In 2000, at the end of the Frei administration, they had dropped to 4,640 to climb back to 5,690 six years later, at the end of the Lagos administration. The number of workers belonging to company unions during the first three Concertación governments did not rise substantially. In 1990 there were 417,514 affiliates, and sixteen years later there were 423,675, which means 10.8 per cent of employed workers had the right to collective negotiation (Dirección del Trabajo 2009: 15–16). Of the mere 31 per cent of trade unions affiliated to a federation, 80 per cent of them were affiliated to the General Workers’ Union (Central Unitaria de Trabajadores, CUT) (ibid.: 80–81). The 2008 data are interesting, since this was the first year in which the trade union outlook improved in all aspects: growth in the number of affiliates, number of unions and average size of unions. The bulk of this increase is due to the affiliation of women, which is also a breakthrough in terms of equity, albeit still at a very low level. Whereas the affiliation rate of men increased by only 0.4 per cent between 2007 and 2008, that of women did so by 2.1 per cent (Dirección del Trabajo 2009: 11). From another angle, the density and characteristics of the fabric that binds organized civil society together merit consideration. This civil society is mostly made up of small, weakly interlinked groups that depend on government funding to implement government programmes and are not connected with larger networks. An initial proof of this is the complexity of the organizations. Direct-membership organizations prevail: the UNDP study counted 81,849 such ‘first-grade’ organizations, but only 1,421 ‘second-grade’ organizations, which group and represent first-grade organizations. A third and final grade consists of federations or confederations of second-grade associations; these numbers almost a hundred, with 84 per cent concentrated in the Metropolitan Region (PNUD 2000: 302). This extensive but disjointed association pattern occurs mainly in sectors that are less affected by economic modernization and are the direct object of targeted state action: poor urban areas in consolidated districts, small farmers, indigenous communities. Other sectors – seasonal farmhands, municipal districts with strong population growth, the labour sector linked to outsourcing – show much lower density of association and few innovative organizational tools. A comparison between six municipal districts, distinguishing between those with highly dynamic socioeconomic and demographic transformations and more stable ones, showed a clear decline in association among the former, whether rural or urban (ibid.: 154). A sample of fifteen municipal

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districts of different sizes and locations showed that only two had both a relatively favourable Participatory Management Index and relatively high Citizen Capital Index (SUR 2007).3 This seems to indicate that modernization and the privatizing change have had a disruptive impact. However, since 2006 a process of union reorganization has emerged precisely among workforces in areas that were detached from the union movement by the change in labour relations: forestry workers in the Bío Bío region; the subcontracted workers of the state-owned copper company (CODELCO), who led a sizeable strike movement in 2007; seasonal fruit pickers in Copiapó, who mobilized during the 2008 season; salmon workers in Puerto Montt, who paralysed operations, et cetera (Abarzúa 2008; Calderón 2008; Baltera and Dussert 2009). A correlation seems to hold between political conditions and organizations’ evolution with respect to the union movement. The general historical trend is a relatively low union affiliation rate and a large number of small unions. However, significant increases are evident whenever the political initiative has favoured unions with greater union freedom, better legal regulations and political support, as in 1990–1991, 2002 and 2008, according to data on trade unions in Chile (Dirección del Trabajo 2009: 7–8). At the local level, there is a crisis in social participation. Many forms of neighbourhood organization still operate but are neither networked nor really able to influence the orientation of the local administration. In addition, many groups form with the sole purpose of getting funding for projects the organization became impermanent. They therefore lack a broader view of the local space, as reflected in the weaknesses of the Citizen Capital Index in fifteen municipal districts in Chile (SUR 2007). The crux of the problem is the multiplicity of local- and central-government targeted programmes in poor areas that depend mainly on bidding-based funding mechanisms for allocation of resources to support short-term (a year at most) projects. No detailed information is available, but in many places there remain some grassroots organizations operating in the neighbourhood or at a micro-local level that are supported by government agencies such as FOSIS. Most of these organizations’ workers are women whose activities focus mainly on welfare functions and community improvement (Delamaza 2005a). Meanwhile, NGOs, which proliferated in the 1980s, have either undergone a change process or suffered a loss of identity. As international cooperation withdrew over the last twenty years, they forged a bond with the government administration by becoming its subordinate executors of social policies. In doing so they sustained significant losses of proposal capability and institutional investments made over many years. Their main demands are participation in the design, implementation and evaluation of social policies and programmes, and autonomy from the central administration (ACCION and Fundación para la Superación de la Pobreza 2004; Delamaza 2005b).

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Before further analysing the impact achieved by different sectors of civil society in connection with public action and policies, it is necessary to characterize the structure of opportunities and constraints set down in these policies. The statistics show that social organizations are numerous (though seldom interrelated), but this does not automatically translate into relevant, politically significant action – which, as we shall see, also depends on other factors.

Citizen Participation: The Generation and Tensions of a Political Agenda Beyond specific social policies, the democratic governments have advanced different, unclearly articulated initiatives overtly intended to promote citizen participation and civil society’s incorporation into public policy. These policies set up specific conditions encouraging or restricting the action of organized civil society. Therefore, I shall briefly describe the main public initiatives in this connection and analyse both the resulting bills submitted to Congress and the programmes and institutional agencies that were established. I then analyse the political debate during the Bachelet administration, which highlights the tensions aroused by proposals to strengthen participation in the governance model. One important dimension of governance is the attempt to promote the ‘modernization of the state’. The prevailing approach to this modernization has not always considered participation a relevant issue, but at different times the subject has nevertheless arisen in association with modernization. Though one of the modernization main objectives were from the start ‘to streamline public services and strengthen democracy through participatory governance’ (Comité de Modernización 2000: 16), in practice the emphasis has been on efficiency, not participation, and modernization has followed a ‘managerialistic’ approach. High levels of discretionary autonomy among the state techno-bureaucratic elites also impede attainment of the stated goals. Within the institutional framework of the state, different identifiable approaches and tensions have had consequences for the thrust, progress and setbacks of pro-participation initiatives. One example is the report on the modernization of the state published by the Consortium for State Reform (Consorcio para la Reforma del Estado) in October 2009. This consortium is composed of the seven most influential think tanks representing the political spectrum from the Concertación to the Right, and four very prestigious, well respected university centres. The report’s wide-ranging proposal for reform of the state elaborated the issue of participation in a mere four points out of a total 109. One of the four points concerned the need for a comprehensive

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approach; the second warned of ‘costs and risks of intervention and hijacking’ by private interest groups; the third suggested disseminating ‘reference documents for policy measures’ to obtain funding, and the fourth referred to the need for decentralization (Consorcio para la Reforma del Estado 2009: 21–22). In short, the report treats participation as a marginal issue: the proposal does not incorporate it into the institutional framework, but even so it issues a preemptive warning about its likely dangers. The first two Concertación governments’ stimulation of participation was mainly circumscribed to the design of social programmes: the aim was to incorporate nongovernment bodies and grass-roots organizations in the programmes’ different phases of execution, with the stress on co-funding and implementation. The main programme in those years encouraged ‘participatory paving’, in which citizens in poor communities co-funded the paving of their streets and alleys – thus subsidizing the government, whose resources were insufficient (Valenzuela et al. 2000). A government report on this topic tellingly states that ‘the Participatory Paving Programme is an initiative launched by national government in 1995, which replaced the previous participatory paving programme of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (MINVU) which, despite its name, did not consider the participation of the local residents’ (ibid.: 158). Only after the electoral political picture changed in 1997 did the issue of participation make it onto the political agenda. In the parliamentary elections held that year, the ruling coalition lost about a million votes because many voters opted not to go to the polls or used the ballot to convey statements against politics or expressions of discontent instead of voting. The following year, the effects of the ‘Asian crisis’ caused an ostensive setback in economic growth with serious consequences for employment and the overall expectations of the population. The political disaffection, together with the relative wear and tear on the economic model in force since the mid-1980s, marked the end of a stage in the political navigation of the Chilean transition.4 It therefore was no surprise that the seven presidential candidates in 1999 justified their proposals with reference to the need to significantly change the way the country was run, in open contrast with the bias towards continuity in the previous election, held in 1993. The government coalition candidate Ricardo Lagos, who won by a small margin, kept his campaign promise to strengthen public action vis-à-vis social protection through a reform of the medical care system. He also tackled the issue of citizen participation and the need to strengthen civil society and deepen the reform of the state. A wide-ranging Citizen Council was convened to formulate a policy for strengthening civil society, including a bill to be submitted to Congress. All of these generated expectations of change (DOS 2007). The council was made up of twenty-eight citizens associated

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with different organizations (mostly NGOs) and four representatives of ministries. Other presidential initiatives during the Lagos administration were the Presidential Guidelines for Citizen Participation and the creation of the Fund for Strengthening Civil Society. The higher political priority assigned to the issue of citizen participation became clear when the government promulgated a plan to incorporate the arguments of the Citizen Council. The Presidential Guidelines for Citizen Participation, issued in 2002, required ministries to commit to meeting specific citizen participation targets, thereby incorporating participation into ministerial policies and programmes. An evaluation of the guidelines’ impact late in 2004 showed very partial results. The ministries and public agencies pledged to undertake 106 measures, 24 per cent of which could not be considered participation proper but merely the creation of conditions for participation through improvements in the internal administration, campaigns and general commitments. Some 55 per cent of the measures concerned the most elementary forms of participation: improved contact with users (26%) and dissemination and consultation activities (31%). Only 21 per cent of the measures pertained to advanced forms of participation such as supporting organizations and concluding agreements with them, and participating in the formulation and implementation of policies (Espinoza 2004). These initiatives involved no institutional rearrangement and followed the same trend as before, programmatically strengthening existing participation opportunities without rising to the challenge of the institutional change or political redesign that citizen participation presupposes. Unfortunately, the available information on other countries or contexts does not permit a comparative analysis with the Chilean case. A new evaluation of the incorporation of citizen participation in public policies and programmes undertaken in 2007 – the Governmental Report prepared by the Division of Social Organizations (DOS 2007) – registered the surprisingly high number of 305 participation mechanisms, corresponding to 155 citizen participation commitments established by all of the eighteen ministerial divisions of the central administration (Fernández and Ordóñez 2007: 32). However, this very same evaluation also revealed the very low efficacy of promotion of citizen participation. Analysis of the government initiative’s results confirmed the absence of substantive advances in this connection, six years after the presidential guidelines were issued. It is worth noting that 37 per cent of what the ministries and agencies reported as participation – published as such by the DOS – did not correspond to participation proper, revealing a lack of understanding, clarity and standards with respect to participation. The participatory instruments put into practice emphasized the instrumental modality (44%) and, what is more, its most basic form, namely, informative participation, which

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corresponds to 26 per cent of the total mechanisms (see Table 4.7). The participation modality, referred to as ‘empowering’ because it strengthens both the state administration and the participants in civil society, reaches only 19 per cent (Fernández and Ordóñez 2007). Table 4.7. Types of Participation in the Mechanisms Incorporated into Governance (N = 305) Public policy stages Information

Nonparticipation Use of information and communication technologies 3.3%

Campaigns 9.2%

Diagnosis and decision Implementation

Internal, improvement of user service 25.0%

Evaluation and Reformulation

Total

37.4%

Type of participation Instrumental

Empowering

Dissemination of information 26.2%

Nonbinding consultation 8.8%

Deliberative participation 9.8%

Delegated execution 3.0%

Co-execution, supervision 5.9%

Passive evaluation: enquiries, complaints, claims 5.6%

Deliberative reformulation (social control) 3.3%

43.6%

19%

Sources: Fernández and Ordóñez (2007: 34) and DOS (2007).

These results highlight the lack of a concept of what participation can mean for public policy. Not only did the ministries provide incorrect information to the agency responsible for follow-up – the DOS – but the DOS lacked suitable benchmarks to orient these ministries and bring about the advances expected in the running of the state. Similar problems prevented the approval of the main legislative initiative attempted by government: a bill on Associations and Citizen Participation in Governance, sent to Congress in June 2004 after more than three years of pre-legislative discussion. This bill emerged as part of the Plan for Strengthening Civil Society, the presidential response to the proposals and recommendations of the Citizen Council convened by President Ricardo Lagos in 2000. This bill underwent a discussion stage that lasted until the first half of 2006, when the Executive branch of government – under a new presidential incumbent – sent an amendment to its contents.

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This bill established the right of citizen participation in governance as a component of the Law on the Basis of State Administration, as well as the obligation to form councils of civil society organizations to advise on matters predetermined by the different public agencies, including ministries, services and municipalities. It also created the category of public interest organizations (Organizaciones de Interés Público, OIP), which excluded political parties and their foundations, religious organizations, trade unions and other organizations that benefit their members directly. It also cut through red tape to constitute public interest organizations by means of a registration system. At present, this registration system is used exclusively by residents and functional associations in the municipalities. Not-for-profit foundations and corporations seeking corporate legal status must apply to the President of the Republic, who may also revoke it. Another related measure created the Fund for Strengthening Public Interest Organizations, co-administered by representatives of the Executive and representatives of OIPs, elected by their peers in registered OIPs. Finally, it established a public accountability system that obliged authorities to respond to citizens’ concerns. This bill initially passed in the Lower House – where support cut across political lines – and in the Internal Government Senate Committee. However, in December 2008 the Senate rejected it, necessitating constitution of a mixed committee (deputies and senators) to analyse a new bill. On 10 March 2010, one day before a new president and new legislature were sworn in, the mixed committee unanimously approved the new text of the bill. It incorporated Civil Code reforms that favoured the establishment and operation of foundations and corporations, and eliminated the title dealing with voluntary public service statutes. The bill was finally passed in February 2011, whereupon its implementation began (Varas 2012: 167ff.). All proposals concerning direct democracy mechanisms in earlier versions of the project were excluded from the text sent to Congress, apparently by agreement between political leaders of the Concertación. This flew in the face of citizen support for introducing direct democracy mechanisms – the revocation of mandate, the referendum, laws by popular initiative – which hovered around 80 per cent (Recabarren and Aubry 2005: 79). Afterwards, a constitutional amendment was sent to Congress; if approved, it would allow formulation of a proposal to establish laws by popular initiative. In 2010, the government of Sebastián Piñera presented a bill to reform municipal law and the popular elections law so as to facilitate implementation of nonbinding plebiscites and consultations at the level of the municipal district. The current law allows their implementation, but in practice it is a dead letter because its conditions make it inaccessible to citizens (Tironi and Poduje 2011; Mlynarz 2013). In the political sphere, early in the Bachelet administration a debate arose around a generic proposal to implement a ‘citizen government’, which polit-

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ical actors interpreted as bypassing the political parties in several government matters. Bachelet herself, on the night of her victory, had declared: ‘The people do not only want the right to vote, but also the right to voice. They want to be heard. They want to shape their own destiny. My administration will channel that will to participate. We will forge a great alliance between politics and society, between the representatives and the represented’.5 Three relevant issues of participatory politics that go far beyond a ‘governing style’ could be clearly inferred from these words: the need to develop democratic mechanisms between elections, effective governance participation channels and a resolution of the problem of political parties sharing their representation role with other actors. What was missing was the issue of strengthening civil society as an autonomous actor and the formation of various councils and commissions composed of experts and representatives of social organizations invited to suggest policies reflecting broad consensus on sensitive issues (children, social security, education). However, a few months into administration, in May and June 2006, the government had to confront the extensive mobilization of high school students, which injected urgency and controversy into the debate on citizen government. This context reawakened the fear of unleashed social demands, such as those manifested in the initial years of the transition, in the Chilean political elite. According to the head of one of the parliamentary benches, as quoted by the Barómetro de las Américas, ‘this was the first time that the Concertación faced a grass-roots mobilization, which it was unable to control and had no idea about how to respond to it’ (Cited in Luna and Seligson 2007: 7). Some sectors of the government also argued that the student mobilization had been stimulated by participatory policy approaches that risked an overflow of demands. As a result, the authorities dropped the participation slogan. The various orientations to the practice of citizen participation generated tensions in the government initiative. In September 2006 President Bachelet presented her Pro-participation Agenda. The clear differences between the arguments the President used in her speech and the contents of the agenda probably expressed the tension between programmatic will and political constraints. The speech had mentioned political reforms: the binominal system, automatic voter registration, women’s political participation, voting by Chileans abroad, election of regional authorities, municipal reform to create local governments, law by popular initiative and others. The agenda, however, was much more limited. It proposed the formation of councils of CSOs to act as advisory bodies, an increase in bidding-based funds to support social organizations, regional infrastructure projects to house organizations, improvement of access to information on public policies and promotion of pro-tolerance and antidiscrimination measures.6

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Since 1990, various institutional mechanisms for participation have been established in the form of councils, most of them consultative in character, sat on by participants from the public sector and civil society. Most such councils are formed via ‘participation by invitation’, which seeks to incorporate external visions into the state by unilaterally selecting members on the basis of political strategy alone (Remy 2005). This vastly privileges the participation of specialized technicians and professionals, demonstrating that even here, professionalized elites have upstaged other actors in the name of citizen participation. The composition of these councils thus repeats the pattern of combining technicians close to the Concertación with those loyal to the right-wing opposition. They normally reach an agreement on aspects that, in the long run, will be the object of government projects. Under certain conditions, this sort of pre-legislative work reinforces the subsequent negotiation. The scheme developed for councils was also applied to the presidential advisory committees organized by the Bachelet government (Aguilera 2009). A review of the rules of organization and characteristics of these CSO councils reveals diverse criteria regarding their structure and scope, and the powers conferred on them. However, this variety indicates that they are a widely used mechanism that contributes to the political legitimization of the Concertación governments. Attempting to classify them is thus worthwhile. First, there are directive councils formed by selective cooptation mechanisms. Diverse criteria govern the selection of people from different sectors designated by the President of the Republic. FOSIS, for instance, includes representatives from ministries and public services and four people who belong not to the government sphere but to the business and industry sector, trade unions, academia and NGOs. The members have executive powers, although in fact they are delegated to the FOSIS executive director. This is also the case of the National Commission for Scientific and Technical Research (Consejo Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica CONICYT), whose members come from academia. Remarkably, these councils are responsible for the political orientation of the aforementioned public bodies. More recently, a second way of designating council members has emerged. The nominations may reflect proposals by organizations in the relevant sector. In the National Council for Culture and the Arts, for instance, the different branches of artistic expression submit shortlists to a chairperson who makes the final choice. In practice, this council operates as a ministry because its chairperson has ministerial status and is in the confidence of the President of the Republic. A third modality is that of the National Indigenous Development Corporation (CONADI), whose council is made up of representatives of the President of the Republic and councillors periodically elected by the different ethnic groups that are recognized in the country. Successive institutional conflicts have affected this organization, suggesting that this com-

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bination of councillors has not produced the expected results. Some of the most serious conflicts involved representatives of the president who acted autonomously and were consequently removed. Moreover, the indigenous councillors’ minority status in the council undermines their electoral legitimacy, a situation that has repeatedly led to sharp conflict – particularly under the government of Eduardo Frei, who explicitly favoured infrastructure and road works over application of the Indigenous Law, despite indigenous sectors’ objections. The most widespread councils are advisory, including the National Environment Commission (CONAMA), the Fund for Strengthening Civil Society and health sector councils (hospital councils, community health councils and the Integrated Councils of the Assistance Network [Consejo Integrador de la Red Asistencial, CIRA]). The system of Explicit Health-care Guarantees (GES) also has an advisory council composed of health specialists. Yet another modality of constituting a council was adopted by the Fund for the Americas, whose council consisted of representatives of different ministries, a representative of the government of the United States (the country supplying the funds) and a majority of representatives elected from the fund’s beneficiary organizations, one of whom chaired the council. The Council of the Fund for Strengthening Civil Society, included in the law on participation and association, works similarly. The Fund for the Americas did not experience the same conflicts as CONADI, even though it also involved the direct participation of councillors legitimized by vote. This suggests that the problems are not necessarily due to the introduction of direct participation by the social sectors, but to the legal and political framework in which these councils operate. The centralization of governance in Chile has also caused problems. In environmental conflicts, for example, sectoral ministers have more than once imposed their decisions on the regional environmental commissions (COREMAs). One peculiarity of the COREMAs is that they are regulated by environmental law and have clear-cut powers. Environment is the only sector with a legally sanctioned participatory institutional framework, in which the powers of the participatory agencies often clash with the Chilean tradition and political culture of central decision-taking. This problem extends beyond civil society representatives to affect regional government representatives, whose statutory powers are often disregarded. Finally, transitory commissions and advisory presidential councils have been created to broaden the debate and the criteria before policies are formulated or bills submitted to Congress. These bodies generally tend to value the advice of technicians and sectoral experts over the input of civil society and other related social organizations. In fact, only the Presidential Advisory Council on Education – the largest and most diversified of all – includes

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representatives of teachers’ and students’ social organizations. Yet these representatives withdrew from the council before reaching an agreement on proposals to submit to the presidency. The councils for childhood, social welfare, the binominal system and labour and equity have not had these experiences (Aguilera 2009). However, because these councils face the overarching limitation of being unconnected to the agencies responsible for public policy formulation and decision-making, their results are extremely dissimilar. The convening of councils and commissions has been a participatory mechanism in continuous use since 1990 in the spheres of human rights (Truth and Reconciliation, the Mesa de Diálogo, the Valech Commission on Torture and Imprisonment), education (Brunner Commission and Presidential Advisory Commission on Education), poverty (National Council for Overcoming Poverty) and indigenous peoples (Commission for a New Deal). More than just instruments for institutionalized citizen participation, these commissions and councils are ad hoc responses to the political need to expand dialogue and set the terms of political agreement. Therefore they all resort to the participation-by-invitation method without establishing public criteria for their composition. The absence of general standards guaranteeing participation also means that the fate of any proposals made is not specified either: each commission determines how it will operate and how open its deliberations will be. These commissions and councils are so informal and ad hoc that, for example, the National Council for Overcoming Poverty did not survive the deactivation of the National Programme by the same name and became a publicly funded foundation. Similarly, discontinuity was the lot of the commission convened to analyse and propose reform of the binominal system. In the case of the Advisory Council for Education appointed on 2006, which favoured a more organic inclusion of social sectors, the lack of clear work objectives and guidelines for future action resulted in short-lived commitment on the part of sectors that were more critical of the government. This weakened the council’s intended deliberative nature. In addition, the proportion of technicians to representatives was not properly sorted out, so the former were numerically overrepresented. More relevant still was that the conditions for dialogue and the precise ultimate fate of resolutions were not clearly specified either, so the council’s final report was not consensual, and the Minister of Education wound up selecting the proposals included in a bill sent to Congress. Finally, another political mechanism was created: the government and the parties that supported it negotiated the specific contents of the reforms with the opposition. The foregoing analysis of mixed councils shows their manifold nature. When used as a means to involve civil society in public affairs, they amount to an institutional opening in this respect. However, in the absence of criteria

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for their configuration, organic links with relevant social agencies or standards for operation, their fate depends mainly on external political variables, which weakens their potential. An interesting exception is the regional case of the Coquimbo Board for Rural and Peasant Development, which includes a regional peasants’ council. This option is not institutionalized in the design of the GOREs, but its conception assumes a unified social interlocutor with the right to be heard and vote (Ríos and Ríos 2011).

What Is the Impact of Civil Society–State Interaction? The previous sections established the existence of CSOs varying widely in composition but weakly internally articulated. This fragmentation prompted their characterization as an archipelago deficient in useful internal links, which impairs their capacity for action. An examination of state policies concerning these organizations and institutional spaces for participation revealed a series of limitations, particularly in the areas of strengthening civil society’s capability and ensuring its presence in government decisions. Having provided this context, I can now analyse some data on how the interaction between state and civil society concretely impacts the development of public policies. In the following sections, I shall discuss some indicators of the empirical impact that the different interaction modalities have allotted to Chilean civil society. Some of these modalities have had a top-down origin and thus a direct link to the decision-taking organs, whereas others sprang from the grass roots, at the level of programme execution and implementation. Neither case features institutionalized, regular structures of participation but only ad hoc bodies, weakly institutionalized and dependent on the political situation. Information based on data from primary sources is available for subnationallevel initiatives involving public bodies’ and CSOs’ joint participation in experiences of negotiating or generating programmatic links for developing joint actions. These initiatives are the local implementation networks. Here I seek to understand their contribution to the development of local democratic governance. Specific variables and indicators of these interactions’ impact on public policies and reinforcement of citizen organizations have been developed for this purpose. This analysis can be considered a sort of impact assessment conducted by those responsible for initiatives concerning the construction of new governance patterns from local networks. Then I will present the case of national political initiatives, which also are a site of the aforementioned interaction. In this discussion the analysis proceeds in more general terms around the notion of public policy networks, using data from secondary sources. The impact analysis will allow identification of the these initiatives’ areas and scope in the institutional framework.

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Local Innovation: Analysis of a Sample of Interactions between Civil Society and the State at a Subnational Level This analysis will use homogeneous information from self-administered questionnaires relating to a purposive sample of 129 proven cases of development, in Chile, of processes of direct contact and interaction between the public sector and CSOs to address public issues. These cases are the set of initiatives that received the Innovation and Citizenship Prize between 1999 and 2006, selected from a total of 1,870 applicants. This prize’s evaluative criteria refer precisely to civic reinforcement, the establishment of opportunities for social participation in both the public sector and civil society, and changes in the way in which both sectors liaise. That is, these initiatives have led to specific outstanding achievements and are the best developed in terms of proactive, cooperative links between the state and civil society at the subnational level (Delamaza and Fernández 2006). The sample is purposive and nonrepresentative. It groups initiatives that, according to their own opinions and definitions, were eligible for this award and applied to be evaluated accordingly. The sample is quite balanced in terms of the number and profile of selected and registered agents and items on the political agenda, providing an interesting variety of sectors and geographical environments. The agencies that promoted the initiatives fall under the categories of state and civil society, with the latter having a proportionally larger share. Among public institutions (47%), more are associated with subnational levels of government administration – mainly municipalities – than with sectoral public services. Nevertheless, in many of these experiences the latter funded, co-executed or transferred their agenda to municipal administrations because in Chile, not bound funding or self-financing for political initiatives is scarce among municipal authorities. A balance also pertains among the CSOs’ various components. Grassroots organizations – including associative small enterprises – prevail. They represent 57 per cent of the CSOs initiatives and act as the driving agents and often also the main beneficiaries of the experience. NGOs specializing in development issues and agendas make up the other 43 per cent. They are often at least partially government-funded, and in most cases they carry out initiatives that coincide with the work guidelines and modalities of the administrative, sectoral or territorial public agenda. The same holds for the grass-roots organizations, which are direct recipients – at times mediated by NGOs or municipalities – of central state action, while often also acting as co-executors and/or providers of matching funds. Given the multiplicity and variety of links among the different actors, it is necessary to refine the data to reveal the core constituted by the ‘driving actors’ of these experiences. With few exceptions, these actors participate

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with others in public policy implementation networks, so the task is to determine analytically the role that each of them plays in the network. The role of driving actor is only one of the key roles in the configuration of the network (Ochsenius 2004). How can we estimate operationally the impact of these initiatives? Their effects fall into two fields: transformations in conditions for participation in civil society actions, and transformations in governance. Each field is divided into operational dimensions, which are in turn informed by different variables. In the case of civil society, these dimensions are organizational capabilities, capabilities for action in the public space and specific capabilities to influence policy. In the case of governance, the specific impacts of each initiative occur in the following dimensions: orientation of public policies, creation of institutional instruments for participation and management of policies and programmes. Based on the results of this analysis, I shall determine the prevailing patterns and chief deficits of the impact that grass-roots civil society has had on the public sphere. To classify the impact or influence of each initiative on each of the variables and dimensions, a research team used questionnaires the initiatives themselves filled out to apply for the Innovation and Citizenship Award. Each questionnaire consisted mainly of open questions, so the categorization of responses took place ex post. When interpretation was difficult, we referred to background documentation reports that external specialists prepared for each experience.

Transformations in Conditions for Citizen Participation and Governance The sphere of citizen participation (called ‘citizenship’ as a shorthand in the following discussion) is divisible into three operational dimensions. The first marks changes in the population’s capability to organize and thus to generate entities of increasing complexity – as, for example, in the successive emergence of grass-roots groups (i.e., first-grade organizations), second-grade organizations or federations of grass-roots organizations, and third-grade organizations uniting the federations in a national organization. This cline reflects the assumption that the more populous, diverse and inclusive the organizations are, the likelier they are to make their voices heard and to negotiate their agendas in the public sphere. Some internal capabilities of these associations are variables subject to change: leadership, ability to increase their members, internal cohesion, management of resources and of projects with public sources and interests. All of them represent capabilities that civil associations might use to avail themselves of the support of contacts, knowledge and experience in public action and governance. These capabilities thus

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become preconditions for improving an organization’s standing in processes of interaction and dialogue with the state and its agents. The second dimension concerns changes in civil associations’ capability to enlarge their sphere of influence, legitimacy and collective action, with a certain degree of autonomy from the state and its agents. This is expressed in certain selected variables: sensitizing the public about their own agenda, creating means and opinion resources for the dissemination of the agenda, initiating class-action or collective demands, and creating or joining spaces for debate and deliberation on issues and measures of public interest already on the agenda or still emerging as a focus of demand. The third operational dimension of citizenship tracks development of the abilities that most directly influence public actions or decisions – that is, developing and proposing alternatives to them, and creating or joining respective mechanisms for their negotiation, co-management and social control. Table 4.8 displays the categories that citizen participation can influence: Table 4.8. Dimensions of Change and Variables that Impact Citizenship Dimensions of change

Variables First-grade associativity

Organizational capabilities

Increase in leadership, cohesion and membership in associations Management of social projects and resources Second- and third-degree associativity Sensitization of new audiences to actions or demands of collective interest (agenda setting)

Capabilities for public action

Creation of communication / public opinion media or resources Instigation of class actions, complaints, or claims through legal or direct action Opportunities for deliberation on measures in the public interest Preparation of proposals for public policy measures

Capabilities for influencing public policy and administration initiatives

Dialogue and negotiation with the state to generate policy measures or adjustments and public programmes Co-execution of public social policies and programmes Monitoring, social control and accountability regarding decisions or public policy measures

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The governance sphere, for its part, is divided into four dimensions, each operationalized by means of variables. Governance transformation variables refer to changes whose direct impact on the orientations, contents, methods and organization of public administration is attributable to the links generated through the innovative experiences. The first operational dimension concerns impacts on the orientation of public policy, that is, direct modification of its content and course of action, but also actions aimed at changing the public policy agenda. The scope of these changes in orientation and content can be as narrow as a specific measure or as broad as the integral redesign of policies and programmes. The second dimension follows changes in the public sector’s methods of action. They may not necessarily be associated with new contents, but many aspects related to management methods are key to defining the link with the actors of the civil society. A third dimension encompasses other changes that to some degree strengthen the inclusion and participation of new actors in policies and management. Indeed, often these initiatives’ main objective is the acknowledgement and inclusion of people who were previously marginalized or subordinate vis-à-vis the actions of the state. The final dimension of the field of transformation in governance pertains to change in the organizational culture of the state, which may make governance more permeable and wide-ranging in terms of contact with civil society actors. Changes in this dimension also vary widely in scope: they may affect only, say, the attitudes of officials (which in any case are difficult to verify), or go so far as to alter the organizational culture to make impacts sustainable over time. Table 4.9 presents a conceptual scheme classifying the categories of impact or influence on governance. What impact did the prizewinning initiatives make on the different dimensions of governance and on citizens’ capabilities for interaction with the state? According to what they themselves report, I shall try to answer this question by first examining the number of dimensions impacted, and then identifying the impact on these different dimensions. With respect to the reported number of dimensions of impact, which indicate higher or lower impact integrality, the sample presents a large dispersion. Almost half the cases show impacts or changes in two of the four governance dimensions and two or three citizenship dimensions, depending on whether the driver of the experience aligned with the state or with civil society. As a whole, these experiences are of medium complexity or integrality in terms of their impact. The data show a comparatively strong impact on citizenship, as all the initiatives surveyed indicated an impact in at least one of this sphere’s three dimensions, with 92 per cent reporting impacts in two or three. In the case of governance the impact was somewhat lower: some 29 per cent of all the

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Table 4.9. Dimensions of Change and Variables that Impact Governance Dimensions of change

Variables New rights sanctioned; new regulations issued Creation or redesign of intersectoral policies, including changes in public agenda priorities

Orientation of public policies and/or programmes

Creation or redesign of sectoral policies Creation or redesign of specific programmes Issuance of ad hoc programme adjustment measures Set-up of commitments with segments of civil society Exploration of new approaches or issues on the public agenda: work groups, studies, technical panels Adjustment of public officials’ profile or staff Adjustment of management methods’ design, implementation, evaluation or administration

Internal governance methods

Budgetary adjustments Creation or redesign of institutions; appointment of people in charge In-service training of officials; provision of technical capabilities

Mechanisms for new actors’ inclusion and participation

State organizational culture

Development of participatory strategies, including the use of several instruments at different levels for purposes subject to evaluation Creation or use of formalized public participation spaces and mechanisms Perception of changes in the organizational culture, including via dissemination of the sectoral or territorial agenda to the public Perception of improved communication between public officials and citizens

initiatives reported impact in one or no dimensions, and only 7 per cent reported integral impacts in all four dimensions. The remaining 64 per cent are of medium complexity (with impacts in two or three dimensions). The indicators of complexity could be determined with empirical precision, as it has been done in in an analysis of local innovation in Mexico to determine the intensity of governance (Cabrero 2006: 169). The reported experiences differ appreciably according to the institutional belonging of an initiative’s main actor or driver. In general experiences driven

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by CSOs have impacts of lower complexity or integrality: 37 per cent reported no impact or impact in just one dimension, and only 1 per cent had an impact in all four dimensions. By contrast, state organizations were behind almost all initiatives reporting an impact on all four dimensions of governance. Experiences driven by CSOs therefore show a lower impact on the governance apparatus and public decisions, despite their achievements in furthering capabilities to exercise citizenship. In this sphere they show greater impacts than do their governmental counterparts: nearly half of the initiatives promoted by CSOs reported integral impact in all three dimensions of citizenship. Even though the state organizations reported stronger impact results for governance, these were also at the level of medium complexity. Only a third of them managed to impact three or four dimensions of governance. In short, the sphere of an initiative’s origin is relevant to its impact results: each area shows better results in its own ambit. In general terms of complexity, however, the aggregate impact on governance is less complex than that attained in the citizenship dimensions. The level of complexity or integrality of the impacts on governance reported in the analysed sample of experiences does not indicate substantive differences between the various types and levels of sectoral and territorial state organization, or between segments of civil society.

Scope and Limits of the Impact of Subnational Innovations Having analysed the relative complexity of impact, we can now examine its content, that is, the higher or lower impact in each of the analytical dimensions. Table 4.10 summarizes the impact results by dimension. The governance dimension in which the greatest impacts were reported involves changes in the orientations of the public policies and/or programmes applied in the sectoral and subnational territorial spheres (80%). These changes are reported mostly by municipalities in the case of the state, and by NGOs in the case of the civil society. In the citizenship ambit, very high percentages prevailed in two of the three defined dimensions: the strengthening of citizens’ organizational capability (91%), and of capabilities for citizen impact on public policies and administration initiatives (90%). Both state-led and CSO-led initiatives reported high impact in these areas, indicating a high degree of intertwining and confirming the significant impact of state action on the activity of the civil society, especially at the local level (Delamaza 2005a). The dimensions in which the least impact was reported are in the ambit of governance innovation: the set-up or use of mechanisms for new actors’ inclusion and participation in public policy and administration (36%), and changes in the organizational culture of the state (27%). In both cases, state

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Table 4.10. Reported Impact on Governance and Citizenship According to Dimension Dimensions of Change

Impact on Dimensions of Governance

Strengthening of Citizen Capabilities

Impact (in the respective territorial or sectoral ambit)

Total initiatives

Stateled

CSOled

Orientations of public policies’ and/or programmes’ implementation

80%

85%

75%

Governance methods

55%

67%

45%

Mechanisms for new actors’ inclusion and participation in policy and governance

36%

40%

33%

The organizational culture of the state

27%

37%

19%

Organizational capabilities

91%

87%

97%

Capabilities for public action

53%

47%

59%

Capabilities to influence public policies and administration

90%

92%

89%

Source: Our own elaboration from Database of Citizenship and Public Management Program

initiatives had higher impacts than did those of civil society. These data clearly show that the interaction between state and CSOs mainly impacts citizens’ capability to intervene in public policy and administration issues. But they also show that this does not translate proportionately into processes of opening the operation, approaches and decisions of the state institutional framework to civil society actors. In other words, the flexibilization and modification of governance is incommensurate with the citizen empowerment that results from citizen or state action. This difference in the spheres of mutual influence also appears in the few cases of initiatives reporting the existence or use of formalized mediating mechanisms in the deliberation, design, application and evaluation of public policies and programmes, as shown below in Table 4.11. In the citizenship sphere, the dimension of lowest relative impact pertains to the capabilities needed to intervene in the public space, which stand at midrange (53%). This appears to point to a type of interaction mainly oriented along two lines: the organizational strengthening of civil society, and the functional requirements of associating with the public administration. In other words, a key dimension that extends the space for action by civil society beyond its organized components appears to be reduced. This increases the risk of corporativism and technification, whereby relations between state and society, though intensified, lack a proper opening to the public space. With-

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out such an opening, the politicization, accountability and democratization of citizen action are compromised if not impossible. Three dimensions registering midrange impacts reveal differentiated performance according to whether the experiences are state-led or CSO-led. In two cases, state-led initiatives reported greater impact. Impacts on internal methods of public administration are reported mainly by government agencies (67%), and less often by social actors (45%), and the same holds for mechanisms for including new subjects in public action (40% and 33% respectively). Conversely, changes observed in the strengthening of citizens’ intervention capability in the space of public communication are more likely to be driven by civil organizations (59%) than by the state (47%). To sum up, the data reinforce the trend already observed: initiatives led by state agencies tend to affect both ambits of impact – governance and citizenship – whereas their civil society counterparts show significant changes mostly in the citizenship dimension. The four impact dimensions defined for governance have been broken down into different numbers of variables. Inside the dimensions I have ordered the variables considering their different degrees of impact, beginning with the most and ending with the less as shown in Table 4.11. In the more complex dimensions, the actors that led the experiences mentioned some variables substantially more often than others. This lends an imprint or main qualitative feature to the performance of the whole dimension, suggesting that whereas a significant number of experiences achieve some impact, it tends to be specific and germane, does not reach greater complexity and is not systemic. Thus, unsurprisingly, these modifications tend to be mostly unsustainable or to conflict with the performance of other relevant factors of governance, even within the dimension considered. Of the three dimensions of governance with significant reported levels of impact, each has a primary variable within an overall picture of high performance dispersion and thus low numerical concentration and little depth and impact sustainability regarding the reported variables. Table 4.11. Reported Impact on Governance According to Dimensions and Variables Dimensions of Change

Guidelines for Public Policy Implementation

Impact on Governance

Total initiatives

Stateled

CSOled

Legal sanctioning of new rights, issuance of permanent regulations

9%

3.5%

15.5%

Redesign of intersectoral policies and higher priority on the political agenda

16%

17%

15%

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Total initiatives

Stateled

CSOled

6%

5%

7%

Creation or redesign of specific programmes

43%

45%

41%

Ad hoc programme adjustment measures

25%

20%

29%

Establishment of commitments or agreements with segments of civil society

6%

5%

7%

Exploration of new approaches or issues on the public agenda

3%

2%

4%

Adjustment of profiles and/or hired staff

5%

6%

4%

Adjustment of administration methods

29%

40%

19%

Budgetary adjustments

15%

22%

8%

Creation or redesign of institutions or appointment of people in charge

13%

22%

6%

Staff training, installation of technical capabilities

9%

13%

6%

Replicability and impact on larger scales*

9%

6%

12%

New Actors’ Inclusion and Participation in Policy

Development of participation strategies

4%

5%

3%

Creation or use of spaces and formalized mechanisms for citizen participation

36%

40%

33%

Organizational Culture of the State (Perceived)

Perception of changes in the organizational culture, including dissemination of the agenda in the public space

16%

20%

13%

Perception of improved communication between officials and citizens

11%

17%

6%

Redesign of sectoral policies

Internal Methods of Governance

*Replicability on a larger scale means being considered a ‘model’ for public policies. Source: Our own elaboration from Database of the Citizenship and Public Management Programme

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As for the dimension of guidelines for the application of public policy, the main impact occurs in the creation or redesign of specific social programmes (mentioned most often, by 43 per cent of all initiatives), in which municipalities and NGOs are the dominant actors in their respective areas. Second in importance and also related to the area of programmes are measures for ad hoc adjustments to programmes. Grass-roots CSOs mentioned this impact more often. In short, the most substantial impacts on policy orientation pertain basically to a reduced area concerning adjustments of specific, locally applied social policy programmes, an ambit in which intermediary agents (subnational governments, NGOs) and recipients of public policies (the grass roots) liaise. These forms of interaction therefore lack actors that can decide or control the design and evaluation of policies. With few exceptions, sectoral public services are resistant to changes in public policy implementation, an area of impact that most actors in the sample did not mention. As a result, the variables whose impact are inherently deeper – such as the sanction of rights or permanent regulations, and the creation or redesign of inter- and intrasectoral policies – have a lesser impact whose value is more qualitative than quantitative. Within the dimension of new actors’ inclusion and participation in policy and governance, the most frequently reported process of change relates to the creation or use of spaces and formalized citizen participation mechanisms. This was reported for 36 per cent of experiences, mostly concentrated in the health sector. By contrast, very few initiatives (5%) make an impact by establishing targeted, measurable and complex strategies for citizen participation. Hence, although spaces for interaction dedicated to social programmes and benefits exist, they are weakly regulated and little publicized via the use of massive, intensive citizen participation instruments. The third dimension for which significant impact was reported involves perceived change in internal governance methods (29%), mostly based on the existence of processes for adjusting administrative methods (design, implementation, evaluation or administration). This impact contrasts with the weak impact of variables that are likely to promote institutionalization of the new management methods and make them sustainable: budget adjustments, staffing and in-service training of civil servants. CSOs reported significantly lower impact on this set of variables than did public bodies, and the same goes for the two variables related to the organizational culture of the state, also key to sustainability, which had a relatively low impact on interaction. In the ambit of citizen capabilities, impact is greater than in the sphere of governance. Most of the trends apply for both the state and the civil society spheres, as shown in Table 4.12.

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Table 4.12. Reported Impact on Citizenship According to Dimensions and Variables Dimensions of Change

Organizational Capabilities

Capabilities for Public Action

Capabilities to Impact Public Policies

Impact on Citizenship

Total experiences

Stateled

CSOled

First-grade associativity

22%

20%

24%

Increased leadership, cohesion and/or internal membership

53%

50%

56%

Management of resources and projects

61%

57%

65%

Second- and third-grade associativity

48%

37%

58%

Sensitizing new audiences about actions or claims of collective interest (agenda setting)

33%

19%

42%

Creation of media or communication or public opinion resources

14%

12%

16%

5%

0

10%

Opening of deliberative bodies to public interest measures

27%

23%

30%

Preparation of proposals for public policy measures or decisions

22%

15%

29%

Dialogue and negotiation with the state to generate measures or adjustments to policies or programmes

62%

67%

58%

Joint execution of policies, programmes and public projects

65%

75%

57%

Monitoring, social control and accountability for decisions or actions

14%

12%

16%

Instigation of class actions, complaints, vindication, legal or direct actions

Source: Our own elaboration from Database of Citizenship and Public Management Programme

First, two organizational capabilities variables and two public policy impact variables were reported far oftener than the variable of impact on capabilities for action in the public space. This is consistent with the inadequate mediation of regulated instruments and massive use of social participation, which both entail increasing opportunities for dialogue and actors involved, as well

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as and more levels of deliberation in the communicative and decision-taking public space. Thus, increased leadership, internal cohesion or membership in civic associations (53%) and citizens’ capabilities in administering resources and funding projects associated with governance (61%), are the main variables for which associativity-strengthening impact is reported. Overall, significant levels of articulation were reported for this associativity, since it is supported by second- and third-grade organizations (48%) rather than by grass-roots organizations. Secondly, and in line with the above, the capabilities for influencing public policy initiatives – reported mostly by state agencies – align again with variables concerning implementation of social programmes, namely, opening up to the adoption of adjustment measures (62%) and civil recruitment for joint execution of these programmes in local areas (65%). In the experiences analysed, these were the main modalities of impact on governance, surpassing the frequency of citizen proposals, whether for measures or policy decisions, or for societal control of them. The trend is much more pronounced in the case of public bodies. Their low impact on the proposal and social control variables suggests marginality as an institutional practice and little incorporation of the participatory instruments available to them. This analysis of a purposive sample of innovative initiatives in the links between state and civil society allows identification of multiple fields of impact these experiences had on the orientation and methods of both the conditions for citizenship and governance. The variety of the initiatives’ themes and methodologies is attributable to the operation of social policies incorporating participatory methodologies and different modes of interaction with civil society. It is also an indicator of the vitality of CSOs’ handling of issues of public concern and establishment of different forms of interaction with the public sector. The initiatives reveal patterns of relations with the state that differ from those traditionally associated with the ‘socio-political matrix’ operating in Chile in the democratic period before the military coup (Garretón 2000). Formerly, this relation tended to link national social actors with public policies that were being expanded via the mediation of political actors. These actors carried out this mediation in Congress or through expansion of the state. Some analyses contend that subnational entities, particularly municipal ones, acted as brokers for legislators by securing votes in exchange for benefits for their communities (A. Valenzuela 1977). However, the parliamentary benches were not just oriented to the interests of particular groups but structured into political parties with strong social roots permanently and organically embedded in certain social sectors and long-term political projects. This political process went hand in hand with that type of state’s development and its links with collective interests (Abal Medina 2005).

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Judging from the foregoing analysis, the current situation is very different. To begin with, social actors are not structured in national-level organizations but operate at a local level, without mechanisms for the representation of broader interests (PNUD 2000). Moreover, they liaise with the state directly, through the municipalities or through local, sectoral or territorial social programmes. These links are many; therefore, the implementation of many policies and programmes presupposes the organization and active participation of its beneficiaries. The participation framework is often provided in the policy’s or programme’s defined objectives, and may promote the formation of local groups that contribute to it under different forms of organization. In other words, the relations multiply and intensify – not in a context of competing political definitions, but in order to implement certain policies and programmes already determined by the state. Still, the new links show a higher potential for grass-roots-level impact in areas related to the exercise of citizenship, mainly the strengthening of local associativity, particularly second- and third-grade. Through their strengthening of leadership and membership, these links have the capacity to mitigate the excessive fragmentation of civil society. They can also significantly impact capabilities to liaise and negotiate with the state to formulate and implement specific policies and programmes at the subnational level. The weakness of this impact appears to be due largely to its relegation to the fringes of public space. This is why it does not empower social organizations to act and bring its influence to bear in that space, and thereby influence public policy. Instead, the link tends to be instrumental to, or to function within, prior policy designs and previously defined regulatory and budgetary frameworks. However, initiatives arising from civil society and those promoted by the state both strengthen citizen capabilities, suggesting that potentially democratizing actors are present in both spheres of public action. From another angle, this could also favour increased political participation by unconventional means, according to the correlation observed between social capital variables (including associativity and support for collective-action causes) and participation in political activities other than elections or campaigns (Klesner 2007: 28). Finally, in the governance sphere, impact is lower and corresponds mainly to initiatives promoted by the state itself. In other words, the institutional framework has proven inadequate and reactive with respect to the social initiatives that the state itself promotes. Additionally, the impact on governance variables is specific, with no generalized impact on the key variables of institutional framework and sustainability of the innovation. The impact of this bottom-up joint effort is mainly at the programme level and is relatively low in terms of planning, administration and public policy control methods.

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About a third of the initiatives have created specific mechanisms to include new actors in policymaking, but they have not increased the impact on the variables that structure public policy and determine its future projection. As for the modification of public administration methods, it is consistent with the overall strategy of modernizing the state but lacks sufficient scope to affect the democratizing orientations of state action. Similarly, the difficulty of scaling up or replicating innovative initiatives points to a lack of continuity and impact at higher levels.

National Public Policy Networks: Other Forms of Impact So far I have examined the associative and participative profile of Chilean society and analysed the articulation between one of its segments and public policy initiatives, namely, its capability to influence decisions and courses of actions that affect society. We have seen that public policy, particularly in the social sphere, sets up multiple links with grass-roots organizations and NGOs and sometimes conditions the funding that sustains the existence and operation of organized forms of the community. Qualitative analysis of the sample of participatory links established with the state at a subnational level showed that these links are also realized as relatively isolated networks, that is, between one organization and one government agency. In other words, they do not take the form of one or several macro-networks (or blocs of actors linked by dense networks) but consist of multiple weakly interlinked networks. This finding confirms the characterization of Chilean civil society as an archipelago of small, isolated units. It also accounts for the state’s internal diversity: the convergence established at the implementation and intermediate levels lacks effective channels to the decision-taking levels, so there is no bottom-up flow. Moreover, agreements on social policies are unrelated to the orientations defined at the strategic core of the state, where this type of agreement does not exist in the same way. The analysis of this purposive sample of initiatives with an organized participation aspect is relevant because it shows its weak potential for impact on public policy, despite the number and variety of experiences. Organized civil society liaises with government and local services via the established channels but falls short of structuring sustainable public policy networks capable of autonomous initiative. The right institutional framework to promote them is also lacking. By contrast, other forms of association involving civil society have been implemented but are not channelled through the established mechanisms, which tend to relate to social policies. These other articulations take shape at the national level or exploit the public scene to gain relevance to political

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and institutional actors with national influence. In general, they involve the more powerful, influential sectors of civil society, or reflect different strategies to liaise with the state and thereby mobilize political and organizational resources that subnational initiatives lack. They also involve non-institutionalized mechanisms, which subsidize more stable mechanisms with ad hoc designs or, simply, result from the political dynamics between state actors and civil society. These are the expert knowledge networks (Varas 2006), the strategic public-private alliances (Blanco and Vargas 2006) and urban citizen movements (Poduje 2008). Compared to the previous sample, these cases have more power to change public policy via their connections to other types of organizations and civil society actors, and produce a different combination of ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ changes. The three most important determinants of impact are technical knowledge, position of authority and position in the socioeconomic structure. The pattern of these resources’ concentration in certain groups and places is crucial to understanding the higher impact, in public policy decisions, of social actors who reinforce elitism rather than reduce it.

The Role of Technocracy and Specialized Knowledge in Public Policy Networks According to Augusto Varas, in the Chilean case, the influence of sectors of civil society is detectable in certain significant changes in public policy. However, this influence does not derive from social mobilization processes or innovations working from below. Several factors explain the institutionalization of these policies, particularly the gender equality policy analysed by Varas, but perhaps the greatest influence for change was a form of link between civil society and state involving ‘expert knowledge’. These networks’ effectiveness also relied on contextual factors such as the international framework of agreements on this issue and the ‘new visibility that the real society began to acquire through the open but diffuse feminist presence in the country and the increasing use of public opinion polls that showed the reality that could no longer be concealed’ (Varas 2006: 50). Virginia Guzmán (2005) argued that the expert networks made up a ‘dense institutional fabric of gender equality that provided favourable conditions and opened institutional places – interfaces – so that the knowledge acquired and developed by NGOs and independent academic centres and later, university centres, could be translated into public policy proposals’ (ibid.: 50). A material expression of this linkage based on specialized knowledge is the fact that ‘between 1990 and 2005, a total of thirty five institutional consultancy agencies, with seventy three significant products, fuelled the public management of the sector’ (ibid.: 51).

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As Varas pointed out, these favourable conditions included the weakness of Congress and the almost exclusive predominance of the Executive in gender equality matters. Also relevant was the movement’s female leaders’ fluent transition into government positions. As will be discussed in chapter 5, those who made the transition actually belong to the highly qualified professional sector. At the same time, international cooperation continued to offer some support to independent academic centres linked to feminism, which combined their independent research capability with studies and consultancies for the government. The outsourcing modality that the government used to produce knowledge favoured this network. However, these networks’ effectiveness was directly related to the political framework in which they were inserted, which set limits on the use of the knowledge produced. In the case of gender equity policies, the institutionalization achieved in the agreements of the post-1990 transition provided the right context for certain fields of innovation but limited progress in others. Still, the influence of expert knowledge was obvious in the use of public opinion polls, the studies being conducted and the existence of a dense institutional network of women experts in the government, think tanks, NGOs, aid agencies and multilateral international agencies. This model of state–civil society linkage is special: although it originated in a social movement and has a political expression, it depends strategically on neither. A political agreement provides the framework for action, but thereafter the process develops in ways that are relatively autonomous from the social dynamics, depending instead on the power of think tanks, the resources of international cooperation and the opportunities open to experts who come to government positions via feminist organizations. Insofar as channels of communication exist between the two sectors, influence may be exerted on different areas of public policy. Meanwhile, the strictly political dynamics – that is, representation in Congress – do not appear to determine what happens so much as they echo and react to what emerges from these networks of experts. To the extent that a gender equality policy can be described as an area of progressive modifications of the political agenda, it differs little from the approach taken in other areas such as citizens’ security, higher education or economic regulation. Here the technical or specialized discourse plays a much less progressive role, as equally dense institutional networks use it to encourage preservation, rather than modification, of the public policy orientations established in the 1980s. Another type of network was established in the case of the revamping of criminal legal procedure, one of the most important reforms during the tenure of Eduardo Frei (1994–2000). Using Blanco and Vargas’s (2006) terminology, these networks could be called ‘strategic public-private alliances’.

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This sectoral reform was also government-led, but it did not originate with the government because it was not part of the platform. It was developed and designed under an agreement between academic centres and civil society institutions, with significant support from the press. Here there were no Chilean antecedents – no previous social movement or claims for more and better justice – but only a political decision backed by the political elite (government and opposition). The antecedent lay instead in the agendas of international organizations such as the IDB and the World Bank, which were concerned about the modernization of the justice sector as part of the second-generation reforms. Unlike the case of the gender equality policy, this reform was preconditioned on change in the sector’s agenda. The initial situation – of confrontation between the government and the judiciary (whose upper echelon was composed of judges appointed by Pinochet) concerning human rights trials – shifted to an agenda dominated by issues of citizen insecurity and the perception of increased crime. The government’s proposals focused on aspects of the modernization of justice. Also, the composition of the Supreme Court changed, producing a sort of cross-cutting consensus that so strongly favoured the criminal justice reform that ‘positions critical of this reform became frowned upon. To be modern and democratic today is to be in favour of the criminal procedural law reform’ (Correa 1999: 295). The precondition for this consensus was the government’s acceptance of restricted versions of the ruling Concertación’s earlier proposals, according to Jorge Correa, a senior government official of the Concertación governments and later a member of the Constitutional Court appointed by President Bachelet: ‘the second government of the Concertación abandoned, though not entirely,… the more confrontational transformation agenda, so as to take advantage of this common diagnosis and build around it a new agenda that was not in its program, but which could eventually be transformed into a policy of consensus’ (ibid.: 295). Here, once again, the political context’s importance in the definition and development of the agenda is obvious. As the more confrontational aspects – that is, the ones that the political heirs of the military regime did not agree with – gave way to more consensual aspects aligned with the governance model, a space for civil society actors opened up. Who were these actors, who managed to occupy a space and attained extensive political influence? Most relevant here is the influence that certain sectors of civil society exerted on the new agenda, which had not come from the state or the traditional political forces. In such a critical area as justice, the initiative and agenda instead represented a strategic combination of actors in a new form of ‘public policy network’. As Jorge Correa described it:

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The main government agenda was not conceived in the programme of any political coalition or in the Ministry itself, but in the efforts of two NGOs. The first one was Paz Ciudadana, associated with El Mercurio and with modernizing forces ranging across the whole political spectrum, which were concerned about the issue of citizen security. In turn, Paz Ciudadana associated with the Corporación de Promoción Universitaria, a body related to the Christian Democracy, which had received the financial support of the US Agency for Development. They were joined by academics concerned with issues of due process and human rights, from the Faculty of Law of the Universidad Diego Portales. … But it was undoubtedly El Mercurio which, through its many editorials and news coverage, gave the final impetus to the idea. (1999: 308)

The first reform project was produced at the Discussion Forum on Criminal Proceedings, where participants included legal experts, scholars and international support agencies (Blanco and Vargas 2006: 2). The Ministry of Justice later took up this proposal and turned it into several bills that Congress quickly passed. Once the reform was applied in the Metropolitan Region in 2005 (the last stage of a partial implementation), its implementation was complete. The same actors that originated the proposal are currently evaluating its performance. According to its main driving institutions, the prime factor in this success was the consensus reached among the experts’ discussion circles, for which favourable spaces for participation had been created. Second in importance was the ‘leadership of the nongovernment entities involved’, which in this case stemmed from Citizenship Peace Foundation’s (Fundación Paz Ciudadana) direct relationship with the entrepreneur Agustín Edwards and El Mercurio 7 and from the strong links the Corporación de Promoción Universitaria maintained with the political elite. A third factor, the ‘public-private strategic alliance’, was not born of the government programme but was adopted by the state after appearing on the agendas of the mass media and academia. Also important was the ‘sustained public interest and private support for a period of over 10 years and the support of the mass media’ (Blanco and Vargas 2006: 4). In short, the issue was part of an agenda promoted by social actors whose enormous power enabled them to sustain, fund and disseminate the work of this network, which eventually became a wide-ranging public policy. At work here is thus another factor usually considered relevant to social actors’ impact: the availability of resources that they can mobilize (Fuentes and Heiss 2006: 363). Blanco and Vargas (2006: 5) summarized their evaluation of the process of the criminal justice reform with an attempt to generalize what they believed

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determined the success of a participatory process, namely, ‘three key elements that could be replicated in any participatory process of policy design: generation of common interests (technical rather than political), building up of leaderships (public and private) and setting up permanent participation channels (forums and evaluation commissions)’. Once again, expert knowhow (conceptualized as opposed to political discourse and knowledge) prevailed, permitting the free flow of dialogue between the public and private sectors. Meanwhile, the presence of sectors with resources and power was felt in the funding of initiatives that did not depend on the state but on their own academic centres, companies and international cooperation. The question here is why this case was so successful when so many are not – indeed, to the point of producing a major reform that even involved a commitment to significantly increased allocation of public resources and, paradoxically, was also endorsed by the supporters of a minimal state. Fuentes and Heiss asked a similar question when they analysed the ‘successful’ initiatives of citizen impact included in the volume La Propuesta Ciudadana (Varas 2006), noting that ‘[w]e need to focus not only on the necessary and sufficient conditions for impact, but also to explain the conditions that have prevented collective action and have limited the impact of certain actions of public interest’ (ibid. 372). To answer this question, the case of the Presidential Advisory Council on Education, mentioned above, can serve as a point of comparison. The educational reform was not on the presidential program, either. It undoubtedly involved far more ample participation: both the social movement that gave rise to it and the council itself involved many more sectors and people than the process of reforming criminal procedural law. It also had at its disposal the country’s expert know-how and public and private leadership. However, it did not manage to forge a consensual vision or involve the political elites, which eventually consented to a much more limited reform that did not adequately consider the council’s findings or the high school students’ demands. Another specific way this case differed from the criminal procedure law reform was that it lacked the media’s support – despite the initial sympathy shown towards the student movement – and permanent support for policy development. In fact, the council had was given only a few months to carry out its task, which was necessary to deactivate a conflict, whereas the criminal law reform faced no conflict and was not pressed for time. Beyond all this, the issue of public education evokes no consensus and thus cannot be resolved ‘technically’. What is more, the Presidential Advisory Council on Education failed to process the education issue politically. A possible explanation for this failure could be the extent of participation: in the case of the criminal procedural law reform, participation was restricted to

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experts, whereas the advisory council involved social movements and organizations whose claims included changing certain key reforms of the dictatorial period and therefore went beyond the governance model. By contrast, civil society’s involvement in the criminal procedural law reform, as Jorge Correa pointed out, consisted in three academic research centres associated with relevant forces of the political system, under the hegemony of the Fundación Paz Ciudadana and the consequent support of El Mercurio, a factic power in the transition. It is interesting to observe how impact is associated with previous power factors and the technocracy’s growing importance in the processing of public problems. Even in a more institutionalized mechanism for dialogue with civil society, such as the public hearings of the Legislature, the pattern persists. The public hearings that Congressional commissions hold in the process of discussing certain bills also reveal the outsize presence of factic powers and the associated expert networks. The monitoring of parliamentary work revealed that the organizations with the largest presence in Senate committees represent industrialists and big business (28 per cent and 30 per cent of the CSOs heard in 2006 and 2007, respectively), followed by the trade unions (18 per cent in the same two years) and other social organizations, including NGOs (18%). Business organizations also predominate (32%) in the Lower House committees, followed in the second place by think tanks (14%), relegating social organizations to third place. In both cases, professional guilds are heard less than the aforementioned organizations (7% in the Senate and 5% in the Chamber of Deputies). In other words, some organizations, particularly corporations and business and trade organizations, have a privileged presence in both houses of the Legislature. In the same period, think tanks were heard by Senate committees on 46 occasions and by the Chamber of Deputies on 89 occasions. Heard most often was the Instituto Libertad y Desarrollo, a think tank associated with the UDI, on 20 and 21 occasions in 2006 and 2007 respectively (Observatorio Parlamentario 2008: 31–35). The legislative committees lack clear standards or norms to regulate participation. And this goes even for basic issues. No criteria have been defined to establish what kinds of projects call for public opinion to be heard, what types of organizations should be invited or what procedures should be used to guarantee the expression of public opinion. Therefore, one study concluded, ‘there is no actual acknowledgment of the right of citizens to be heard’ (ibid.: 26). Because of this shortcoming, the institutional framework reproduces the inequalities typical of Chilean society in the participation mechanisms it creates and weakens the citizenship aspect of already existing ones. It is not that civil society is absent, but just that only certain segments’ participation has an actual impact on public decisions.

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Inequality and Citizen Participation in Urban Movements Civil society is hardly homogeneous in its orientations or internal composition, given the groups, ideologies and differences of power that coexist within it. These differences become significant when CSOs attempt to launch processes of mobilization and change public policies. This observation was confirmed by a study on citizen movements related to urban conflicts, which have tended to proliferate in recent years. The pioneer movement emerged in opposition a project for an urban highway in Santiago known as Costanera Norte and involved the area’s middle- and upper-class residents (Ducci 2004; Sepúlveda 2005). Its latest manifestation was a referendum organized in the capital’s municipal district of Vitacura (the district with the highest income in the country), which was the first citizen plebiscite since the reform of municipal law in 1999. These and other documented experiences show that participation that succeeds in working change hinges on its drivers’ relatively high economic status and the local residents’ well-placed connections and ability to influence power centres inside and outside the government. These same sectors have also managed to overcome the fragmentation that characterizes citizen organizations in the country, and thus have even greater influence. In his analysis of the movement that opposed Costanera Norte and managed to modify the original scheme, urban planner Iván Poduje ascribes its success to three factors: …the high level of organization of the residents and their fluent contact networks with the authorities and opinion leaders. Perhaps for this reason, the media gave a wide coverage to the conflict, threatening the image of the star project of the new plan. Finally, a key factor in the rerouting of the project was the interest of the concessionaire company itself, both to avoid problems with the neighbours and to improve the attractiveness of the business, since the concessionaire would also make a profit from the construction of the highway. (Poduje 2008: 5)

Regarding organization capability, the UNDP Human Development Report of 2000 had already observed that the available formal and informal social capital was unevenly distributed among the Chilean population. According to its measurements, the upper strata had a greater stock of both formal social capital (interpersonal or social trust, trust in institutions, associativity, civic commitment and reciprocity norms) and informal social capital (having someone to talk to, perception of reciprocity and informal civic commitment). The UNDP’s Formal and Informal Social Capital Index for upper-class groups was more than double that of the lower classes (PNUD 2000: 144–149). The role of the media is also reproduced; they are not independent but have strong ties to the country’s economic and political elite. The case of

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Costanera Norte is just one example of a pattern that is also spreading in the citizen movements motivated by urban conflicts in Santiago. Out of thirtytwo citizen organizations that emerged from the movements, eighteen (56%) were based in the traditional barrio alto (uptown Santiago). Others emerged in new real estate developments in high-income neighbourhoods in popular areas. All in all, ‘the proportion of ABC1 social movements reaches 66 per cent. The remaining 16 per cent is distributed among middleclass communities … only 19 per cent of citizen’s movements are located in lowincome communities’ (Poduje 2008: 7).8 Citizen movements also achieved a high level of impact in the modification and freezing of eleven municipal zoning plans, the changed layout of different real estate or road projects, and the increased costs borne by the state in several projects. According to Poduje’s estimate, these ex post participation processes – prompted by designs about which the community was not consulted, projects that did not generate a consensus or compensation payments that did not fully correspond to the costs involved – added U.S. $586 million to the costs borne by the state. Due to the characteristics of the process, these changes and higher costs do not correspond necessarily to an increase in the public good, but to the state’s forced response to group mobilizations with the capacity for influence – which circles back to the problem of the lack of an institutional framework for citizen participation. Thus, concludes Poduje, ‘in the absence of clear institutional frameworks, the state has had to compromise to avoid conflict, without that decision necessarily implying a social benefit’ (ibid.: 14). These clearly were ‘bottom-up’ changes driven by citizen movements, but the far greater relative power of the citizens involved gave them a greater impact on the modification of public policies. This conclusion is reinforced by the case of the plebiscite in Vitacura, which was demanded by opponents of high-rise buildings in some streets of this municipal district and is to date the only case of a Chilean municipality being forced to carry out a plebiscite. Previous attempts to force plebiscites, like those in La Serena in the north of Chile and the municipal district of Ñuñoa in Santiago, had failed. In La Serena, a proposal for a referendum to decide the fate of a municipal facility led by the Health Advisory Council managed to get the requisite notarized signatures corresponding to 10 per cent of registered voters in the district. However, the Municipal Council, being unable to fund a plebiscite, chose to accede to the residents’ proposals rather than run the risk of losing one. In Ñuñoa, a middle- and high-income municipal district, residents who opposed a regulation allowing high-rise buildings failed to obtain the large number of notarized signatures required by law. Thus, Vitacura is the only municipal district that has managed to make use of this institutional mechanism. In Vitacura, only 0.13 per cent of the pop-

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ulation lives below the poverty line. Its per capita municipal budget is seven times that of the municipal district of San Ramón, one of the poorest in the capital (Luna and Seligson 2007: 6). Average monthly household income in Vitacura exceeds U.S.$5,000 per month, versus about U.S.$670 in La Pintana, another of the poorest municipal districts in Santiago (OECD 2009: 90). Also, the case of Vitacura enjoyed extensive media coverage, which motivated people to participate and gave the residents’ organization ‘Defendamos Vitacura’, which opposed the mayor’s position, a resounding majority. To conclude, different identifiable models of linkage between the civil society and the state can bring about changes in public policy. Their differential results in terms of impact are very directly related to aspects of the governance model discussed in previous chapters. Results depend on generating support or forging links with certain hegemonic forces, not on the institutional channelling of conflicts, which to date appears to have quite limited potential. The public exposure of certain issues via the media is also a factor, and excessive concentration of media ownership and their links with the hegemonic forces reinforce the phenomenon of differential results. Meanwhile, different experiences show the importance of technocrats working in the state and in international organizations, and of their links to segments of civil society within the configuration of new political elites and agendas in the country. The next chapter investigates their role, which has decisively influenced certain elements of the state-society interface. As Peter Spink has suggested, the problem does not seem to be whether there is participation, but rather who participates, how, and with what consequences for public policy. My analysis has highlighted the changes that have taken place in the Chilean society. It also questions the validity of the usual diagnosis that sees this society as completely disorganized and permeated by the individualistic logic of the economic model. While the empirical data are not complete, they show an active but fragmented civil society that lacks extensive networks to provide internal cohesion and suffers above all from the inadequacy of organic channels leading into politics. The analysis of local initiatives revealed that participation initiatives have a relatively low impact, in terms of translating into policy orientation or institutionalization of their own participation. This is due to both the fragmentation of the civil society and the fact that spaces for participation are weakly institutionalized and disconnected from the cycle of public policies. These spaces are nonbinding and generally functional only as far as the implementation of specific government programmes. Yet the citizen participation policy has not sought to amend the situation. However, the chapter has highlighted another aspect that is generally disregarded: civil society is highly internally differentiated mainly because of the enormous socioeconomic inequality prevailing in Chile, which is also

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expressed in differentiated participation in public policy networks. The local actors that liaise with the state do so through targeted social policies, participating in implementation networks that are subordinate to guidelines decided elsewhere, by others. Other actors are considered strategic for the governance model and thus have greater power; their participation in networks gives them considerable influence on policy decisions. Neither type of actor institutionalizes participation or makes it a public issue subject to greater accountability.

Notes 1. Most surveys enquire about organized participation using a list of organizations that is shown to the respondent. The method of presenting the data prevents making a simple addition later (as might occur when one person participates in more than one organization) and does not reflect other forms of organization that are not included in the list. Thus it is more accurate to base comparisons on the residual category of those not participating at all and then address each organization in particular. 2. This work by nature studies mainly the organizational dimension of collective action by civil society, which is the action directly related to public policy but does not reflect the conceptual entirety of civil society. Thus it is also necessary to mention the scarcity and large methodological limitations of studies on the subject in Chile. 3. On the Participatory Management and Citizen Capital Indexes, see Cannobio (2009). 4. In addition, in October 1998 General Pinochet was arrested in London and ultimately forced to retire from the political scene after returning to Chile in March 2000. This dispelled fears of increased military influence and ushered in a significant change in the country’s political agenda. 5. http://www.ispch.cl/ley20285/t_activa/participacion_ciudadana/AGENDA_PRO_PAR TICIPACION_CIUDADANA_2007.pdf. Retrieved 20 June 2014. 6. http://www.ispch.cl/ley20285/t_activa/participacion_ciudadana/AGENDA_PRO_PAR TICIPACION_CIUDADANA_2007.pdf. Retrieved 20 June 2014. 7. Fundación Paz Ciudadana was founded by the entrepreneur Agustin Edwards, owner of El Mercurio, the main newspaper network in the country, after his son was abducted on the orders of the Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodriguez – a Communist Party splinter group – in the early 1990s. The foundation’s board grouped personalities from the Right with renowned intellectuals and politicians of the Concertación linked to the DC and the ‘renewed’ or ‘liberal’ sector of its left wing, mainly from the PPD (Ramos and Guzmán 2000). 8. ABC1 refers to the upper socioeconomic groups among the scales used by the marketing research, that divided society in A, B, C1, C2, C3, D and E groups.

5

From Civil Society to the State A New Elite Is Born?

The third factor this work analyses to determine the potential and limitations of the civil society–state relation are the career paths that some individuals follow between both spheres. According to Dagnino, Olvera and Panfichi (2006: 76), ‘the notion of career paths is a methodological instrument that allows understanding the complexities, tensions and contradictions that accompany the transit of civil society activists to the political society and, particularly, to the state’. In this approach, the notion of career paths permits incorporation of a new angle on the empirical documentation of links, convergences and tensions between civil society’s dynamics and organizations, on the one hand, and the exercise of political power under postdictatorial conditions on the other. The peculiarity of this angle is that it relates the conceptualization of civil society to the conceptualization of the elite, an aspect not typically considered in studies on civil society. Elites form and perform in a process of mediation between society’s demands and orientations and those of the political sphere; therefore, they require specific consideration. According to the authors of a collective volume of discussions on the different characteristics of democratic-participatory innovations in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the elite’s disproportionate influence is one of the problems not dealt with in those studies: ‘one of the shortcomings of the approach to participatory experiences is that it creates big blind spots such as those related to the study of the elites’ policy’ (Raventós 2008: 27). This chapter will analyse the links between civil society and the state by focusing on people who exchanged leadership positions during the transition or moved from pro-democratic social and political organizations operating during the dictatorship to executive central positions under the postdictatorship governments. Tracing these actors’ career paths enabled me to more accurately document what proportion of Concertación government cadres came from civil society and, specifically, from which of its segments. It also illuminated the positions these people have held within the state administration and some ways in which their career paths affected the government agenda. When a career path returns to or leaves the state, information on the – 207 –

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attendant conditions and on whether it will next turn towards or away from civil society, is relevant to understand this path.

Individual Career Paths and the Formation of Political Elites The sphere constituted by political elites is hardly restricted to the public institutional framework. One marked characteristic of the transition process in Chile was precisely the negotiation between the new people responsible for the executive branch of government and those who, though on their way out of government, retained positions of power in the military, economy and mass media. The influence they derived from this power had a dual expression: so-called authoritarian enclaves, that is, the legal and constitutional mechanisms designed to preserve the institutional framework set up during the military government; and extra-institutional spheres linked to formal political expressions through several mechanisms. Chilean political jargon terms this assemblage the factic powers. However, in the opinion of Antonio Cortés, the phenomenon goes beyond these factic powers to encompass agents that exercise political power of some kind, although their functions originally were not politically oriented. ‘This extra-institutional circuit in the process of public decision-taking [is] made up by links and agents within and outside the institutional framework … which come from three areas: economic groups and industry and trade associations; the mass media, particularly television; the techno-political intelligentsia’ (Cortés 2000: 193). Once again, connections with specific actors shed light on elements of power that are relevant to understanding society’s influence on public policy. An analysis of the political elite’s composition must consider more than just its members’ institutional positions. The initial moment of the transition had an instituting dimension, because in the period of democratic transformation, people moved from outside the state into its interior. Some of the civilian officials of the outgoing military government remained in the state, this time in the legislative branch. To do so, they had to undergo the electoral process and legitimize their positions. The exceptions were the appointed senators, certain high-ranking officers in the armed forces and some members of the Supreme Court. In the long run, they all left the state. However, the first group is particularly deserving of analysis because unlike the others, it accessed the government from outside the state. The political power expressed by parties undergoing reconstruction after decades of clandestine activity or adjournment was not the only consideration in the process of recruiting the new government. The growing importance of technocracy and specialized know-how also influenced the process.

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A new breed that cut across technocracy and politics – namely, the technopols (Silva 1991; Domínguez 1997) – became a crucial factor in the case of Chilean transition to democracy. Organized civil society was the source of most of the cadres recruited and trained by the ruling majority coalition that took power in 1990, a fact that underlines the importance of career paths. Yet despite its civil society origins and continuing pro–civil society discourse, the Concertación government did not lay out any proposals for strengthening its role or reinforcing democracy in its participatory dimension. Conditions favoured the ‘virtuous confluence of the political projects’ (Dagnino 2003) originating in civil society and those arising from political society, mainly because the two societies’ members were the same people who had taken part in the civil mobilization to recover democracy. However, this did not suffice to attain the expected democratization of society and the state. The state did become partially and gradually democratized within the framework of the governance agreement, but civil society failed to become stronger, and its fragmentation remained unchanged. This is partly explained by the institutional conditions of the political transition, which prevented the ruling political majority as of 1990 from fully exercising its power (Garretón 2000). However, to fully explain this divergence we must also analyse the specific dynamics of the political society, particularly the ways in which the new post-1990 political elite was constituted. The previous chapters dealt with the general conditions of civil society’s evolution and its links with the state, within the context of the transition and the characteristics of the local-level associations. They described the relative weakening of the lower strata of civil society (the popular sectors) and their subordination to the government’s handling of the requirement to insert the country into a model of globalization. The consequent disarticulation and fragmentation of these segments of society, formerly capable of mobilization, deprived their social action of relevance. The earlier chapters also treated the role of social policies in the creation of environments favouring the development of civil society, and confirmed both the absence of a suitable institutional framework and the disarticulation of policies that might have contributed to the development of one. The prior connections established between some influential people and civil leadership or organizations, despite being quite common, have not themselves been very relevant to the democratic governments’ generation of projects and agendas, or to these governments’ style of relating to the citizenry. The governments took up part of the agenda developed by civil society – namely, the creation of laws, agencies and targeted social programmes – but failed to address many social issues and claims because of their commitment to the politico-institutional and economic framework forged by the transition

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pacts, which defined other actors and priorities. At the same time, the governments gradually became more oriented to a particular Chilean version of consociational democracy, which stresses the need to balance majority rule with the overrepresentation of certain groups (Liphart 1999). The Chilean version’s peculiarity was that the groups that were overrepresented were not minorities that had been particularly discriminated against or excluded. On the contrary: the minority that the government sought to overrepresent was the Right, so as to balance the majority rule that favoured the Centre-Left (Brunner 1990; Ruiz 1993; Cazor 2007). Complementing this political design was the increased importance of political and technical elites’ roles in public action and the growing weight of the technocracy. In terms of civil-society-to-state career paths, the Chilean case differs from others in the region. In Peru, for example, NGO leaders accessed the government during a crisis of political representation at the end of the Alberto Fujimori administration, and then left the government when politics was rearticulated under Alejandro Toledo and later Alan García (Panfichi 2007). Similarly, members of Mexican civil organizations who joined the government during President Vicente Fox’s first term were later displaced by militants of the governing party (Basombrío 2005). In Chile, however, the new government cadres were not ‘civil society militants’ and eventually built careers in government posts. After presenting my main hypotheses, I shall analyse the characteristics of the Chilean evolution, emphasizing the political parties’ role in reconstituting the political elite during the democratic transition. This is followed by data on the career paths of high-ranking officials in the executive branch of government. The sample confirms the presence of elites within civil society, once power networks were built up beyond the formally established political power. The section after that will present the main ways that civil society actors’ presence has influenced the setting of political agendas during the transition. The chapter concludes with a reconceptualization of the relations between state and civil society.

Hypotheses about Career Paths from Civil Society to the State The existing institutional framework and the stability of the political agreement reached in 1990 permitted the reconstruction of the politico-institutional system of representative democracy, but they have also prevented the consolidation of democratic participation and the strengthening of civil society. The specific characteristics of the transition negotiation established differentiated opportunities for different segments of the opposition to the military regime. The more radical political expressions – like the Communist Party (Partido Comunista, PC) and the Revolutionary Left Movement (Movimiento de Iz-

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quierda Revolucionaria, MIR) – refused to abide by Pinochet’s constitutional framework and thus were isolated and shut out. In fact, even twenty years later they still lacked suitable political expression: the MIR had disappeared, and the PC, despite the constant support of 6 to 10 per cent of voters, did not get into Congress until 2010, when it formed alliances. In addition, the negotiations with civilian and military supporters of the outgoing regime led to the design of a quite centralized decision-making proc­ess subject to several types of restrictions and led by very few people (Otano 1995). As a protagonist of the process who came from civil society described it: In 1990 the democratic political atmosphere was very much pervaded by the fact that the pro Pinochet forces had around forty per cent of voters, that the armed forces had entered the transition process unscathed, and that, ultimately, the economic power of the country remained in the hands of powerful businessmen and industrialists who had fully backed the dictatorial regime. (Namuncura 2005: 282).

These prevailing conditions effectively translated into the deactivation of organized social expressions, the transfer of initiative to the government, the summoning of those able to embrace the new government orientation and the abandonment of the former social mobilization. The interpretation of this situation as a reality check imposed by the political conditions was exemplified by President Patricio Aylwin’s advocacy of ‘justice insofar as possible’. According to Domingo Namuncura, a staunch defender of human rights and member of the IC and then the PPD who was appointed Director of CONADI and held public office under different Concertación administrations: ‘It was necessary to make progress only to the extent possible, and leave for later governments the task of completing a task that the first government would just begin. We call this a “reason of state”’ (Namuncura 2005: 282). However, the social leaders of the previous period saw things another way: In their view, this societal restriction of politics is not only a reality check, but also the intentional object of the new course that the government parties are taking … This is the time for the old expert politicians: the young students who fought against the dictatorship have withdrawn from the public space, and the generation of social leaders of the struggle against the dictatorship is now a generation of technicians who are more interested in the efficient management of power than in changing society. (Rojas 2008: 38)

Eduardo Rojas cites Carolina Tohá – a student leader of the 1980s (initially a member of the Socialist Party [Partido Socialista, PS] and subsequently of the PPD, which she also chaired) who later became a member of Congress, an undersecretary and a minister under different Concertación administrations

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– who says: ‘[T]here was little participation from the people and, besides, there was very little information. Perhaps there was no other possibility, but the cost of things being so was very high, because when that comeback was over, many who had been key actors until 1988–1989 were no longer protagonists’ (Rojas 2008: 39). The change of protagonists was thus a consequence of the way things had developed. Meanwhile, the agendas of the civil society that had mobilized in favour of democracy were institutionalized only partially, and in various entities and policies subordinated to the requirements and restrictions of the governance model. This severely limited their scope, as well as their continuity in time and political impact. Personal career paths were largely an expression of this. The nature of the transition process determined who, when and how some civil society activists came to hold positions in the new administration. The political parties that negotiated the transition also mediated the recruitment of top executive-branch officials. But the military government’s repressions, along with the institutional framework that was its legacy, had eroded these parties’ rich historical tradition. As they worked to design the new government and recruit staff during the transition, they had to compete with a technocracy whose continually growing influence tended to displace theirs in the management of public affairs. This was an inevitable outcome of a transition that by design was restricted exclusively to the politico-institutional sphere within the legal framework established by the dictatorship. This design, which dominated Chilean politics from 1987 on, fostered a trend of installing the ‘democratic elite’ in positions of power. This was not publicly discussed until the end of the Lagos administration, ‘when the issue of citizen policy emerged’ (Rojas 2008: 39). Thus, although many professional cadres appointed to carry out government functions came from organized civil society – mainly professional NGOs – they and their recruiters alike understood their accession as an individual matter that did not necessarily involve the memberships and agendas they were leaving behind. The ruling coalition sent political signals demanding performance based on technical competencies subordinated to the central design of the government’s political project – not on loyalty to affiliation or prior social projects. Domingo Namuncura expanded on this ‘closing’ of the political space: Once the results of the democratic election of 1989 were sorted out, the headquarters of the presidential campaign [where Namuncura had worked] started being dismantled, and with it, all the technical and organizational structures. Power was circumscribed to the executive team in charge of convening different citizens to carry out government related tasks. … Very few professionals from the sphere of human rights were invited to take over important posts in the new government. (2005: 280)

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In general, career paths did not return to civil society during the twenty years of Concertación governments. Those who reached the upper levels of executive administration acquired specialized competencies there that were later recycled in three main ways: in other, higher posts in the state itself, in leadership roles in political parties and in private activities, particularly consultancies and the political management of large enterprises. Political activity has therefore acquired an increasingly specialized, elitist character and background that coincides with the weakening of civil society itself and the paucity of institutional channels to guarantee its presence in the setting of the public agenda. The few cases of returns to civil society involved moves to highly specialized, professionalized entities such as NGOs – precisely the sector with the greatest capacity for critical dialogue with the state. This particular feature of the Chilean transition was practically disregarded in Carlos Basombrío’s (2005) analysis of activists and intellectuals in Latin American civil society who held government posts. The author understands belonging to civil society as an ascribed role, not a positioning that changes in view of different historical and political circumstances over time. I argue, on the contrary, that the identity of militant members of civil society hardens in line with their greater or lesser distance from institutional policy. Of those recruited from civil society to become the new civil servants responsible for the state apparatus, one group of highly qualified professionals was assigned disproportionate weight, reflecting the phenomenon of the technopols (Domínguez 1997). Endowed with considerable cultural capital derived partly from their prosperous socioeconomic backgrounds and perfected in studies abroad, members of this group had wide, powerful networks of international contacts. In the context of the Chilean political transition, these attributes lent them maximum political efficiency for several reasons. First, their negotiated nature tended to preserve the basic characteristics of the model imposed by the military and legitimized by the Chicago Boys. As high-level technocrats, they retained most of their academic, cultural and symbolic influence (Silva 1991; Dezalay and Garth 2002; Rosende 2007). Second, the political parties had been debilitated by almost seventeen years of proscription. The Left’s troubles were especially acute, given the double political defeats it had sustained in the military coup of 1973 and the breakup of the socialist camp in 1989. Third, the international factor’s leverage was felt in several respects: in the increased relative political influence of leaders returning from exile with the strong support of their former countries of residence; in the governmental and nongovernmental international cooperation mobilized in support of the return to democracy; and in expanded economic opportunities for Chileans residing abroad, especially in Western Europe and the United States.

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Lastly, in the forging of the Centre-Left political alliance that made the transition possible, leading roles went to those who were able to build bridges between the DC and the parties of the traditional Left, which had practically no prior history of alliances. These leaders were mainly militants of the catholic leftist parties, a late-1960s splinter of the DC. Having meantime experienced a process of ideological reconversion that moved them closer to the political Centre, they did not have a strong party, which contributed to their decision to join the coalition. Their centre-stage performance at the time doubtless derived at least partly from their membership in the social and economic elite and correspondingly extensive cultural capital (Rojas 2008: 127; Tironi 2009).

The Recomposition of the Political Arena in the Chilean Transition The career paths of those who went to work for the state appear to be more individually determined than organically associated with previous membership in civil society networks, even in the case of leaders and activists. Membership or belonging to civil society was a legitimizing factor in most such appointments, but two other conditions had to obtain for somebody to become a top public official: membership in a Concertación party, and possession of some kind of professional technical qualification. Indeed, these two conditions were necessary and sufficient by themselves; belonging to civil society was merely a factor that helped. In most cases the appointees belonged to a particular segment of civil society that was highly professionalized and had strong political links. In Chile, there is no absolute separation between political and civil society. On the contrary, the hallmark of Chilean civil society’s organizational makeup is precisely its close political connections. Only in recent years has this begun to change. The years of military dictatorship were exceptional, as party politics were proscribed and institutional spaces closed to political activity. In this situation, many political militants and leaders took shelter in social organizations and in the emerging field of NGOs associated with international cooperation and/or some Christian churches. The latter also intensified their social work and, by providing a broader institutional space in which to carry out activities belonging to the sociopolitical sphere, took up a role vacated by the state (Ábalos and Egaña 1989: 31–32). Thus there emerged an important cadre of professionals linked to think tanks, who contributed to critical reflection on the policies of the dictatorship and later became key players in formulating policies for the democratic transition. By 1987 an estimated forty-eight think tanks with 664 professional associates were operating in Chile, funded almost entirely by international cooperation (Lladser 1989: 253; Puryear 1994).

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To classify a leader as social or political, one must therefore examine the career path of the individual. Affiliation to one or the other type of organization is not an adequate criterion. It does not suffice to simply classify them as ‘civil society activists’ like the aforementioned book by Carlos Basombrío (2005), who based his analysis on the testimony of people who went from NGOs to the state in different Latin American countries. Unlike in Mexico and Brazil, the expression ‘civil society militant’ has never been used in Chile, where ‘militant’ is exclusively reserved for political party members. Ascription to civil society appears more a matter of a specific career path than of the permanently ascribed condition implied in several of the testimonies in Basombrío’s book. Most of these testimonies were given by people whose positions in the public apparatus were directly related to previous affiliations and career paths that they subsequently had to renounce – seldom voluntarily – owing to changes in political conditions. Politics had brought them to power and could also eventually force them to ‘return’ to civil society. Curiously, the two testimonies about Chile came from human rights activists who accessed the state and have remained there, a trajectory repeated in most of the cases studied.1 In general terms, I aim here to analyse the constitution of the new political elite, whose members include some persons from the ‘elite’ of organized civil society. A first consideration has to do with the very nature of the transition and the political conditions it imposed, which favoured some groups more than others. In the 1980s, the demand for democracy pulled supporters in two different directions: enforcing the schedule for the return to democracy according to the same agenda sanctioned by the 1980 Constitution, or forcing Pinochet to resign and convene a constituent assembly that would reestablish the traditional political, institutional, pluralistic and democratic foundations of the state. The former of these options won the day under the auspices of a nascent Centre-Left alliance that articulated the DC with certain factions of the PS generally known as ‘renewed’ (Otano 1995). The year 1988 saw the birth of the Concertación de Partidos por el No, composed of seventeen parties and movements united behind the president of the DC, Patricio Aylwin, who won the plebiscite to choose Pinochet’s successor in October. Within the socialist sphere, this new context precipitated the legalization of the PS, specifically its most orthodox faction, led by Clodomiro Almeyda, its historical leader and former Minister of Foreign Affairs under the Unidad Popular government. Until then, that faction had remained faithful to its historical alliance with the PC – dating from 1957 – which at that time promoted a breakaway strategy known as ‘popular rebellion’. In later years the socialist streams merged under the leadership of the ‘izquierda renovada’ (renewed Left), whose strategy of allying with the centre and participating in the plebiscite had triumphed at the polls (Otano 1995).

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However, the strategy of using the legal framework of Pinochet’s transition moved another group of socialists, together with some former radicals and some liberals, to create an ‘instrumental party’, the Party for Democracy (PPD), led by lawyer and economist Ricardo Lagos. Originally in the Radical Party (Partido Radical, PR), Lagos had resigned his membership in the early 1960s to join the PS. He was never part of the main camps vying to control the PS; instead, he and a small group of intellectuals formed a faction known as ‘the Swiss’, precisely because they remained neutral in the fight for control of the party. The making of the Concertación was a major innovation in Chilean politics because it managed to secure strategic agreement among sectors that were traditionally at loggerheads and had almost no past history of previous alliances, except in the mid 1950s. It also meant the end of the DC’s camino propio (doing things our way), a slogan the DC had emphasized since the election of Frei Montalva as President of the Republic in 1964. Ultimately, this coalition blocked the reconstitution of the alliance between the Right and the DC that had carried Frei Montalva to the presidency to prevent Allende from getting in, and that later supported the military coup. The consolidation of the party system between 1986 and 1989 produced a new, broader Right that internally disputed the projection of the legacy of the military regime; a DC reinforced by its alliance with PR sectors; and a renewed Left divided into a social democratic wing (PS) and another, somewhat liberal, pragmatically oriented camp (PPD). The very small traditional Marxist Left, though present, was excluded from representation in Congress until 2010. This emerging political system was completely taken over by two alliances: one formed by the two right-wing parties (RN and UDI) and the other uniting the four parties that subsisted in the Concertación (DC, PS, PPD and PR). Outside these alliances, the only party to have survived as a significant force is the PC. Only after twenty years an electorally significant political group, the Independent Regionalist Party (Partido Regionalista de los Independientes, PRI), led by then Senator Adolfo Zaldívar, was expelled from the DC in 2007. In the municipal elections of October 2008, the PRI’s alliance with other breakaway sectors from the Concertación and the right-wing Alianza por Chile managed to get over 7 per cent of the municipal vote. In the 2009 parliamentary elections, however, the binominal system favoured the big blocs once again. During the Piñera administration, Zaldívar was appointed ambassador to Argentina and thus became one of only two important DC leaders recruited by the new government (the other, former mayor Jaime Ravinet, served briefly as Housing Minister). In 2009, three PS leaders resigned their memberships to become left-wing presidential candidates. The most successful candidate – with 20 per cent of

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the vote but electing no representatives to Congress – was Deputy Marco Enríquez-Ominami, biological son of the late MIR leader Miguel Enríquez and adopted son of Carlos Ominami, a former PS senator and minister (originally a member of the MIR). The political parties recomposed themselves within the legal framework imposed on the political system, which establishes the distinct separation of social movements from political parties. Adding to the legacy of social atomization factors left by repression and economic deregulaation, institutional barriers keep social organizations from intervening in parties and vice versa. In turn, both the electoral system and the configuration of the constituencies in 1989 were tailored to meet the needs of the first majority (the Right), to prevent substantive amendments to the Constitution. The main features representing continuation of the pre-1973 political scheme were the multiparty representation system (although the electoral system forces the parties to form blocs) and the persistence of most of the democratic parties that had existed before the military coup (the DC, PR, PS and PC). Meanwhile, on the Right the traditional parties gave way to new parties that emerged during the mid 1980s but had some grounding in the previous period: the RN and UDI. Another new party, the PPD, defied its origins as an ‘instrumental’ party confronting the 1988 plebiscite (in which the Left had no legal expression) and established itself as part of the political system. In global terms, the system has a rightward bias and is subject to a binominal electoral system that lacks full legitimacy and has until now prevented the emergence of other channels for the constitution of civil society actors and representation. The type of transition applied in Chile favoured the Right, chiefly in its Pinochet-related version (UDI) and its broader, more diverse version (RN). It also favoured the forces that accessed power under the terms negotiated in 1989, namely, the Centre-Left, which was committed to staying within certain limits involving the economy, constitutional change, protection of Pinochet, preservation of military privileges and restriction of legal actions involving human rights.

Political Elites: Common Social, Cultural and Generational Roots A second consequence of the negotiated end of the military regime, including the civil legitimization of the constitutional arrangement devised by Pinochet, are the social and cultural characteristics of the new political elite that has taken shape since the 1980s. This elite interconnects several groups: party leaders, several segments of the private sector – entrepreneurs, top professionals holding executive posts and staffing legal, economic and communication firms – and the consultancies and think tanks that provide strategic assistance

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to the state (i.e., the Executive and Congress). Right-wing think tanks normally employ former leaders and civilian technicians of the military government; others rely on former members of the Concertación governments. Perceptions vary, regarding the power of the transition elites. On the one hand, the elites’ self-representation of power ranked Chile’s most powerful entities as the mass media, the economic ministries, the large economic groups, the Central Bank and the political ministries, in that order (PNUD 2004: 195). The general public, however, considered the government, big businessmen and industrialists, political parties, judges and the armed forces the most powerful institutions, in that order (ibid.: 197). Weighing the general fate of the actors in the transition, which linked social and political aspects, journalist Rafael Otano wrote: In the opinion of the majority, the collective actors that have gained the most in this political business of the transition are the armed forces, the Catholic church, the entrepreneurs, El Mercurio, the malls and also the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia. Those that have lost are the trade unions, the world of classical secularism, the traditional Left, the progressive Christians and the community organizations. (Otano 2006: 10–11)

An important segment of these elites belong to groups formed by Catholic University through its colleges, universities and pastoral groups. The Church’s influence extends to a large part of the current ‘renewed’ Left that came from the DC and is currently affiliated to the PS and PPD. Most of this predominantly metropolitan elite lives in the wealthiest townships in Santiago. This phenomenon may have nuances in some specific sectors, but it does not break the general pattern of elitism. Analysis of the universe of female, political-entrepreneurial and social leaders confirms their origin in cities, the Metropolitan Region and townships with the highest income and 64.1 per cent of women leaders were born in townships with high levels of human development. The exceptions were trade union leaders and municipal councillors (Hardy 2005: 122). Social networks are also a component of political affiliation, according to Larissa Lomnitz (2002), who pointed out that political parties are supported by ‘groups of friends’, thats is, robust networks built on cultural, social and family relations. Also worth mention are the dynamics of generational change in the political elite. Initially, the Concertación por la Democracia structured its leadership around traditional figures who had held political and/or public office before the military coup. However, in both political blocs, the top leadership posts were mostly renewed by the generation of ’68ers, whose importance grew as of the 1980s. These elite groups, mainly Catholic in origin, started their political careers at the end of the 1960s and have held leadership posi-

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tions in the political parties and upper echelons of the state administration for over two decades. Within this generation, which is relatively homogeneous in social and religious aspects, those on the Left did not manage to structure stable political parties or persuade other sectors to coalesce around them because factionalism, hyper-ideologization and an avant-garde orientation always prevailed at this end of the political spectrum. Such was the case of MAPU, a group that broke away from the DC in 1969. Its first splinter group joined a new group of DC breakaways to found the IC in 1971 (Moyano 2009). MAPU split again in 1973 and on many other occasions thereafter, until it finally disappeared at the end of the 1980s. The IC also failed to structure a national political force and to date remains on the fringes of the electoral and political system. However, in the early days of the transition, the main leadership and most members of such small parties joined the PS and the PPD (Hite 1996). Their substantial cultural and educational capital, the weight of their social, economic, family and even international networks, and their steadfast ideological reconversion towards the political Centre earned them an undeniable leading role in most of the political action of the 1990s (Moyano 2009; Tironi 2009). In journalistic jargon, mention of the hegemony of the ‘MAPU-Martinez’ alliance until 2006 within the ruling bloc clearly refers to the old DC ‘rebels’ who formed MAPU and to Gutenberg Martínez, a member of the same political generation who is seen as the main political operative of the DC’s pro-Aylwin faction. Rafael Otano describes the former as follows: They were people of the same generation, who had never stopped regarding themselves as the midwives of history. They had their first chance when they were between 20 and 30 years of age and omnipotent. Some made the most of their second chance during the exile, with Class A scholarships. Now they had their third lucky strike. They just couldn’t believe it although they had the healthy awareness that they deserved it. (2006: 63)

In the right-wing bloc, the generation phenomenon is much more marked. The main difference is that the parliamentary elections of 2000 made the UDI, a totally new political party, the main political force in the country. By 2010 it had the largest bench in Congress. To date, its leading elite is the Catholic gremialista group, which arrived on the scene in the late 1960s to fight against reform at Catholic University and confront the leftist Catholic student leaders who would later form MAPU. In the 1970s, the gremialistas fed the military government’s technical and political cadres in ministries, public services and town councils. The UDI became a political party as such when its main ideologue and leader, Jaime Guzmán, was expelled from the RN in an attempt to unite the Right in the late 1980s. Formally, the UDI

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had existed since 1983, but only in 1988 did it constitute itself as a party after breaking with the RN under the Political Parties Law promulgated by Pinochet in March 1987 (Joignant and Navia 2002: 3–4). The UDI is led by a small group of men from traditional families. Some are linked to Opus Dei and other conservative Catholic movements, and most have family or friendship ties with the others. These men made their political careers in Pinochet’s cabinets, the town halls and the sectoral bodies for social and political control. Their high ideologization and sense of mission are typical of their generation. Yet the UDI has controlled all expressions of factionalism and dissidence: decision-making and the selection of formal leaders are not done by vote, but by consensus arrived at within the small core of founder members. Internal tendencies are neither allowed not, in fact, existent. The first signs of change in this party were discernible only in 2008, when competitive elections were first held to decide the president of the party. In its work at the grass roots in the popular districts, the UDI projected the political and social position it had attained through the exercise of power during the military regime. Because of this, it garnered important margins of support at the polls, which the electoral rules and its internal unity reinforced. Along with the political power it got from Pinochet, the UDI has also enjoyed the undubitable support of the big entrepreneurs and industrialists, most of whom, having been directly favoured by the military government’s economic policy, consequently supported Pinochet the whole time. The technocrats responsible for this policy ended up taking executive positions in the big companies or acquiring state companies that had been privatized. As regards ideology, this group has the support of the most conservative streams of the Catholic Church (favoured by the long papacy of John Paul II), the two large chains that monopolize newspaper production (El Mercurio and COPESA) and one of the national television networks (Megavisión). It also has influential representation on the directorial boards of Chile’s only public television broadcaster (Televisión Nacional) and Catholic University. This elite group has also spread its influence to the field of education by creating private universities tied to entrepreneurial and/or conservative religious groups, which in turn benefit from several stimuli and financial perks provided by the public and the private sector (G. Arriagada 2003; Monckeberg 2007). In the other party of the Right, the RN, groups of members from the traditional Right coexist with a generation whose participation in political action in the 1970s does not, however, amount to an internal trend. Chile’s recent President of the Republic, the multimillionaire Sebastián Piñera, belongs to this generation. In the early 1990s, Piñera and three RN senators belonged to a generational group known as the ‘youth patrol’.2 However,

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Piñera’s career path is quite unique. A scion of a prominent DC family, he represents the most ‘liberal’ or closest-to-centre faction of the Right. In the 1990s the UDI held sway over several parliamentary representatives of the RN and thus increased its power. The correlation of forces had initially favoured the RN, but the growth of the UDI changed that. Regardless, the UDI suffered the electoral defeat of its candidate, Joaquín Lavín, in the presidential elections of 1999 and 2005. In 2009, Piñera was nominated as the sole candidate of the Alianza por Chile and won the presidential runoff in January 2010. Meanwhile, in the parliamentary elections the UDI became the party with the largest Congressional bloc – forty deputies and seven senators. Non-Catholic sectors, such as the Masons and the historical Radicals and Socialists, are positioned marginally with respect to the core of the political elite. These sectors were originally made up of a strong urban middle-class component educated in traditional secular institutions, such as the University of Chile, the Instituto Nacional and other public schools. They have lost their influence on the current ruling groups because of the multi-class aspect of their configuration, the weakening of their organized social base (blue-collar, rural and white-collar workers) and their reluctance to forsake the historical values of Chilean political culture, but they have not disappeared altogether from the political scene. These sectors also had their own ‘Generation of 1968’, in which the MIR and radical groups from the PS were hegemonic. However, they have practically disappeared in political terms, largely because of the military repression, which drew the bulk of its victims from these sectors. The inauguration of Michelle Bachelet in 2006 ushered in a partial internal replacement of the ruling elite. The historical Socialist sector, which had had little presence in previous cabinets, was strengthened. Some professionals from the MIR, at the time members of the PS, also joined the government. But they did not fill the top ranks of the government completely because another group gaining strength then were the technocrats linked to the think tank Expansiva, mostly professionals who had done postgraduate studies in the U.S. and shared a so-called liberal approach that emphasized development of public policies with a strong technical component. All these non-Catholic groups had in common the insignificance of Catholic Church influence in their formation; they also had comparatively weak social ties with the country’s traditional elite. Early in the transition, the new elite accessing political power had no links with big business and industrialists and had to contend with their strong opposition and distrust, rooted in their ideological alignment with the military government. However, over the years, relations were established via the political negotiations forced by the institutional framework of the transition.

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During the Frei Ruiz-Tagle administration (1994–2000), the political, economic and social ties between these this elite and business interests became stronger. Several sectors contributed to this connection: the old leftist ‘black sheep’ of traditional families, now linked to economic groups and returning to the fold to lead their companies; Concertación businessmen who had profited from economic growth in the 1990s and government contracts in areas such as housing and infrastructure; government officials from the Concertación subsequently recruited by the boards of private companies; former officials who had accumulated political capital in the government and then moved to the private sector as lobbyists and consultants, connecting large companies to the political actors of the Concertación, among others. The elections of Vice-President Viña Concha y Toro and Chairman of the Confederation of Production and Commerce Rafael Guilisasti in 2009 can be considered a consolidation of this trend of unified elite components. Guilisasti replaced his predecessor both generationally and politically: a member of the 1968 generation, he was also one of the Concertación elite (a former MAPU member educated at the exclusive Saint George’s School), not from the traditional conservative groups that have generally represented entrepreneurs. This link is also projected into the ideological plane, as in the case of the Fundación Paz Ciudadana, mentioned in chapter 4, whose board members include prominent Concertación leaders (Ramos and Guzmán 2000). The same has started to happen at some private universities controlled by conservative economic groups, who have appointed certain political figures of the Concertación to their boards and teaching staff (Monckeberg 2007). A few, very prominent names from the Concertación crop up repeatedly as board members of large corporations and foundations, in articles and interviews in national newspapers, in ministerial positions and in business and political consultancy services. These highly qualified professionals are affiliated to the DC and the liberal faction of the Concertación. While ties between the old and the new elite grow stronger, other sectors that have nourished political cadres and wielded various kinds of political influence have seen their space of action reduced – for example, intellectuals, especially those at public universities, independent academic centres, NGOs and independent media. The lack of institutional space and the dominance of the logic of market-economy competition have shrunk their capabilities for design, proposal and visibility. Their influence and contact with labour experiences and grass-roots organizations have diminished as well. These weaknesses are compounded by privatization policies requiring them to self-fund their services via the market, and by the end of international cooperation or its functional subordination to the requirements of public policy implementation (Delamaza 2009).

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Unlike in the past, political parties are no longer significant in the social and cultural life of the population. Their only prevailing functions are political recruitment and campaign organization. Economic groups’ ties with cultural apparatuses such as universities and the media are spreading, while state universities are debilitated by the self-funding effect. The links between the elite, the parties they belong to and the citizenry are far from sustaining the intense, broad mobilization and public deliberation that characterized Chilean social life in the past.

Favourable Conditions for Democratic Technocrats The considerations outlined above have reinforced the presence and political influence of a technically specialized class within politics, the so-called technopols or, more broadly, ‘techno-political elites’ (Cortés 2000). 3 Though the technocratization of political management, particularly in the executive branch, is hardly exclusive to Chile, an interpretation of the Chilean case is inadequate without discussion of this component, favoured by the conditions described earlier. In the Chilean transition, numerous factors fostered the emergence and consolidation of the so-called democratic technocrats, to paraphrase the concept of ‘technocratic democracies’ discussed by Centeno and Silva (1998: 11). Chile’s are a variant of the technocrats these authors studied earlier, who are characterized by their prioritization of certain ‘transversal or crosscutting’ issues and share certain qualifications: ‘Economic growth over social development, an acceptance of the need for political order, and a reluctance to challenge the social hierarchy … training in economics and/or engineering, extended visits to Europe and the United States, a fluency in international discourses’ (ibid.: 3). This sector’s prevalence in political activity is ever expanding, especially through important positions in the executive branch of government and the instruments that influence public policy design: generation of specialized knowledge, public communication, political lobbying, international agencies. Several factors have influenced this expansion, most obviously Chile’s strong presidentialism, which reduces the weight of the Congress as a representative political body and is relatively armoured against demonstrations of popular will. Also relevant is the forced – and accepted – cohabitation with the neoliberalism that still permeates various aspects of institutional ideology and carries much weight in the media and in the policies of international organizations like the International Monetary Fund. Another factor, the successful strategy of containing social demands during the transition, relieved the social and political pressure on bureaucracy.

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Also influential in the Chilean case was the post-1990 ruling coalition’s reliance on people with previous experience in state administration under Frei Montalva and Allende, as well as the strong self-criticism of the excessive politicization of their past performance. Finally, there is the objective fact that a highly qualified sector of the Centre-Left leadership managed to reproduce and expand its cultural capital during the military regime, mainly in exile. People in this sector mostly belonged to privileged social groups, with which they maintained or recovered ties during the transition.4 In other words, elements of the political process combined with aspects of the composition of the elite to strike a balance between the political dominance of a majority coalition and the growing weight of technocracy (within and outside the Concertación). The transitioning between private sector and public administration has intensified, as suggested by Antonio Cortés, who argued that Chile is reproducing a phenomenon already observed in the United States: The techno-political elites associated with liberalism, as well as the ones associated with the right have been formed (and are being formed), some more some less, through a mechanism similar to what the Americans call a ‘revolving door’. … In Chile lobbying does not exist by law, but what does is the use of contacts through alternative formulas: consulting companies, think tanks, personal counselling, etc. The technique of the ‘revolving door’ has not only been used by former congressmen but also by former senior officials of the authoritarian regime, including members of the armed forces and of the previous two Concertación governments. (Cortés 2000: 105)

In a 1997 study, Jorge Domínguez had already pointed to the emergence of a related phenomenon that was widespread during the political transition in several Latin American countries, namely, that of technopols. He characterized technocrats as highly specialized individuals who, on that basis, performed public functions. The technopol, a variant of technocratic actor, had other specific characteristics: Technopols are political leaders (1) at or near the top of their country’s government and political life (including opposition political parties) who (2) go beyond their specialized expertise to draw on various different streams of knowledge and who (3) vigorously participate in the nation’s political life (4) for the purpose of affecting politics well beyond the economic realm and who may, at times, be associated with an effort to ‘remake’ their country’s politics, economics and society. (1997: 7)

The importance of these new actors, according to Domínguez, is that they seek a rational policy that is not only ‘technically correct, but also politically

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enduring. Rationality thus defined can be achieved through politics’ (ibid.: 7). In Chile, this characterization is applicable to both the Chicago Boys who redesigned the economy during the military regime, and those whom Patricio Silva (1991) called the ‘CIEPLAN monks’, who have carried out much of the economic, political and social administration during democracy. Of the list of twenty-three public officers (all male) on the Aylwin administration’s economic teams, mentioned by Silva (1991: 407), at least sixteen held later other positions in the Executive; two were elected to Congress; and five migrated to academia or the private sector. Of the nine original officials of the Corporation for Latin American Economic Research (Corporación de Investigaciones Económicas para Latinoamérica, CIEPLAN), four have been ministers and three, top executives of public services or companies; two remained in academia and consultancy firms. As the inter-institutional circuit of power developed under the conditions of the Chilean transition, the elitist characteristics of the process and the constraints on representative politics reinforced one another. This circuit became a functional element in the political system and in decision-making. ‘The systematicity and the organic nature of the extra-institutional circuit of power are produced mainly by the action of agents from techno-politics, who are particularly important in the power centres of formal and institutional bodies, but existing and gravitating also in the private bodies of power’ (Cortés 2000: 195). A Chilean techno-politics, conducted by highly qualified agents in different positions in public policy administration and direction, has been consolidated. This sector stands side by side not with civil society from which it comes, but with high corporate bureaucracy, each sector drawing on the other to fill its posts. This phenomenon that is growing as business strategies internalize political management as part of their action and require links with the state. At the same time, the conditions underlying the coexistence of this techno-political group and representative politics have been changing. At first, according to Montecinos and Markoff, the Chilean group of technopols was able to ‘overshadow the traditional politicians, who did not seem prepared to face the challenges of a new era’ (2001: 188). Then the phenomenon evolved: forms of clientelism were reproduced within the ‘technical’ designs of social programmes (Durston 2005), and coordination improved between the Executive and Congress. As the respective interests began to diverge, particularly after 2003, new tensions arose between the two dimensions of politics and worsened under the Bachelet administration. A good example was provided in 2002 by Lagos’s former finance minister, Nicolás Eyzaguirre, who said that ‘politicians are atrocious’. This statement implies a separation

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between politicians and technopols; thus, Eyzaguirre’s status of minister and party member (PPD) does not, in his view, make him a politician. In any case, as Silva put it, it is essential to understand that ‘Chilean technocrats continue working inside political parties’ (1991: 407). Moreover, these parties do not play the same role or have the relevance they had in the past. In fact, Silva’s prediction was fulfilled at the beginning of the transition, when he said: ‘I do not expect a restoration of their old pivotal position in the Chilean political system. They can perhaps find a redoubt in the Congress, but not in leading positions at ministerial levels, as was the case before September 1973’ (1991: 407). Party membership continued to be required for the vast majority of cabinet posts until 2010, when the right-wing coalition took power and created a cabinet composed mostly of independents. Many of them came from senior management positions in the private sector, and their legitimacy was justified on the grounds of superior technical qualifications. Nevertheless Piñera recruited two high-profile politicians for his first ministerial adjustment in January 2011. Interestingly, one was one of the two Chilean political figures included in Jorge Dominguez’s book on technopols, former Senator Evelyn Matthei.

An Empirical Analysis of Career Paths to and from the Central State To provide more systematic empirical data in support of some of the previous statements, I will examine the career path of a group of public officials who held positions in the political and social spheres during the transition to democracy. The group contains all the positions that existed in four ministries during the first three governments of the Concertación (1990–2006).5

Profile of a Sample of Government Positions The sample from the political sphere came from three relevant ministries: the Ministry of Home Affairs, responsible for public safety and internal order and the decentralization policy; the Secretariat to the Presidency, which coordinates the executive with Congress and oversees the processes of state modernization and environmental policy; and the General Secretariat of Government. This last ministry also serves as the government spokesperson, coordinates sports policy (through Chiledeportes) and is responsible, since 2000, for citizen participation and the strengthening of civil society policies through the Social Organizations Division. The extraordinary composition of this ministry is explained by its origin under the military government as a

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ministry of propaganda and political mobilization of the regime. In the social area, the Ministry of Planning, MIDEPLAN was selected. Created in 1990 (from ODEPLAN), it brought together social policy agencies dealing with poverty, focusing on specific social sectors that had been added to the public agenda. Each ministry’s positions were classified according to two levels of responsibility. The first level, Top-Level Responsibility for Policy Administration, includes the positions of minister, undersecretary, chief of divisions and services. The second level of responsibility, Technical Administration and Support, includes the chief of staff and the chief of technical support units (research, planning, organizational development and public relations). The total number of people in these positions during the first three governments of the Concertación (March 1990 to March 2006) was recorded. The database contains 267 positions that were filled by 219 people, several of whom held more than one job in the base during the period. Twenty-nine people held two positions, another twenty held three and one person held five different positions. It also is definitely possible that some people migrated from one position in the sample to another government position not included in it. The database uses both open, official information and information obtained directly from the people involved. Table 5.1 outlines the distribution by level of responsibility and type of agency where the position was held. Table 5.1. Positions by Level of Responsibility and Type of Agency Level of responsibility Top-level political administration

Technical administration and support

Total

Political

74

114

188

Social

42

37

79

Total

116

151

267

Type of agency

Half of the 267 officers identified served during the Ricardo Lagos administration, which indicates a much higher turnover level than in previous periods. A first relevant feature of the sample profile is gender. In total, 216 positions were filled by men and only 51 women. The percentage of women was even lower in positions of greater responsibility. At the technical level it reached 21 per cent, but in higher political administration it came to just 16 per cent. Furthermore, 75 per cent of the total number of women joined the state administration only after 2000, under President Lagos. During the Aylwin government, only one woman, Soledad Alvear, wife of the important DC leader Gutenberg Martínez, held a ministerial portfolio.

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In fact, the Servicio Nacional de la Mujer was given ministerial status precisely to include a woman in the cabinet. Alvear ended up as minister in three governments of the Concertación. Under Frei, the number of women in ministerial positions increased to three, and Lagos had five in his first cabinet. This changed significantly in the government of Bachelet, who initially applied a policy of gender parity in top-level administration, including undersecretaries, which substantially increased the number of women in public office. In comparative terms, the presence of women in the executive branch of government increased from 6.8 per cent in the Aylwin period to 23.3 per cent under Lagos (considering ministers, undersecretaries, chiefs of services, regional ministerial secretaries, superintendents and governors) (Hardy 2005: 59).6 All the people included in the sample were university-schooled professionals, and many had done postgraduate studies. The most frequently occurring professions were law (81) followed by management and economics (43), social work (35), engineering (30), education (25), the social sciences and politics (22) and journalism (10). More than half of the women (53%) were concentrated in two professions: social work (17), where they almost equalled their male colleagues in number, and law (10). Clarisa Hardy’s study indicates that 100 per cent of all women members of the Executive during the period were professionals whose incomes placed them in the country’s richest quintile (2005: 112–118). Lawyers were a majority at both responsibility levels (30 per cent on average). Four professions – lawyers, economists and administrators, social workers and engineers, the last three in a similar proportion – accounted for 73 per cent of the Top-Level Political Administration. In Technical Administration and Support, these same professions made up 70 per cent of the total, showing a similar pattern in both groups. As a general trend, the recruitment pattern of the Concertación governments favoured the political career path at the higher levels. In Technical Administration and Support, subject-specific expertise formalized through higher education and participation in sectoral governmental and nongovernmental agencies was more relevant. This discriminated in favour of older people in the available positions in the central government. Three age groups or ‘generations’ were identified: the pre-1973 generation, formed by people who had political prominence before the military coup; the generation of the 1980s, consisting of people who were under twenty-five at the time of the coup; and the replacement generation of people born after 1962 with post-dictatorship experience in the state. The second group makes up 56 per cent of the sample. This group has been called the generation of the 1980s because, in general, they began to build political career paths during that decade or after the military coup.

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The pre-1973 generation held 19 per cent of the positions and was well represented in Top-Level Political Administration (29%). The replacement generation had held only 14 per cent of the positions, equally distributed between both responsibility levels. The generation of the 1980s prevailed in all three governments and continually, if slightly, increased its share. In the first two governments the weight of the pre-1973 generation exceeded 25 per cent, but under Lagos it dropped to 11 per cent. Younger people who accessed government positions to become part of the replacement generation did so almost entirely under the Lagos government, during which they held 22 per cent of the positions. The appointment of senior officials responded to criteria of political balance within the coalition, with the DC holding around half of the positions and the Centre-Left bloc (PPD, PS and the Partido Radical Social Demócrata, PRSD) roughly the same proportion. In this sample, the DC held 38 per cent of the positions; the Centre-Left bloc, 45 per cent; and independents, 16 per cent. In both the pre-1973 generation and the replacement generation, the DC tended to be stronger, but the generation of the 1980s included more people from the Centre-Left bloc. Table 5.2. Positions by Generation and Political Affiliation Political Affiliation

Generation Pre-1973

1980s

Replacement

No information

Total

DC

23

55

18

11

107

PPD

9

33

6

4

52

11

37

6

1

55

Other

1

1

1

1

4

No affiliation

4

11

3

0

18

No information

3

12

3

13

31

51

149

37

30

267

PS

Total

The balance between the different internal political forces of the Concertación was such that it did not compromise the type of position held by its affiliates. They interchangeably took over responsibilities of political leadership or technical administration and support. Something similar happened with the independents, who usually had the support of a bloc or were considered close to one. People completely unrelated to blocs or parties held very few positions and still fewer top-level senior positions.

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Links with Civil Society and Accessing the Government To examine the impact of the civil society leaders recruited into post-dictatorial governments, I will use an operational concept of civil society. By this I refer to those organizations created in the 1970s and 1980s to defend and promote rights suppressed or curtailed by the military regime, and to tend to the restoration of the democratic political system. The segments of the social mobilization around these orientations included standouts like the opposition press, development NGOs, churches, the human rights movement, women’s movements, the student and university student movements, professional associations and trade unions and union advisory centres. Grass-roots groups are omitted here, since they had no access to the selected positions in the central government. The information collected indicates that people with some connection with these types of civil society organizations held 128 of the positions considered here. This confirms the large extent to which they originated the political and technical experience of the Concertación government authorities. Because the difficulty of obtaining data on the whole sample’s previous affiliations prevented systematic comparisons between both groups, the analysis is restricted to those who reported previous affiliations. The internal breakdown of the group coming from civil society shows the relative importance of each segment, as can be seen in Table 5.3. Table 5.3. Positions Held by People from CSOs by Organization of Origin Previous participation in Civil Society

Total

%

Think tanks

11

8.5

NGOs

39

30.5

Student unions

31

24.2

Church

24

18.8

5

3.9

13

10.2

5

3.9

128

100

Opposition press International organizations Trade union advisers Total

It’s difficult to establish the previous participation in CSOs. The difficulty to obtain information is twofold: to know the current whereabouts of the people who are no longer in the government and to have their CVs in case of finding them. We only know of 128 cases that had links and another 49 that did not. Of the other 90 positions we do not have enough information.

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If the same proportion of the known cases was maintained, civil society cases should reach 72 per cent. In the case of government officials with previous ties to the identified segments of civil society, the profile and hierarchy of the position they accessed is irrelevant. At the turn of the 1990s, they held the same number of positions in the political leadership as in technical administration, and in different government agencies. This seems to support the fact that the civil sphere was a breeding ground for an important part of the current political elite from the Concertación, though to be sure, this sphere was hardly completely separate from political society or the party system under reconstruction. During the period studied, a significant number of officials with previous links to civil society served in the two political blocs of the Concertación. Their number was significantly higher in the Centre-Left bloc (PPD, PR and PS) than in the DC, as shown in Table 5.4. This was in part because the DC had greater internal breeding capacity. Another reason, though, was that the parties on the Left had been the most severely persecuted under the dictatorship, which led their members to take refuge in civil organizations and help to build civil institutions where they could exercise their sociopolitical and professional vocation. The DC retained its traditional mechanisms of political organization to a larger extent, at least at the top levels. Table 5.4. Positions by Participation in CSOs and Political Affiliation Participation in civil society Political affiliation

Total

Percentage

DC

43

33.6

Centre-Left (PPD, PR and PS)

74

57.8

No affiliation

8

6.3

No information

3

2.3

128

100

Total

The figures in Table 5.4 clearly show the ‘merger’ between society and politics during the dictatorship. The point is not that all the civil society’s activists were political militants. The fact is that many political militants, especially many leading cadres, acted within nontraditional organizations, such as NGOs. Yet it was a segmented participation, primarily concentrated in certain types of CSOs that grouped members of the professional middle classes. More or less stable links were established with popular movements in some cases, but they did not directly subsume or represent these movements. Links between government officials and CSOs were many. Officials usually were members of several CSOs simultaneously, which shows how interrelated

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the different expressions of civil society were at the time. However, the record of these civil servants’ primary or longest membership offers clues as to their provenance. The main CSOs of origin were NGOs, the student movement and the church, each of which had a distinct profile as a source of the new governmental elite until 2010. International organizations (men only) and research centres were the next most mentioned origins. Particularly striking is the concentration of women in NGOs (53 per cent of women with previous involvement came from NGOs), by far the most important channel by which women accessed government. Men, for their part, were balanced among the three main types of origin. The increased presence of women in NGOs is consistent with women’s joining the government in larger proportions during Lagos’s Centre-Left administration, as this political bloc prevailed in NGOs. In professional terms, NGOs provided the state mostly with economists, administrators and social workers (and social scientists to a lesser extent). Lawyers came from the student movement and the Church. From the perspective of political affiliation, distinct patterns of party-political reconstruction are detectable. As the Table 5.5 shows DC officials come specially from Students and Professional Unions and from the Church’s organizations and secondly from NGO’s and Political Research Centres. Officials from the Centre-Left, however, had been concentrated in NGOs concerned with contingent political issues and the advancement and social education of Table 5.5. Positions Held by People from CSOs by Political Affiliation and Organizations of Origin Political Affiliation Civil Society Organizations

DC

Centre-Left (PPD, PR, PS)

Political think tanks

5

6

NGOs and trade union consultancy firms

5

32

6

Student and professional unions and guilds

15

14

1

23.4

Church

13

10

1

18.8

International organizations

3

10

Press

2

2

33.6

57.8

Total (%)

No affiliation

No information

Total (%)

1

9.3

1

34.4

10.2

6.3

1

3.9

2.3

100

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grass-roots sectors. This political sector favoured this reconstruction space over the traditional social organizations, pointing to a sharp change in the historical breeding pattern of the traditional Left in Chile.

Leadership and Types of Career Path Those who entered government from civil society had experience in different types of leadership that marked their career paths. The first, traditional political leadership, groups with another type that could be called hybrid. The difference, though not sharp, has to do with prominence and time frame. Altogether, this group holds people who had had outstanding, active career paths in the pre-1973 political world and who took part in reconstructing a democratically oriented civil society. A second group is formed by those who joined the government after being politically formed in entities closer to the social world of the time – university student federations, the Catholic Church, NGOs and trade union consultancy centres – and meanwhile kept working in the political parties, which were undergoing reconstruction during the dictatorial era. Some people are hard to classify in one of these two types of leadership, since outside of clandestine politics, much political activity was merged with social action. What is relevant to this analysis, as a general rule, is the prevalence of people who participated politically prior to entering government. Having participated in a CSO can be regarded as a career path plus – in terms of qualifications and technical knowhow, that is, rather than social representation. However, it was not a decisive factor in the Concertación cadres’ access to government. A final group is composed of those whose leadership experience was purely sociotechnical, with no political career path. The high incidence of the first two types of leadership among officials from civil society reinforces the close relationship between organized civil society and the political parties. This reduces the sociotechnical leadership to very particular cases. Obviously, some people involved in the NGOs in the 1980s had no political affiliation and did not participate politically, but on the whole, these people did not access government positions. There were exceptions, however: two women who had belonged to professionalized NGOs concerned with emerging issues – environmental conservation and disability – in which the political parties and the state had little experience or lacked a tradition before 1990. This probably explains their inclusion in government echelons. Despite having strong links with CSOs prior to 1990, the career paths of senior political staff in the Concertación governments led also into the political and party-political world being recomposed as of the mid 1980s. Their incorporation into the state was determined above all by their party links and

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their technical expertise in political and social matters. That experience was developed in the field of civil society, which had largely substituted for the political arena that was rendered nonexistent at the time. The hybrid career path was the breeding ground of the secular CentreLeft, not of the DC. In the absence of an institutionalized political arena and open, active party life, CSOs proved themselves a privileged field for political training and bonding, judging by the massive presence of the non-DC political sector in public office in the 1990s, including popular representation positions. Indeed, engaging in politics from the NGOs, instead of in frontline mass politics, appears to have contributed to the success of the reconstruction and the general parity the Centre-Left maintained with the DC in the political scenario of the transition. A next step is to outline some recurrent career paths associated with common traits of the political and generational profile of the political authorities in the Concertación governments. A first type of career path is represented by the pre-1973 and 1980s generations chiefly affiliated to the DC: many of these people participated in CSOs, mainly at politico-institutional think tanks associated with their partisan orientation. A second stream within the DC flowed from trade union organizations, in which the party was historically hegemonic, and from social advancement agencies linked to the Catholic Church after the military coup.7 The testimony of a DC professional in top-level administration illustrates this career path: ‘I do not come from a political family. My family does not belong to a political party and has no political option. Nor do they own property or other assets. Then, suddenly, sometime in 1975, I ended up at the University Parish. In 1976 I was at university and there I met some interesting people, such as Alejandra Krauss and many others. The experience with the Church, with which I worked as an independent lawyer in some human rights cases, led me to what started to be a political activity’. (Top administration official, DC)

The same type of career path is described in another testimony: ‘In the 1980s I used to work at everything being done to define what would be the health policy. All the policies and research that form the health agenda of the Concertación in this field were developed at the Corporación de Promoción Universitaria’. A second type of career path developed within the social and humanitarian activities of the Catholic Church, NGOs and independent research centres of the 1980s, also linked to political parties of the Left. Those following this path at first were appointed to technical administration positions and then gradually moved up to top political leadership positions starting with the

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Lagos administration. This trajectory produced the hybrid type of leadership that combines sociotechnical and party-political leadership. These career paths feature broader, less exclusive links to party agendas because of the ideological and organizational dispersion the Left suffered in the post-coup repression and the priority the leftist parties reorganization had assigned to middle-class intellectuals regrouped in and around NGOs, some of whom had DC government and party experience before the military coup. ‘As one of the interviewed officials put it: ‘I believe that at the time [the early 1990s] accessing government positions was not much a party issue. The world of the Left was relatively disorganized; there were no party relations, there were more relations involving people and knowledge’. (Top administration official, PS). A minor emerging trend that began during the third Concertación government involved a younger generation – usually related by family to representatives of the two previous generations – making its way into mid-level technical administration posts. This generation, which has some experience participating in NGOs or initiatives after the 1980s, is a combination of DC affiliates and independents. It is also a space of convergence of actors from new areas of recruitment of the elite: the political and private entrepreneurship spheres.

Leaving the Government and Returning to Civil Society This section will analyse trends in the career paths of officials who left public office. Regardless of which government recruited them, 55 per cent of the civil servants in the sample remained in government positions, and another 6 per cent moved on to Congress or party leaderships. That is, 61 per cent of the people remained occupationally associated with the Concertación’s political field in different positions. Surprisingly, only a very small minority opted to stand for Congress. This may partly reflect the limited availability of empty parliamentary seats and the complex negotiations between the political alliances forced by the binomial electoral system. Thus, in a kind of ‘freezing’ of positions, members of Congress stayed put for several terms, while relevant officials rotated among different positions within the executive branch of government. A reduced state with a complex electoral system seems to render leadership positions in the government, Congress and parties an inefficient channel for grooming new generations of elites. The system tends to focus on the top level and on those in top positions; hence, the trend rewards endurance over time. Only 23 per cent of government officials actually departed from positions of state responsibility. A slightly higher proportion of departures was evident among the cadres recruited by the first Concertación administration (Ayl-

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win’s) for reasons of age. Outside the state, the departing officials mainly gravitated to the private sector, which accounted for 15 per cent of the total cases. Academic and consulting activities in international organizations were the destination of 7 per cent of the cases studied. However, it cannot be assumed that these new destinations are not linked to the governmental agenda or action, as such connections have been observed in several career paths that feature alternating periods inside and outside the state. This happens, among other reasons, because of the increasingly close ties between the two spheres via consultancy services, the outsourcing of services and the presence of former government officials on large companies’ boards of directors.8 Many of these people are also appointed to presidential advisory boards and commissions in a more sporadic relationship with the state that is quite suitable for this type of link with political power. Government officials who move on to university jobs often combine them with free exercise, since many of these universities are private institutions where freelance work or part-time contracts prevail. Several former officials of Concertación governments have been recruited as board members of private universities owned by conservative groups, and thus these officials tend to have a strategic link with the government. This trend has deepened since the Concertación was ousted from government, as more former officials are available to take positions as board members or executive officers in the private sector. The trends among functionaries who leave their government positions indicate a low level of renewal of political elites and a tendency to maintain the same cadres. This is mainly so in the executive apparatus, but a private fraction also operates in the market under different forms of association with the public sphere. The state no longer performs the grooming function it had back when its size and the turnover of cadres were greater. NGOs and independent political research centres – the state’s substitute and alternative field, which used to nourish the Concertación with government cadres – no longer grooms new officials either, since practically no career path returns to civil society once a government position is accessed. What happens, upon departure, to the career path of officials known to have come from organized civil society? Is there a distinct pattern? Among them too, the dominant trend, although slightly attenuated, was of permanence in the state. This was true of at least half of them. A second group became ‘privatized’ (17%), and its proportion of departures to new positions is similar to that of the whole sample. Finally, a third group reoriented itself towards positions in academia or international organizations. It accounted for the same share as the group that migrated to party or representative politics (9% each). Finally, as already mentioned, exceedingly few career paths in this subsample returned to civil society.9

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Former participants in CSOs who had become distanced from professional action and support of existing civic organizations apparently regarded a government position as a decisive step in changing a sociopolitical career path. The cycle of the civil society that emerged to fight for democracy in the 1980s seems to have ended, as does the political cycle that brought civil society and political society together and merged their positions in that decade.

From Civil Society to the State: Balances and Perceptions The data confirm party mediation’s relevance to access to government positions. Civil society leaders were incorporated into the state mainly through networks and political groups, sometimes combined with strong ties and personal loyalties. This was particularly noticeable in sectors of the Centre-Left, whose party-political reorganization was slower and more difficult, and involved cadres and ideological bases other than those of their historical constitution. In the case of recruitment to mid-level government posts, a discrete criterion was that of technical competencies in public administration; as regards top posts, the criterion was the political capability to build consensus and conduct negotiations. A respondent who had held a top-level administration post recounted: ‘Patricio Aylwin said to me: “Look, you are a person who has expressed in the country the will to reach agreements, a consensus, to integrate, not to disqualify … and this is the sort of people I need because I want to govern through agreements.” It was a surprise for me because I had no political affiliation.’ Despite the greater fluidity and closeness forged between civil and political society in the 1980s, career paths to social or strictly civilian leaderships did not prevail or displace the preeminence of party-political leadership in the new democratic governments’ processes and agendas (though such displacement has been observed – at least during some periods – in other Latin American re-democratization processes). Consequently, prior connections with civil society organizations and leaders, although quite widespread, have not enjoyed much relevance in generating the democratic governments’ programmes and agendas, or in defining the style of relations between the state and citizens. Most of the directive cadres developed career paths primarily in political society, according to its strategic orientations. This occurred even though the breeding ground of party life in the 1980s had diversified to incorporate functions of reflection and social support through church organizations, research centres and independent consultancy firms, as well as mass mobilizations through student federations, unions and professional associations. This diversification was particularly relevant in the case of DC members.

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Government officials of the Centre-Left showed greater overlap between party affiliation and links to a segment of civil society, such as developmental NGOs. This prevailed over participation in mass movements, such as middle-class movements (student and professional associations), in which the DC’s influence was more marked. It also prevailed over affiliation to labour or grass-roots movements, which decidedly were not sources of access to positions in the Executive. The situation was similar in Congress. However, the top three political union leaders of the 1980s – all Christian democrats – got into Congress.10 The hybrid type of career path and leadership, both political and sociotechnical, showed stronger commitment to centralized, unified governance than to affiliation to a particular group. This idea of governance appears to amount to stability and homogeneous leadership free of social conflict. A socialist activist recruited for a top administration role in government described it as follows: ‘I basically thought, first of all, that the transition was a very difficult stage, very complicated, in which the central value was political stability. Economic stability contributed to political stability. Since there was an enemy threatening the transition, the government stability called for an enormous internal discipline. To prevent outer disagreements, the men promoted to top positions were directed as if they were walking on a tightrope. These men had to ensure stability, besides not falling down and, in addition, they had to inspire confidence in the private sector’. (Top administration official, PS)

Another official and PPD activist from the group of technicians recalled: ‘We had been so out of touch with power, with the government, for so many years, that we really did not know what had to be done. Let alone what was possible to do. At any rate, it was not the same world where I moved the day before and the day after 1990. Perhaps in the ‘political-political’ sphere somebody might have had a clear idea of how long the transition would be, how to negotiate, agree and the rest’. (Technical administration official, PPD)

This sector’s progressive distancing from and functionalization of their networks of origin is expressed in a critical view of the world of the NGOs they were part of before they reached the echelons of government. Several testimonies described this: ‘Informally we met once a month to talk, a workshop, that is, certain sorts of relationship remained, but definitely, when you change jobs, you create other groups and other ties’. (Top administration official, PS)

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‘I myself kept up my connection with my NGO, at least for two or three years, but it became more and more off-putting. … It was really hard. … There was no capability to come up with something interesting. They were going downhill, getting worse and worse. [The NGOs] began to regard themselves only as the executors of public programmes and no more. It was the need to survive’. (Technical administration official, PPD) ‘I have kept it up, I remain friends with them, but I also think there are many NGOs who figured they would continue to enjoy the old freedom of action, and failed to respond to the changes’. (Top administration official, PS).

Meanwhile, those who still regarded themselves as leaders on specific issues or social agendas resented the difficulty of keeping in touch with their civil society support bases but went on to fightover political leverage margins with top government leaders. After their government experience, they expressed frustration about issues that were absent from or not prioritized in the governance agenda. ‘I had a feeling of utter desolation, I felt very lonely. I did not feel I had a support group behind me. Perhaps I could not develop it myself … [When I was asked to resign], the women wanted to give me more support and I stopped it. It seemed complicated to make ‘waves’ in the government. So, I was trapped between my loyalty to the government so that this was not put to political use by its enemies, and generating a real conflict. This is why I could not say that there was a conflict that had to do with proposals that were different’. (Top administration official, PS)

Another top administration female official, also with no political affiliation, said: ‘Now, the issue has been dropped. President Lagos thought at some point that the environmental issue and sustainable development would be the line of work of his government, but very quickly we all realized that the forces were pointing in another direction. What a terrible frustration!’. (Top administration official, Independent) These statements contrast with those gathered in the volume edited by Carlos Basombrío (2005) on the career paths from civil society to the state in Latin America. In the Chilean case, neither those who remained in government nor those who left it in frustration after failing to conquer a space for their agendas recovered their position in discourse as civil society activists. Instead, they regarded themselves as part of the tensions of governance, about which many had critical views. The prevailing trend of staying available to work for the state not becaming a contender or alternative to the political elite – has allowed top agents of the state qua political class to reproduce its base of support. However, a new

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pattern is also discernible: leaving government positions to go into private enterprise or private activity, often associated with political or governmental activities. In both cases, the co-optation of Concertación representatives into this small but diversified power elite seems to be on the rise.

Impact of Career Paths on the Political Agenda Between the victory in the October 1988 plebiscite and the inauguration of the first transition government in March 1990, the coalition that was poised to rule paved the way for the future. Above all, the package of constitutional amendments that they negotiated with the departing military and politicians was approved in mid 1989 in a highly consensual plebiscite that did not include the authoritarian enclaves (Hagopian 2005). Meanwhile, they also structured government cadres. Both these tasks were carried out by a very small group to which the whole coalition subordinated its actions (Otano 1995). By contrast, a third task concerning the government’s platform involved a large number of people, especially professionals, who started designing the measures to be taken in the first term of government. Many participants in civil society’s struggle to restore democracy joined different commissions to define the programme of the Concertación. Despite the differing sensitivities within the coalition, the prevailing spirit was one of unity, weakly mediated by party structures whose programmatic development was minimal, or in certain areas nonexistent. That period saw the zenith of amplitude and political convergence, as well as the largest substantive presence of civil society’s issues and agendas and the widest opening of possibilities to formulate a democratization policy. Later, the exercise of government revealed that the conditions agreed for the transition – in another setting, by other actors – substantially narrowed the possibilities for change contained in those designs. Some of the transition negotiators thought that those limits might be relaxed once the government was conquered and Congress elected, but this did not happen. Others, however, state to this day that what was achieved was simply the best-case scenario given the conditions at the time. This was the opinion of Edgardo Boeninger, a key actor in this negotiation who later became Minister Secretary-General of the Office of the President and is generally acknowledged as one of the most influential men in the government coalition: The unambiguous acceptance of a constitutional text was essential because taking over the government while ignoring the constitutional text that underpins the entire political system and the rule of law was an impossible alternative

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and, as we have said, neither was it feasible to generate a social mobilization that forced the Parliament to change the Constitution in a country tired of conflict and only longing for peace [italics in the original]. (2007: 26)

Although Boeninger himself conceded that ‘the reforms of 1989 did not alter at all the orientation and content of the original text’ of the political Constitution, particularly regarding economic matters and the role of the state, he also believed that the exercise of the political power shared since 1990 ‘has allowed [the government to fully meet the objective to restore a thoroughly democratic political system, in accordance with the history of the country and the institutional characteristics of contemporary democracies’ (ibid.: 26). Once the institutional design was clarified, the party leaders, together with the designees to top posts in the government, negotiated the different quotas of power for each party in the future cabinet and in the whole government. Throughout the whole period, the resulting agreement favoured the balance between the major political forces of the Concertación: the DC and the PS-PPD axis, with the PR acting as electoral reinforcement for each of these sectors at different points in the process. The other thirteen parties or groups that originally were part of the Concertación de Partidos ‘por el No’ began to disappear, merging with or stepping aside from the coalition. These included the Partido Liberal, MAPU Obrero Campesino, the IC and the Partido Humanista, among others. The negotiation of Aylwin’s first cabinet was relatively devoid of problems between the parties, which subordinated themselves to the coalition’s top leadership. Its composition became problematic only when an unexpected issue arose: it consisted exclusively of men (‘cabinet photo with absent woman’ was what the leaders of the women’s movement called it). They remedied the problem by awarding ministerial status to SERNAM, thereby permitting its first female director, Soledad Alvear (DC), to join the cabinet. Alvear was later appointed Minister of Justice, Chancellor and PDC presidential candidate (twice); she was also elected Senator for Santiago. The first years of democratic government showed the new authorities’ large initiative capacity, its impact on the civil society agenda and the effects of its practices in the social area especially, including the creation of FOSIS, the AGCI, SERNAM, CEPI (later CONADI), INJUV, FONDART, a programme to support 900 of the poorest schools, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Santiago Decontamination Plan, worker-entrepreneurgovernment negotiation panels and the enactment of the Teachers’ Statute (providing job security for teachers). However, the internal contradictions of the coalition also became clear, as did the constraints of the measures negotiated with Pinochet’s forces. These

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were visible in the institutional sphere, the composition of Congress, the validity of the 1980 Constitution and the ‘leyes de amarre’ (binding laws) issued by Pinochet before March 1990. But they were also evident in the operation of the ‘factic powers’ outside the formal political system. For example, in terms of representation in Congress, the Concertación did not hold a majority in the Senate until the 2006 legislature, despite always getting more votes than the Right (a 20 per cent difference, initially). This series of factors objectively reduced the weight that civil society’s agenda might have acquired in the new political scenario. The parties that accessed the government brought in some figures who had been involved in the previous civil mobilization, but they were chosen for their connections and political loyalty, not their social membership. Another important sector of the government simply came from political networks in which the issue of a new role for society through citizen participation was not present. In turn, both these sectors had to negotiate with the opposition, whose parliamentary representation had increased – and was also present in municipalities and regional councils – and with the extra-institutional power circuit. Therefore, the merger of social and political actors that had characterized the pre-democratic period had no sure way to project itself into the new scenario, as the testimonies below reflect. This hampered the political institutionalization of the agendas that arose from civil society in the 1980s, which were partially expressed in new laws, state agencies and social programmes. In other words, these proposals experienced major setbacks in parliamentary debate because they had to be negotiated with the Right, which exercised its power of veto; therefore, only partial institutionalization was achieved. To boot, the institutional agencies failed to overcome fragmentation and discontinuity in public policy, and the design of their social programmes failed to formulate effective change in relations with the social base. The political sectors that led the transition attached enormous weight to a subjective factor linked to the country’s historical memory: the wish to never again jeopardize political democracy as had happened in 1973. This went hand in hand with the forced adaptation to, and subsequent increased acceptance of, the new development model inherited from Pinochet. Hypergovernance (De la Cuadra 2003) generally dominated political action in the executive branch of government throughout the transition and became part and parcel of the political culture of the Concertación. As Hagopian (2005: 127) put it, ‘The Chilean elites restricted the scope of competition and maintained the authoritarian era’s economic reforms, institutional constraints on accountability and citizen demobilization.’ The search for economic stability fared similarly, having been previously subject to pressures and mass mobilization due to the characteristics of the political system and the state-centred development model. At present, stability is more dependent on the power-

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ful national and transnational business sector formed by the privatizing and pro-globalization reforms of recent decades. The rebuilding of democratic institutions privileged the roles and career paths of a professional political elite. In turn, this elite, once installed in the state, downplayed its efficacy to avoid at all costs a repetition of the historical mobilization levels of Chilean society, which it interpreted as a virtual threat to polarize the political system. The same applied for excessive demands on the economic system established by the military regime. These initial efforts also avoided confrontations with the new government by involving organized civil society itself – an unsurprising move, considering that the leaders of the pro-democratic civil society were associated with the same political groups that got elected and many of their supporters took on public roles. At least three ways of understanding links with civil society and inclusion of its issues in the government policy agenda were perceptible among the officials studied here. First, those who understood the NGOs’ role as executors of state action argued that whereas NGOs and grass-roots organizations are needed as doers and allies of the government’s social programmes, that at the same time the government itself should neither encourage nor strengthen the role of civil society because it might eventually become a threat to governance or interfere unduly with autonomous entities. This position clearly differentiates the roles of the state and civil society. It views NGOs as unsuccessful in adapting to the new circumstances, and social organizations as weakened. This position was clear in the configuration of the AGCI, which channelled international cooperation for the democratic reconstruction exclusively to the state and the parties, severely weakening the NGOs that had been the previous recipients and had not considered any action for compensation or support. An interviewee responsible for an area of public policy demonstrated this standpoint, saying: ‘I believe that NGOs are not the same as the government and one cannot expect one type of CSO to perform the task of joint decision-taking with the government. An entirely different matter is to generate decision-taking participation systems. Now, on this, we have made very slow progress’ (Top administration official, PS). A second view is that the social policy should cater for the needs of the people through a direct relationship with them. NGOs can also execute policies, but on the whole this perspective does not consider new roles for civil society, as a former minister of Aylwin’s pointed out graphically and emphatically: ‘With all due respect, I received the hefty volume churned out by the Aylwin Housing Commission. I took it and put it away. The Aylwin housing policy was based on what we heard in those two months on the road, in those great assemblies he used to organize, because there was the crux of the difficulties to be solved’ (Top administration official, Independent).

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Finally, there are those who admit, with regret, that the participation of civil society is not a priority in government policy. This position shows itself to be critical and disenchanted, but realistic. ‘The government has always understood that it had to work with the world of NGOs and grass-roots organizations and, as far as possible, befriend them to undertake specific initiatives. But that it was not the responsibility of the government to strengthen civil society’. (Technical administration official, PPD). ‘There is no political will to make participation a habitual working method. I was one of the people responsible for the Committee to develop the joint document of the government and NGOs. There were many meetings, many things, but in the end there was no political will of the government’. (Top administration official, PS).

In practice, these opinions are more or less shared by government officials and their civil society counterparts. They also reflect the viewpoint of the sociotechnical leaders who managed to secure government posts. Overall, they agree that although they tried to incorporate issues and mechanisms for including civil society in the public agenda, they did not necessarily achieve continuity or major political impact on their institutional environment. ‘I believe that the only actual citizen participation in Chile is the Environmental Act. There is no other such thing in the public administration. I believe that participation and consultation spaces materialized when I was in the CONAMA. There, we set up a way of managing environmental issues with broad participation, discussion, which unfortunately subsequent directors did not keep up’. (Top administration official, PS) ‘In this council I have a very direct relationship with artisanal fishermen and it is actually a unique example of relations between the government and the social world, so to speak. It is the fishermen from each cove that propose the projects to be developed. I was part of the first governing body of the council’. (Technical administration official, PPD)

Obviously, those who left the government without institutionalizing changes attribute this failure to the introduction of modifications in the governing style. They exhibit a greater degree of frustration, although their general diagnosis is the same, as shown by the following testimony: ‘We were lucky enough to create a whole new institutional body (SERNAM), so my proposal was that we should try to make the administration much more participatory. Not co-governing with civil society, but generating a more democratic body. It all ended up with a tremendously author-

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itarian structure, with a focus on the director, with few opportunities for contact with, and participation of civil society. Then, the impact is small. The only thing that makes me happy is to have been able to foreground the issue of domestic violence. As for generating opportunities for participation in which society is heard, and all that, my feeling is that we didn’t’. (Top administration official, PS)

The relatively low impact of the career paths of government officials formed largely in CSOs and their subordination to restricted conceptions of democracy and participation hint at a profound restructuring of both political society and civil society, and their mutual relations, after 1990. In these relations, the traditional expressions of the popular world – trade unions, guilds and coordinadoras poblacionales, as well as other organizations that originated in the antiauthoritarian struggles – are virtually absent. This has reduced the social base of support for more distinctly pro–civil society government agents. The sectoral agendas deployed by new officials coming from civil organizations were impacted in a different way. However, their leaders did not become spokespersons for the movements or organizations to which they had belonged. Rather, they established clear differences in the respective roles, had to contend with other sectors with no awareness of the issues, and above all had to face a global transition and democracy design that left little room for this perspective. Those who attempted a more ambitious game had to leave the government shortly thereafter. This phenomenon is partly explained by the fact that the CSO leaders who were incorporated into the government came from the hybrid segment, a stressful situation during the transition. In the long run, what prevailed was the technical role and subordination to the strategic political design that governed the transition. All in all, any enacted legal modifications – such as the Law on Indigenous Peoples, the Law on Environmental Bases and the Law on Domestic Violence – were directly generated from within the state by officials who came from civil society, usually through dialogue and confrontation with more or less structured social movements that applied pressure and provided political support. However, for a long time the depth and scope of these legal modifications were subject to a somewhat undemocratic Congress and the enforcement of an authoritarian Constitution. No initiatives were generated in any sphere of the public agenda that was seen as lacking the support of a parliamentary majority. Furthermore, several bills that were approved were later challenged by the Right before the Constitutional Court, which ended up blocking their enactment on the grounds of incompatibility with the Constitution. The main changes therefore involved the set-up of new agencies and social programmes, a much lower, more fragile level of innovation, given

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the lack of continuity and limited institutional and political power in which they were conceived. Having accessed the state, civil society leaders faced limitations within its apparatus that complicated implementation of agendas negotiated or developed outside the state. One possibility for reinforcing them would have been to organize mechanisms for expanded participation, as was done with the agenda for the environmental decontamination of Santiago. Absent such mechanisms, these officials’ splits from previous networks or forced adaptations upon entering the civil service became factors that diminished their potential impact. The loss of connections is resented on both sides. This calls for a reconsideration of whether the character of these leaders – both those who took over government posts and most of those who remained their civilian counterparts in the professional NGOs – was elitist or enlightened. The question may also be interpreted as a conflict about the scope and exclusions of the political elite, and not just around the issue of civil society generically understood. In the case of NGOs, for example, the framework of their relationship with the government means that their demands run the risk of becoming corporatized. Alternatively, both the political authorities and the grass-roots organizations have rapidly delegitimized them. This shows their relative isolation from both types of actors. Insofar as no signficant mechanisms have been generated for civil society to express itself in all its diversity, the debate has tended to focus on ‘who makes the decisions’. This scenario strengthens the role of technocracy still further. The diagnosis of weakening links runs parallel to the weakening of the popular classes of civil society itself, which may account for its low political priority. This reinforces the idea of the consolidation in power of a relatively established political class, whereupon possibilities for transforming the way of governing to increase participation seem scarce. In the analysis carried out in this book, the modes of constitution of the political elite and the role it plays appear to be very relevant factors in the dynamics of the links between state and society and the limits of what I have called the governance model. Of foremost importance is the significant weight of politics in the configuration of Chilean civil society. During the transition, this weight received expression through a small group of people rather than through the strong institutionalized party structures that existed prior to the military coup. The negotiations with the departing civil and military power had amplified the voice of the more ‘conservative’ sectors, that is, those who agreed to maintain the conditions imposed by the previous government. The outcome was the strengthening of the sectors that grew from the old social and economic elite – including some who had previously leaned leftward – as well the technocratic class, which also accepted the neoliberal foundations of the new order.

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The subsequent dynamics have trended towards consolidation of a political elite with a low renewal and diversification rate: most who joined the executive branch of government remained there through several Concertación governments. Organized civil society has distanced itself from government policy, but its former leaders have not returned to it. Instead, emerging new spaces with a strong technical component, such as think tanks, act as counterparts associated with big corporations and the government, while ties with organized civil society languish. Other spaces where intellectuals and civil society leaders traditionally expressed themselves, such as public universities and the media, have had to embed themselves in a dynamic of market and self-funding that weakens their role in this area.11

Notes 1. A third Chilean, a human rights lawyer, also took part in the seminar that inspired Basombrío’s book. It is easy to understand why he did not contribute a testimony: he is Gustavo Villalobos, Director of the National Intelligence Agency until March 2010 and again since 2014. 2. One of them, Senator Evelyn Matthei, daughter of a member of the military junta, Air Force General Fernando Matthei, was an RN activist until 1992, when her participation in telephone espionage involving Piñera was exposed. This episode led Piñera to renounce his presidential candidacy and Matthei to switch to the UDI. In 2011 she joined the cabinet of the Piñera administration. 3. A pioneering text on the ‘politics of expertise’ began its argument with a joke that is apropos here: ‘Monsieur Pompidou is reported to have quipped, when he was prime minister of France, that there were three ways for a politician to ruin his career: chasing women, gambling and trusting experts. The first, he said, was the more pleasant and the second the quickest, but trusting experts was the surest’ (Benveniste 1973: 3). 4. See discussion of some of these factors at the initial moment of the transition in Silva (1991). For a historical overview of the political role of technocracy, see Silva (2006). 5. The construction of the database was carried out under the Fondecyt No. 1060087 project, supported by sociologist Carlos Ochsenius as co-researcher. 6. In a broader sample of 387 people, corresponding to a twenty-year period and including members of Congress, the percentage of women is further reduced. 7. To probe deeper into career path patterns and analyse the impact of entering the government, in-depth interviews were conducted with some of the people in the database and some civil society leaders who were involved in these processes. The interviews sought to elicit critical assessment of how previous career paths affected state’s links with civil society. Nine officials and four civil society leaders were interviewed in 2005. 8. For instance, Eduardo Aninat (DC), an economist and former minister under Frei, became president of the Association of Pension Fund Administrators and the lawyer and union adviser Eduardo Loyola (PS), former Undersecretary of Labour, went to the Mining Council after leaving the board of CODELCO. Jaime Andrade (PS), Undersecretary of MIDEPLAN, later became an executive of the Los Pelambres mining company, then took up public office again during the Bachelet administration. René Cortázar (DC), former Minister of Labour under Aylwin, later became director of several companies and returned as Bachelet’ s Transport Minister. The Aylwin minister Enrique Correa (formerly PS) and Eugenio Tironi

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(PPD), communications director under the same government, formed successful consultancies specializing in political communication and strategic advice services, and frequently advised the Bachelet government and political parties. They are also consultants for large companies, in which they sometimes hold top executive posts. 9. This sample held two exceptions: José Bengoa, PPD anthropologist and the Aylwin government’s director of the Special Commission for Indigenous Peoples – the entity that prompted the Indigenous Peoples Act and the creation of CONADI – ended his public service and returned to the NGO he had helped found in the 1980s and his academic work at a private university formed by a consortium of NGOs. The other case is that of Adriana Hoffmann, an environmental leader with no party affiliation who, after a brief stint in CONAMA in the first Lagos cabinet, returned to her position as director of the NGO she founded. 10. Manuel Bustos, president of the CUT, was a deputy until his death, and was succeeded by the leader of the Teachers Association, María Rozas. Rodolfo Seguel, president of the Federation of Copper Workers and national convener of the 1983 protests, served two terms as deputy. And José Ruiz di Giorgio, president of the oil workers, was elected to the Senate representing the Region of Magallanes. 11. Further research will allow the extension of these findings to a larger universe that includes the government, Congress and the party-political elite from both the Concertación and the Alianza por Chile.

Conclusion Participation and Public Policy in the Chilean Democratic Process

This work has analysed the links between civil society and the state as factors in the construction of democratic governance during transition to democracy and its subsequent evolution. The analysis aims to expand conceptualization beyond the narrow frame imposed by the transitology or transition knowhow of the 1980s, which restricted democracy to a political regime to adapt it to the challenges of the twenty-first-century Latin American reality – an undoubtedly post-transitional scenario. Two main factors lend relevance to the multifaceted issue of civil society and its forms of association or participation in democratic construction of the public dimension. The first is the growth in actors’ complexity and diversification that characterizes the current political scene. This is an outcome of the crisis of the so-called classical sociopolitical matrix, in which the part collective actors played in national states led to a relative diminishment of the state’s power and the entrance of new actors on the subnational and transnational scene. This increased complexity is also due to the multiplicity of interconnected networks between levels and ambits that used to be isolated from one another, the intensification of communication and migratory flows, and cultural influences. Whilst the globalizing economic process concentrates economic power and encourages the merging of markets and corporations, social processes disaggregate interests and actors and generate new needs in the management of public affairs and of the state. These trends abound in challenges for institutions, public and political practices and particularly the construction of democratic governance. The second main factor is the ‘democratic experimentalism’ – an expression coined by José Nun – that has characterized Latin America for over a quarter of a century. This phase of responses to institutional and political challenges is inspired by notions of participation and citizenship that exceed the limits of a democracy understood exclusively as a pluralistic, competitive political regime. This experimentalism has no theoretical underpinnings, as it came about as a reaction to the failure of twentieth-century projects for social and political change. However, analysis of what has been done in practice has gradually produced a fruitful conceptualization and a rich debate in the – 249 –

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region. This important Latin American contribution expands and enriches democratic theory because it has developed largely through critical dialogue with the prevailing paradigms, particularly the elitist stream inspired by Joseph Schumpeter and the pluralistic stream that owed much to Robert Dahl. Latin America’s contribution to so-called transitology is also highly relevant, as is its contribution to the conceptualization of democratic consolidation and, subsequently, to studies on the quality of democracy. In all instances, these reflections relate to specific political processes in different countries in the region. The peculiarity of Latin American theorizing on the construction of democracy is that the participatory challenges do not refer mainly to methodological issues or to the mere pluralization or multiplication of the actors taking part in the political process. Instead it is democracy’s capacity for inclusion – that is, the political modalities whereby large excluded groups have become part of the process since the rules of the political regime were established – that is the focus of the Latin American approach, given that a democratic political regime of the Schumpeterian or elitist variety does not guarantee inclusion in societies that are extremely unequal. As Jorge Vargas (2008: 28) put it, for democratic transition studies the recovery of the political regime was the point of arrival, whereas for democratic construction studies it is only the point of departure. Analysis of the Chilean case and its various particular characteristics adds new angles to the discussion. On the one hand, its transition was rather late – the last one in the cycle of the 1980s – and therefore one of its components was a dose of the political lessons learned from experiences in Southern Europe, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. It was preceded and guided by two cycles of massive popular mobilizations (in 1983–1986 and 1988). Yet because it developed according to the elitist model without breaking away from democracy or constitutional change, it inherited features of the institutional framework of the military regime it succeeded. The ensuing regime enjoyed great stability, partly because the structural adjustment had already been effected by the military regime, meeting with scant opposition and partly because it ably kept up the momentum of economic growth for almost three decades. This stability was also due to active social policies focused on groups that were not favoured by the economic model. The economic system underwent no major modification. As for the political regime, it was structured around two political alliances that in practice shared power. Until 2010, the pro-democratic coalition Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia governed the country while the forces that had supported the military regime retained their veto power in Congress and maintained a strong presence in different institutions stipulated in the political constitution (i.e., the ‘authoritarian enclaves’). Then, in March 2010, the

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Right returned to power after fifty-two years of losing elections and sixtyfive years without a majority in Congress. Therefore, the time frame of this study corresponds to a historical cycle of twenty years. It is worth noting that the political system has not undergone major alterations with the change of government because the right-wing coalition does not have a majority in Congress and thus is forced to negotiate its legislative agenda with the opposition. Over those twenty years, the main transformations in the links between the state and society concerned public policy, particularly in the social sphere, which was the top priority of the state administration and the main difference from the earlier orthodox neoliberal orientation. These policies formed a basis for new participatory guidelines and efforts to ensure social inclusion in the restored democracy. This perspective is particularly productive, considering the country’s potential for democratic construction. How far-reaching are the modifications to public policy involving participation and promotion of citizenship, in terms of their contribution to the construction of democratic governance? This study has analysed the role of public policies and the opportunities they create for civil society in a scenario of political stability and economic growth based on opening to other countries and the prevalence of a market economy. Using a broad notion of governance, the study has assumed that public policy was the main transformational instrument wielded by democratic governments to modify the situation inherited from the military government. However, these governments’ ability to produce democratic governance was limited because they were subordinated to an elitist democracy model that adopted a restricted version of citizen participation. This study has stressed the need to reconceptualize governance and broaden its definition as a democratic construct, thereby permitting incorporation of the democratic consolidation of the state and new forms of participation. These forms are not a substitute for representative democracy and can coexist alongside it. However, increased participation per se lacks democratic potential, as notions like participatory democracy suggest. This potential instead appears to hinge on the political context, the specific modalities for institutionalizing such participation and their relation to institutional designs. Democratic potential also depends on the configuration and scope of public policy networks. Intervening factors include the conditions for the reproduction of political elites and the role of expert knowledge in public policy decisions, which reinforce or modify the elitist character of the governance model. The perspective of this study led, first of all, to defining a framework of the challenges to democratic construction in Latin America that acknowledges the factor of inclusion of traditionally excluded groups rather than just the

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pluralization of political representation. This inclusion has a passive dimension involving the redistribution of socially generated benefits and resources. But it also has an active dimension extending to the design, execution and social control of policies and public action in general. This active dimension better guarantees the intended redistribution by increasing its pertinence and permitting its appropriation by the citizenry. It also reinforces democratic practices by expanding and reinforcing citizen deliberation and participation in public matters between one election and the next. The conceptual framework adopted here made it possible to analyse the ‘dispute over democratic construction’ scenario in Chile, starting with the onset of the political transition in the second half of the 1980s. The conditions and restrictions of this transition assigned a preponderant role to social policy as an instrument for transforming the situation inherited from the military government. The analysis thus required a classification of the different participation agendas and the ways in which they were implemented in different areas and levels of government. Furthermore, participation is a multifaceted process involving different actors. The heterogeneity of civil society, its fragmentation and the socioeconomic divisions within it condition its capacity for action. Other relevant actors in the transition included local authorities and government officials in charge of implementing agendas. Actors that moved from organized civil society to the sphere of government were particularly significant; the influence they exerted often made a difference in agendas and policy. Notable among them were the technical cadres who carried out tasks that had political impact (the technopols). How was the articulation between these actors and public policy brought about? Consideration of the mechanisms, institutionalized or not, that make participation possible permitted evaluation of the extent to which each multiple mechanism made an impact, which appeared to be inversely proportional to its degree of institutionalization. The study also analysed the various social sectors’ differentiated access to formal and informal mechanisms. Among the latter is the public policy network, a modality whose differentiated impacts on the course of public action follow the pattern of social inequality in the country. The Chilean case prompts critique of the generic notion of civil society as a sector distinctly differentiated from the market and the state, and as a homogeneous whole with specific interests. It also permits clarification of the notion of a citizen participation dependent on political and institutional factors, and on the characteristics inherent to the social actors. Finally, by taking a ‘successful’ example as the starting point, the case of Chile reveals the concrete potential and limitations of an elitist democracy and the present-day challenges to improving on it.

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The Importance of the Political Context The governance model of transition to democracy endorsed an elitist conception of democracy that was highly segmented and specialized. Initially, this conception was a cornerstone of the transition’s design, in line with the political calculations of those in charge of the process, and later it was more permanently established. Political calculations indicated that the coalition taking the reins of government lacked power because it was constrained by the 1980 Constitution, a possible military threat or fluctuations and instability on the investment markets. In other words, powerful actors sensed that the political and economic costs of introducing institutional uncertainty for the sake of higher-quality, deeper democracy jeopardized the agreement attained with pro-military forces. This agreement was not only the backbone of the transition but also the very condition that enabled the coalition to take over the government. In time, this initial stance of the prodemocracy coalition became the dominant view among its members and originated a new political culture that was very different from that of the movement that had defeated Pinochet at the polls. This initial consideration, born of the circumstances under which governance was attained, led to what political jargon terms a ‘consensus democracy’, a formula for political action that privileged the agreements between the political blocs in Congress and also, in practice, circumscribed government action to whatever might garner the support of the opposition. In plain language, the political opposition availed itself of veto players whose overriding concern was to defend the strategic aspects of the legacy of the military regime. Meanwhile, beyond political correlations, this governance model translated into a highly restrictive conception of participation, at least in two main senses: first, it created a need to restrict anything that might not be conducive to consensus within the elite; and second, it assumed a more or less explicit consensus about the inviolability of the prevailing socioeconomic model. The political philosopher Carlos Ruiz (1993) saw this definition as assigning the elite and its rational performance a key role in generating consensus and agreements as well as limiting competition and areas of conflict. In this model, the political class is the main protagonist of political action and citizen participation adds uncertainty or presents a destabilizing threat to democracy in societies that are fragmented, heterogeneous or ‘over-ideologized’. The self-assigned role of the political elites as representatives of enlightened, responsible, reasonable majorities gave way to the need for technocracy and its measures, motivated by rational calculations and social and political engineering. The underlying idea was that increasing society’s participation would polarize it even further – which reflected the view of those who attributed the military coup to polarization and exacerbated political conflict.

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A second aspect of Chile’s consensus democracy has to do with a broader agreement on substantive goals concerning the socioeconomic system rather than the rules of the political game. The reassertion of the idea of a ‘market society’ definitely helped exclude major socioeconomic demands from the sphere of political decisions. Some active public policies that included participatory components were nonetheless implemented. However, they had no political projections and were subordinated to governance targets. For this reason, whatever citizen participation they involved was instrumental in nature and reduced in scope. These historico-political considerations form a basis for an initial conceptual explanation of relations between civil society and state in contexts of transition to democracy: the greater or lesser space and projection of civil society’s mobilization and action depend on specific political conditions. In contexts that prohibit political activity, civil action emerges as an alternative space for socialization and encounter, generation of proposals, organization and so on. This is particularly so in cases where actors have access to external support (international cooperation) or prior social or political networks. A decisive factor during Chile’s transition process, therefore, was the principle that societal tendencies should be expressed through some kind of organization or political party, or even more extensively if their proponents had resources for action within the political system undergoing reconstruction. As the process developed in a context of forced conservative or restrictive consensus on matters such as preserving the constitutional order and the economic model, pro-democratic members of civil society had trouble finding political space in which to position their agendas because the context strove to exclude them from the process of generating collective will through debate and ample, massive public deliberation. Thus, civil society was eventually restricted to the role of ‘strategic actors’ that made the consensus of the elites viable. Civil society’s efforts tend to be excluded when they lack political action resources appropriate to the prevailing context. When such conditions persist, the civil society may opt for reconstruction outside the political system altogether. However, the phenomenon of path dependence may increase or decrease the probability of this happening. Barring a major legitimacy crisis in the political system, reconstruction of civil society is highly unlikely in a context of previous diverse interconnections between civil society and the politics of accessing the state, and of the state’s preeminence in the historical configuration of society, as is the case in Chile. The rise of civil society during the military dictatorship in Chile was a response to repression and generated forms of reencounter with politics, albeit outside the institutional framework. This reencounter focused more on active mobilization against the regime and less on the collective elaboration of the

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democratic model and institutional framework that it proposed to implement. As already mentioned, the economic model and institutional framework that the military regime designed to ‘protect’ democracy remained unchanged after 1990, except for some minor modifications. In fact, the efficacy of anti-dictatorial action and mobilization was directly related to the convergence of social movements and the party-political leadership, especially during the cycle of protests in 1983–1986 and later in the 1988 plebiscite. This feature clearly distinguishes the Chilean situation from that of countries like Poland or Brazil, where social mobilization against an authoritarian government brought about complete renewal of the political picture and preceded the formation of new parties. Does this mean that the organized civil society of the 1980s was a mere facade for the political parties? More bluntly, was there, or is there, a true Chilean civil society? It would be a mistake to interpret one characteristic of Chilean history – the influence of political parties – as equivalent to cancellation of civil society. During the transition, however, the political fraction of civil society leadership was the one with the most opportunities to access government, resulting in what this study has called hybrid leaderships that are at once social and political. Meanwhile, the more autonomist sectors had no political projection either inside or outside the newly created scenario. For this reason, the historical pattern of conformance that had made Chilean civil society relatively powerful – namely, its links with the state through organic political expressions – weakened it at this new juncture of the transition. The function of politics had changed, the state had lost power and autonomy was now a requirement. But autonomy had not developed properly. Thus, privileged links were established wherever the political context permitted and encouraged them – such as in the reactivated social policies, which have come to substitute for the political mediation of earlier times. It was around social policies that new links, approaches and partial conflicts with civil society came to be, based on new processes: generation of sectoral and territorial spaces for concerted action, particularly in the local sphere, within a framework of targeted social policies and processes of reform and modernization of the state. For some segments of civil society, the political context in practice defines all their opportunities. This was the case for the local grass-roots social organizations and NGOs that gradually became consulting entities for public policy. Others, by contrast, had international connections of various kinds that gave them greater autonomy from the political conditions. Here it may be valid to suggest that in restrictive contexts like that of the Chilean transition, direct international links and the framework of guaranteed rights – also influenced by international agreements – appear to be relevant factors in the

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increased prominence of the role of CSOs, as does their ability to mobilize resources of their own that give them greater autonomy. This volume’s examination of CSOs’ historical evolution assigns an essential role to the relations between civil society and the state. This is because the early constitution of the state was imposed on society, and because the political system conditioned the state’s links with society in the twentieth century. There was no fully autonomous civil society operating outside the institutional framework and political activity. In the Chilean tradition, the state is the place to promote and encourage ‘top-down’ modernizing proposals, which are proposed to and inserted within the larger society. Several social reform strategies and projects were launched from the state, with varying degrees of success, in twentieth-century Chile. This study has also analysed the internal diversity of civil society itself, which was marked by continuity and strength in expressions associated with the power groups, and by discontinuity and weakness in expressions that concerned the popular sectors. Through the political system, however, both social strata managed to strengthen their position in a state that, from 1925 on, called for consensus or compromise between conflicting interests. The military coup of 1973 introduced a more pronounced social differentiation and repressed both political actors and social organizations, affecting links that had been built up over time. The recomposition of democratic forces protected by the Catholic Church diversified social organization and translated into a reordering of alliances on the Chilean political scene. But despite the massive nature of the mobilizations in the 1980s, in the long run the transition process undeniably took place within the framework designed by Pinochet. This very severely restricted the reconstruction of the historical link between society and politics, and the democracy that emerged from this transition had a strongly elitist character. As democratic governments adapted to the institutional framework and the elitist approach to politics, they eventually attained stability and eliminated any threat of authoritarian reversal. At the same time, by reactivating social policies they initiated a new modality of dialogue and links with society in a context of ‘low-intensity’ democracy. In this scenario, organized civil society came closer to the state but distanced itself from politics, an unnecessary pursuit given the new way of relating. Some sectors experienced increased fragmentation into small groups and local or corporate interests, which set up specific instrumental relations with public policy agents, especially its mediators. Other groups with larger stocks of social and economic capital found that the dialogue with public policy increased their influence in setting agendas and defining orientations. Here too, ‘techno-political’ mediation gradually took over some of the space traditionally occupied by the mediation of political parties.

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The Institutional Design of Citizen Participation Acknowledging the close imbrication of actors located in different levels of power and spheres of public interest, the democratic construction approach links institutional traits with the development of social action. The institutional changes that result in the ‘opening’ of the state to society facilitate the emergence of an active, deliberating citizenship. Thus, the role of the state does not end with the passive legal acknowledgement of certain citizen rights but can go further. It is here that the space for participation opens. It may involve definition of the interests, priorities and control of public action; influencing the decision-making process; argumentative deliberation and inclusion of certain matters on the political agenda; and coordination of efforts to generate and increase public goods. The underlying assumption is that this provision of public goods is not guaranteed by itself or through state resources or market operations. Nonetheless, as Ernesto Isunza (2005) suggested, the construction of state-society interfaces includes a wide range of issues and modalities, only some of which can be regarded as instances of citizen participation with democratizing outcomes. The first question to answer is which forms of connection denote a process of actual opening – for example, the co-production of agendas – and a lasting increase in the democratic orientation of the state. A second necessary determination is whether a form of linkage contributes to overcoming the fragmentation of actors in civil society and generates new capabilities that civil society can use to influence the public sphere: associativity, autonomy, voice and the elaboration of proposals. The final step is to assess institutional changes to discern whether civil society’s joint initiatives eventually manage to transform the political and public administration culture into some kind of ‘empowerment’ of society to participate in public issues. In this relation, the state as an actor has particular characteristics because it has specific resources: a monopoly on the use of force, law enforcement and democratic legitimacy. Because these resources actually exist in Chile, unlike in some other countries in Latin America, the state has a great capacity to shape the spaces involved. It is therefore relevant to analyse the policy orientations and institutional designs that the government has implemented to promote citizen participation and links with society. The potential and limitations of these experiences depend heavily on their orientations and designs. Another aspect to consider is the configuration and scope of public policy networks. The research for this volume enabled identification of different types of social policy agendas depending on their orientation, institutional management and modality of linkage with social actors. Each type involved different outcomes in terms of institutional impact and the configuration of society.

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Two types of agendas emerged in the initial context of the transition: agendas previously negotiated with social movements that formed part of the opposition to Pinochet’s regime and later became partially institutionalized in public policies; and the agenda for ‘overcoming poverty’, which formed part of the social policy but lacked an organized social counterpart other than a statistical aggregate of ‘the poor’. For the former type, the subjects of analysis were gender equality and the women’s movement agenda, the agenda for negotiation with organized indigenous groups and the indigenous policy of the Concertación governments. Analysis of the second type of agenda extended to the creation of the FOSIS and the evolution of anti-poverty action into the multi-sectoral approach exemplified by the Chile Solidario system. A third type of agenda analysed concerned policies enacted after the year 2000 that share a characteristic guaranteed rights approach. Here, the notion of citizenship in the traditional passive style reappears in an agenda uncoupled from active citizenship modalities. Neither the Chile Solidario system nor the health care reform was designed in a participatory way or considered forms of participation for the civil society to which they were addressed. Two final types of agenda pertained to the links established between the state and civil society in the local sphere, where different interfaces are set up. The first was the local institutional framework, embodied in the municipalities and regional governments and realized as locally applied sectoral programmes and multilevel programme innovations with the participation of organized civil society. The second, ‘outsourcing of the local interface’, transfers resources to not-for-profit private entities to materialize the links to civil society that are required for democratic governance. This last agenda initially relied on mixed councils (civil society–state) but failed to become institutionalized and wound up being formulaically privatized as a foundation. Of the two cases analysed – the Council/Foundation for Overcoming Poverty and the Council/Fund for the Americas – only the first still exists, calling on young people to do volunteer work and receiving government funding. The diversity of the agendas that connect the state with society via public policies bespeaks the extent of this kind of link and its importance for state action. However, my research points to the state’s rather modest performance in suitably institutionalizing citizen participation, and to its failure to turn this participation into a force for constructing and strengthening democracy. Results were extremely limited in each of the several dimensions of analysis. This shortcoming contrasted overtly with other types of results of some of these policies and programmes: broader service coverage, the institutionalization of some social rights, growth in infrastructure and social services and other improvements count among the numerous achievements of post-1990 government action.

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From the viewpoint of social action, negotiations with organized movements of women and indigenous peoples produced agendas that have evolved towards divorce rather than continued cooperation. The women’s movement gradually lost momentum as its agenda became institutionalized. And the limitations of the Law on Indigenous Peoples negotiated in Congress so constricted its utility that an autonomous indigenous movement sprang up in response and confronted the government repeatedly. Also affecting this situation was the pressure increasingly exerted on indigenous territories and communities by natural resource extraction industries and the large infrastructure works that serve them. The instruments considered in the initial negotiations and the filters applied via ‘consensus democracy’ failed to suitably tackle the problems these agendas were created to solve. In the case of the women’s movement, the state became stronger, but the role of the movement itself was replaced with expert knowledge networks that promoted a progressive agenda. The indigenous movement, for its part, became stronger but did so in confrontation with the state. What was not strengthened or preserved over time was the co-production of agendas and public goods, either because the actors were weakened or because the given problem touched upon issues outside the framework of the initial consensus of the transition. In the latter case, the problem lay more in politics than in the public policy sphere, and no instruments were available to the actors to handle and project these emerging issues politically. In other agendas, the forms of participation lacked institutionalized character; they also more frequently occurred at the stage of implementing rather than defining the agenda, as in the cases described above. Focused on microlocal spaces like neighbourhoods and rural communities, they involved co-funding modalities, favouring small initiatives for local development or partially upgrading small-scale public investment instruments. These modalities produced several local innovations featuring the convergence of public actors – generally local authorities or operators of sectoral services and social leaders. Many of the innovative initiatives analysed showed a certain potential to strengthen citizen participation – rather than a capacity for the institutional modification of the state – but they did so in specific instances that were isolated from one another. When an organized social counterpart already existed and public agents had the political will to generate an opening, the potential appeared stronger. However, it did not respond to general guidelines issued by the central government. In conceptual terms, the very conception of social action and its links with the state seems to be at stake. In different contexts such as those in Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil, different formulas have attempted to institutionalize the participation of organized social movements by associating

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them with wide-ranging public policies such as indigenous participation, conferences on health and childhood, housing forums, negotiations with the Sem Terra movement and even the management of social programmes by piquetero organizations in Argentina. This has not happened in any of the Chilean agenda types. One additional feature is a limitation common to most agendas, particularly those applied locally: decentralization, both its nature and its advance. Privileging local participation draws attention to the degree and depth of decentralization and the instruments it puts at the disposal of actors in the local territory. The Chilean political system is highly centralized, and the governance design applied in the last twenty years has tended to emphasize that centralization. The political project of the transition considered only the political democratization of the municipalities; it did not extend to change in the institutional and administrative architecture of the country. Therefore, decentralization has translated mainly into deconcentrated central services and the transfer, mainly to the municipalities, of administrative functions in such fields as health and education, to name two of the largest. In this too, Chile contrasts with other countries in the region, such as Colombia, Brazil, Peru and Bolivia. Both unitary and federal states have developed deeper local participation in decentralization and institutionalization processes by articulating them to the political decision-making processes. Because the governance model emphasizes fiscal responsibility, the role of the Finance Ministry was reinforced, not only in the area of controlling spending, but also in the overall orientation of programmes. The ministry carried out this task using several instruments to modernize and evaluate public programmes. This priority continues to prevail in the current governance model, which features neither interlocutors with whom specific targets within the executive branch can be negotiated, nor mechanisms for heeding policies negotiated with civil society at the regional or local level. Fiscal financing approaches also encourage co-funding modalities that may reduce spending but offer no occasions for joint decision-making or co-supply of services on the basis of a common agenda and upgrades to investment and public action services. Meanwhile, the so-called agenda for the modernization of the state promotes processes inspired by the same principle – ensuring the efficacy and efficiency of the administration as a whole – but does not incorporate the adjustments required for engagement with civil society. Thus the participation process occupies a reduced institutional space and is poorly articulated with the cycle of public policies in which it intervenes. This weakens its potential by restricting its chances to operate on a larger scale. In a context of policies focused on poorer, more vulnerable sectors, this weakness tends to encourage the configuration of a scheme of participation and concerted efforts ‘between the poor’ (e.g., poor inhabitants living

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in poor municipalities). These efforts’ potential to transform living conditions and overcome poverty is also reduced. This uncouples the participation agenda from other policies, such as poverty reduction and social protection programmes, causing social action to lose its necessary alignment with them. Particularly noteworthy are more recent agendas that have featured the guaranteed rights approach. Do they represent a substantive innovation in the governance model? In a certain way, analysis of the health-care reform appears to suggest that they do, because they reintroduce the issue of universal citizenship, or neo-universalism, that was displaced by targeted policies. The social rights agenda has been gaining space in social policy and coexists with targeted policies and the private administration of services. Neo-universalism adapts the orientations inherent in social democratic policies to a mixed model that has its own characteristics. In Chile, the formulation of social rights is not grounded in substantial social and political accord as in welfare states, but in the political decision of the state. Thus, its modality is top-down. All in all, the conception of rights is incremental: its gradual expansion is parallel to that of the resources allocated to it, or the prevailing political options change. Because of this, prioritization of their implementation rests with the financial authorities or depends on political negotiations that restrict or extend the range of rights, depending on the prevailing political will. The fields of application of the social rights approach involve state provision of such social services as health care, pensions, subsidies and childcare. In another field, the education sector, a universalistic scheme that was originally applied to primary and secondary education has in practice begun declining since the incorporation of the private sector and co-funding by parents. These two novelties incorporated into the system internal differentiations that became more pronounced with the introduction of self-funding and privately managed higher education institutions. Social rights have not spread into the field of labour or issues entrusted to the workings of the market. Rights are guaranteed by law, which establishes the state’s obligations but does not include mechanisms for civil society’s participation in the determination of standards, geographic or cultural pertinence, or social control. The rights agenda, applicable to individuals and binding on the state, is asynchronous with the participation agenda, which applies to social collectives defined in terms of public policy and consultative in nature. Finally, implementation of an agenda of rights in an unprepared state that has set limits on its growth has created a quasi-market for the private supply of services financed by the state, which competes with the government’s direct supply of such services. The regional and local agencies in charge of this implementation lack the autonomy and powers to adjust instruments and action modalities because they are governed by centralist criteria for the

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modernization of public administration, expressed in targets to be met, assessment criteria, uniform public purchase systems and so on. The social protection agenda has advanced, establishing legal instruments that guarantee continuity in time, but the dilemmas posed by its evolution remain to be resolved. To sum up, since the 1990s, the spaces and mechanisms for participation have been embedded in a more ample institutional fabric. Their chances of progress, sustainability, public appropriation, scaling up and capacity for transformation are directly related to the coherence and internal articulation of the institutional governance designs. Because the participation process is not part of the structure of the democratic process or the governance decision-making process, its potential is reduced. However, the emergence of neo-universalism in several areas of social policy represents an innovation that might evolve towards participation modalities subject to standards and increased publification. It is important to note that extending legal prosecution to social rights – that is, making legal action a resort for guaranteeing rights – could lead to exponentially higher costs, which would in turn cause other forms of control and enforceability to be incorporated for economic reasons. The challenge facing institutional participation designs is not so much to create mechanisms suited to a pre-established model as to generate permanent democratizing dynamics in the spheres where these designs are currently applied, in order to increase their relative impact in sectors that are traditionally excluded. It also involves introducing transparency and public control mechanisms in the allocation of public goods and services. The publification of relations between state and citizen is an aspiration that works against such traditional propensities as clientelistic politics and corporativism. It also would serve to express the tensions generated by the neoliberal modernization agenda, which conceptualizes the citizen as a customer.

Public Policy Networks: Configuration, Scope and Influence Having established the main features of the state’s political initiatives with respect to civil society, this study went on to determine the main features of civil society and the actual impact of its participation in public policies. In general terms, the analysis detected relatively scant impact on policy orientation via institutionalized participation. This is due to the nature of the spaces created as well as the configuration of civil society itself, its internal differentiation and the fragmentation of its organizations. When institutionalized mechanisms are scarce and relatively weak, civil society ultimately takes part in several policy networks. The concept of policy networks is useful in refer-

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ence to these semi-institutionalized fields and makes it possible to establish variables that determine their influence and impact. Analysis of trends of change in the configuration of Chilean society showed that it has retained its internal differentiation pattern of high inequality in its members’ incomes, opportunities and power. At the same time, however, a sort of levelling has changed the access to symbolic goods and cultural consumption. This means that sustained economic growth, combined with active social policies in a democratic context, produces significant degrees of social integration. Still, it is not feasible to strike a balance in the availability of power resources within society. The growing disaffection with democratic politics may be related to the political sphere’s loss of effectiveness in channelling the demands for change that are continuously emerging from society. As for collective action, the data do not offer conclusive evidence of more or less social organization now than in the past. What can be demonstrated, at any rate, is that Chilean civil society has little internal articulation – it is configured much like an archipelago – and several areas of low organicism. A variable that appears to affect this is the speed of socioeconomic change in certain contexts, combined with changes in labour relations and internal migration. The institutional mechanisms that can make room for citizen participation are, as already mentioned, extremely limited. The initial analysis examined the different modalities of ad hoc councils and commissions that the Executive has used to orient and reach agreements with public institutions. The diversity of modalities suggests the absence of a clear conception of institutional participation by this means. In other words, councils and commissions are mechanisms that involve a factual opening to nonstate actors, but their function remains unclear in terms of the democratic opening of public policy. Two features reveal the weakness of this modality. First, these bodies’ weak articulation with the cycle of public policies means that their results depend on external factors such as prior political consensuses or the specific power resources of their members. Second, because expert knowledge is emphasized as a factor that often determines who sits on these councils, membership in them has specific characteristics that make them particularly inefficient in processing conflictive matters and arriving at more inclusive new consensuses. Mixed councils represent a modality of opening towards some segments of society, but they have lacked the capacity to transform, in an inclusive sense, issues beyond the preexisting governability consensuses. The analysis of policy networks’ influence distinguished two main types: (1) local networks centred on the implementation of policies and programmes, which assemble intermediating actors and leaders of the organized segment of popular civil society, particularly in the local ambit; and (2) linkages of a national nature, conceptualized as public/private and formed by actors with

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access to strategic resources such as mass media, economic resources of their own or institutionalized power. These are temporary mechanisms designed for specific purposes. The greatest difference between the two types is the configuration of the network, that is, the people that form it and the impact of their performance. In the former case, the networks are relatively isolated from one another and are structured in a one-on-one relation between an organization and a sectoral or local public body. This follows the fragmentation pattern of both civil society itself and the state apparatus. Under these conditions, initiatives influence the constitution and strength of local actors; they also smooth dialogue and improve the capacity to negotiate with public executors. However, their weakness is that they take place at the fringes of public space. This restricts participation to ‘specialist knowledge’, and as there is no deliberation about ends, participation is also depoliticized. The concerted action for implementation articulated by intermediary actors does not have a bottom-up flow because no institutional or informal channels connect them with the decision-making levels. Moreover, these actors lack the autonomy needed to condition central decisions. And since the sphere of social policy lacks an organic link to the strategic nucleus of the state, its impact on policy orientation is minor. The abundance and variety of initiatives and innovations in the subnational ambit bear no relation whatsoever to the weakness of their influence. The conclusion derived from the findings on the subnational networks is that in contexts of low institutionalization of the process of participation in public policy, and of low autonomy of the intermediate units, impact will depend on the previous power of the participant actors and on the level at which participation takes place. In other words, the greater the resources and the previous power of the social actors involved, and the greater their proximity to the central structures of political power, the stronger the influence of the participation process and of public-private concerted efforts. When these conditions obtain, the participatory process effectively increases the number of nongovernment participants involved, although inequality and the non-inclusion of subordinate actors remain unchanged. On the basis of secondary data, this research analysed three participation modalities that confirm this conclusion: expert knowledge networks, public-private strategic alliances and urban citizen movements. In different public policy fields, these three modalities showed significant results in terms of influence: they modified programmes, brought about institutional reforms, successfully promoted new legislation, forced budget and regulatory modifications and so forth. Their common attribute was their assembling of actors in possession of strategic resources that are only accessible to a minority: their field of action was the country’s capital, their interlocutors were in the

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central government or provided reliable support in dealings with municipal governments, and their stock of social, symbolic, cultural or economic capital was high. In other words, these actors concentrated resources that were unequally distributed in society and thus configured networks capable of pulling off top-down modifications. Problematically, this reinforced democratic elitism rather than reducing it. Recent studies of subordinate social actors (settlers affected by environmental conflict, small-scale Lafkenche artisanal fishermen, inhabitants of the island of Chiloe) in contexts distant from the capital city have shown that these groups managed to force concerted action through public policies and enjoyed a higher degree of influence when certain factors converged. One of these factors was the actors’ capacity to propose and mobilize. In addition, ‘public policy errors’, once detected, generated conflict and were used to position theretofore unheeded demands.1 However, their actions did not involve local or regional networks. These actors’ strategy was to ‘skip’ the regional level – which lacked sufficient autonomy or power – and liaise directly with the central government, forcing it to design an ad hoc solution channelled through a participatory formula. This was possible in the three cases previously mentioned because they involved political mediators (some congressmen and mayors) with access to central power (see note 1). In two of the cases, coverage of the conflict in the media, particularly television, was the factor that moved the government to action. Mass media and representatives with control over their voters ultimately proved more effective than the existing participation mechanisms. The central government seemed to have identified certain governance risks and taken direct action. A last factor to consider is external assistance through international cooperation projects and networks. Bilateral and multilateral cooperation has been a channel for pressuring public administrations to introduce the issue of the participation of civil society and make it consistent with international trends. This has opened up a space for dialogue – sometimes mediated by international organizations – on issues such as environmental conflicts and indigenous peoples’ land, among others. Both cooperation with entities other than foreign governments and the networks that the organizations themselves set up with foreign organizations have also been relevant factors, particularly because they not only contribute resources but also enable some movements to be heard in international forums and provide assistance to the leaders, among other efforts. Typical limitations of international support include its lack of sustainability and the difficulty of inserting processes born of international cooperation into the regular practices of Chilean public administration. The existence of different types of policy networks indicates the extent of the installation and expansion of participatory modalities involving civil society. But it also points to the lack of equitable access to the structures of

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the state and to the prevalence of a governance model corresponding to an elitist approach to democracy. Unable to process social conflict according to democratic governance procedures, this model reinforces inequality at the moment of opening the door to concerted action with nonstate actors.

Expert Knowledge and the Reproduction of Political Elites The last aspect studied in this volume was the emergence and reproduction of political elites, and the interfaces between them and civil society. The evolution of a sample of positions in the executive branch of government was examined, permitting identification of the segment that came from civil society. This segment – a techno-political elite with previous training in civil society organizations – appears to be associated with political affiliation and a comparatively large stock of political, cultural and educational capital. Once members of this segment access government, they tend to remain there, occupying different positions within the state apparatus. A smaller group leaves public administration for academia or Congress, while yet another group goes into the private sector. There are practically no career paths that return to organized civil society. Antonio Cortés (2000) has identified the technopolitical intelligentsia as one of three components of the ‘extra-institutional power circuit’. The specific conditions of political recomposition under the military regime and the subsequent restrictions introduced into the transition process gave a leading role to the techno-political elite, especially the contingent of Catholic origin whose political life began in the 1960s and early 1970s. This also produced an interlinked political generation formed of the leaders who launched the democratic opposition, the governments of the transition and the civilians who defended the legacy of the military government. Although his career path is somewhat atypical, Sebastián Piñera, whose victory in the presidential elections of January 2010 made him the first rightwing president since the restoration of democracy in 1990, is part of that same generation and has strong links with the Catholic political elite. The members of his family, however, display quite varied political affiliations: his father and one of his brothers are members of the DC, whereas his elder brother, José, is close to the UDI and was a minister under Pinochet and a presidential candidate in 1993. Sebastián Piñera himself was initially close to the DC and later the RN, a party that he chaired and whose support enabled him to be elected senator. At present there is much more continuity than renewal among the political elites. The strength of the Executive and the weakness of Congress, the restrictions imposed on political parties and the express priorities of the governance

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model were conditions that favoured the centre-stage role of techno-political elites. Their position put them in charge of public policy or allowed them to act as strategic consultants for political parties, the government and corporations. Their priorities were fiscal discipline, efficient management, insertion in global markets and political reconciliation. The strengthening of the extra-institutional power circuit also gave these actors important roles outside the state in think tanks, private universities and companies offering communications and strategic consultancy services. Save for some few cases, the key variables in the recruitment of government officials for this governance design did not involve representation, visibility or prior social legitimacy. On the contrary, during the transition period political trust and technical aptitude became more relevant to serving in higher government positions regarded as extremely complex and full of risks. The subsequent career paths of the techno-professional elite that emerged from civil society to access government positions show that they quickly expanded their contacts and networks with the professional political sphere and private business and industry entrepreneurs. As for the impact of civil society’s agendas, democratic governments have processed only one part of them, namely, the creation of laws, agencies and focused social programmes. Governments’ exclusion of many issues and claims out of commitment to the politico-institutional framework has already been explained. Meanwhile, policy gradually became more oriented to a particular approach derived from the concept of consociational democracy. In its Chilean version, political and technical elites are overrepresented in public action, due to the influence of the inherited institutional framework and the advantages it accorded to the needs of governance at the time, in a scenario of high uncertainty. Reconceptualizing the relations between civil society and political projects requires analysis of changes in the former and the displacement of the political function during the redemocratizing process. The protagonism assigned to public policies with a participatory design prompted the evaluation of their relative impact, as they partly replaced previous modalities of political intermediation. Several of the policies appear to have great potential, but their institutionalization is weak and they are subordinated to a general design that does not assign them a political role in strengthening society. At the same time, the state itself has found that its possibilities for social transformation are also limited. During the twenty-year political cycle that ended in 2010, Chile was ruled by a transition design led by the most stable political coalition in Chilean history. But despite its numerous successes, Chilean society has not recovered the role it enjoyed prior to the military coup. Neither has it conquered the autonomy and strength needed to deepen democracy. After the political

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upheaval in the executive branch and the ascendancy of a right-wing coalition in 2010, the issue of participation in public policy became even less prominent. In any case, changes in the main variables analysed in the research are unlikely, given that the political Right fully endorses the governance model. However, the political coalition in government in 2010 did not have a majority in Congress and therefore also had to opt for a ‘consensus democracy’.

Coda: Society Emerges at the End of a Political Cycle In the year 2011, Chile lived through days of intense, widespread citizen mobilization around the issue of education, where the protagonists were secondary and higher education students and teachers. Between May and December in several cities, protestors staged multiple forms of collective action: strikes, takeovers, massive demonstrations, reflection retreats, artistic expressions, battles pitting students against police, violence and destruction, legal complaints, political negotiations and more. After a hiatus of several years, Chilean society once again expressed itself, collectively clamouring for social and political change. Student demonstrations were preceded by important mobilizations of the environmental movement. February 2012 saw the start of forty days of active mobilization of the inhabitants of the isolated, distant region of Aysén, who agitated for attention to their problems. Over and over again, opinion polls showed ample support for their aims and equally ample rejection of the government’s lack of suitable response. Monthly opinion polls carried out by Adimark gauged citizen support of the mobilizations at between 80 and 71 per cent.2 Educational demonstrations arose several times in 2013, and still others, joined mainly by workers, were led by the new, firstever woman president of the CUT, the communist Bárbara Figueroa. An initial interpretation of all this might suggest that it was simply a reaction to the effects of the political change in government, and that the rightwing coalition had to confront the Concertación, this time in the streets. But this interpretation does not explain why the people rejected the Concertación even more forcefully than they did the government alliance, or why the mobilized actors blamed the Concertación and the Piñera administrations equally. Over 2011, approval of the majority coalitions in the country fluctuated between 15 and 20 per cent for the opposition and between 20 and 30 per cent for the government coalition. That’s why the presidential campaign of Michelle Bachelet in 2013 (former president) was based on a new and broader coalition, called Nueva Mayoría (New Majority) lefting back the previous Concertación. Bachelet won the election against other five candidates.3 But in fact, the demonstrations were not against the government but

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against profiteering in education, centralism, approval of electric generation megaprojects with no prior consultation and other such grievances. The students were agitating for free, public, high-quality education, as opposed to education as a profit-making business. They were protesting the lack of regulation of the system as a whole and the high fees they had to pay – as well as the heavy debt they incurred – regardless of whether they were studying at public or private educational institutions. Ultimately, they were demanding radical reform of the educational institutional framework created by the military government in 1981 and endorsed on the last day of military rule in March 1990 by the Constitutional Organic Law on Education. The tame amendments made to this law in 2009, well after the massive two-month mobilization of secondary school students in 2006, did not incorporate any of the students’ demands. For this reason, the student movement of 2011 has been marked by strong student mistrust of institutional forms and of every mechanism of dialogue and negotiation with the government and Congress. The vast majority of young Chileans are not registered as voters, and the political forces that control the Executive and Congress (and, by extension, other institutions) do not represent their interests. The only political party to take a relevant part in the student movement was the Communist Party (and through only one of its leaders at that), which met with resounding defeat in the elections held late in 2011. As for the case of Aysén, the leaders of the movement were either independent or belonged to the government parties, but this did not prevent serious confrontations with the Executive. Therefore, it is safe to say that for the first time, collective movements appear to have broken away from political leaders and become extremely zealous about their autonomy. This reemergence of social expression confirms my thesis about the distance between politics and society under the governance rules of the last twenty years.4 Resolution of the conflicts generated by the new citizen movements will require a new cycle of political reforms to modify the initial design of the transition – which was functional in terms of political stability and economic continuity – and incorporate new forms of citizen participation. This change will not occur easily. It has few precedents in the political history of the republic, and besides, the new sociopolitical movement capable of undertaking such reform is still to be born. This implies a potential for radicalization and isolation of citizen movements if there is no relevant response to their demands. An alternative possibility is that a new social majority, different from and larger than the one that made the transition possible, will solve the legitimacy crisis of the present-day Chilean institutional framework. A lengthy political cycle has come to an end. We do not know what will come next, but all indications are that the future will be very different from what we have known until now.

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Notes 1. These are partial results of new evidence obtained in two research projects directed by the author. See the case studies in E. Arriagada (2012) and Delamaza and Flores (2012). A comparative approach to the three cases appears in Delamaza et al. (2012). 2. http://www.adimark.cl/es/index.asp. Retrieved 2 December 2012. 3. In the first round Bachelet got 48 percent of the votes and in the second one 62 per cent. 4. Nevertheless it is need to say that in the legislative elections of December 2013 four student’s movement leaders were elected: two from the Communist Party and two from new political movements: Revolución Democrática and Izquierda Autónoma (Democratic Revolution and Autonomous Left). A fifth elected was Iván Fuentes, leader of the Aysén movement, supported by the DC. At the same time Bachelet’s second government initiated two important political reforms, tax and education, and promises a third one, a new Political Constitutional Chart.

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Index

A agrarian reform, 67–70, 73–74 Aguirre Cerda, Pedro, 70 Alessandri, Arturo, 68, 75 Alessandri, Jorge, 68, 70 Allende, Salvador, 67, 216, 224 Alianza por Chile, 61, 212, 221 Alvear, Soledad, 227, 241 Aylwin, Patricio, 98, 114, 123, 211, 215, 219, 223, 227–28, 237, 241, 243 B Bachelet, Michelle, 37, 94, 96, 99, 107, 110, 117, 122–24, 129, 131–34, 146, 162, 173, 177–79, 199, 221, 225, 228, 268 Bolivia, 6, 20, 64, 121, 143, 165, 259–60 Bolsa Familia, 10, 49 Brazil, 6, 10, 26, 35–38, 43, 48–52, 68, 87, 93, 137, 145, 155, 250, 259–61 C Catholic University, 69, 70, 78, 218–20 Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT), 74, 171, 248, 268 Chicago Boys, 78, 213, 225 Chile Solidario, 49, 99, 106–8, 113, 125, 127–32, 156, 258 Christian Democracy (DC), 68, 71, 74, 79, 118, 214–22, 229–32, 234–35, 237–38, 241, 266 citizen participation, 11–19, 31–49, 51, 60, 102, 108–10, 134–147, 155, 58, 174, 178, 181–85, 192, 203–5, 224, 242, 251–59, 263 agenda of, 113, 131 and health, 122, 124, 126–27 forms of, 137, 269 in Chile, 244

Law on Associations and, 10, 108, 154, 176 mechanisms for, 8, 49, 155, 191 (see also participative mechanisms) and public policy, 4, 8, 17, 43, 51, 57 (see also public policy: and citizen participation) promotion of, 12, 173, 175, 257 citizenship, 10, 22–27, 58, 61, 108, 111, 119–21, 131–34, 151, 184–95, 200–202, 249–51, 257, 261 active, 21, 24, 130, 145, 258 and participation, 9, 249 concept of, 6, 47, 105 exercise of, 24, 195 expansion of, 36–37, 45, 104 notion of, 334, 104, 107, 130, 132, 258 regime of, 35, 108, 111 social, 4, 8 10, 33, 111, 130 civil society action, 48, 82, 102, 119, 150, 184, 188–89 actors of, 67, 119, 186, 188–91, 197, 199, 205, 217, 238, 254–57 Chilean, 3, 63–64, 71, 73, 75–76, 80, 89, 93, 157, 167, 196, 214, 246, 255, 263 and citizenship, 21, 111 civil society organizations (CSO) (organized civil society), 14, 24–26, 30–31, 35, 57, 69, 73–74, 81–82, 94, 116, 118, 148–151, 169, 171, 173, 177, 180, 196, 206, 209, 212, 230–31, 236–37, 243, 245, 252, 255–56 constitution of, 66, 68, 71, 80, 217, 254, 262 demands of, 83, 125

– 292 –

I n d ex

and democracy, 18, 21, 25, 42, 45, 83, 209 depoliticization of, 84, 93, 155, 164–67 development of, 13–14, 29, 127, 209 dynamics of, 22, 56, 87, 103, 207 elites and, 210, 215, 266 emergence of, 23, 27, 69 fragmentation of, 3, 41, 63, 89, 108, 111, 115, 167, 195, 205, 264 from civil society to state, 9, 14, 207, 210, 212–13, 225, 230–31, 233, 237, 239, 246 Fund for the Strengthening of, 153, 154, 175, 180 hetereogeneity of, 23, 40, 157, 203, 252, 256 and innovation, 4, 133–34, 144, 148, 155 in the local space, 49, 140, 183, 260 leaders, 15, 28, 214–15, 230, 237, 240, 246–47, 254 mobilization of, 40, 81, 84, 87, 154, 212, 254 and NGOs, 25, 38, 116, 188 (see also NGOs) notion of, 24–25, 27–28, 40, 44, 61, 63, 102, 115, 183, 206–7, 230, 252 participation in public policies and public sphere, 6, 12, 15, 17, 20–21, 28, 31, 40–43, 56, 59, 106–7, 110, 113–14, 117, 127, 135–36, 149–50, 153–54, 157, 173, 176, 179, 181, 184, 202, 240–45, 249, 251, 255, 258, 261 and political parties, 67, 233 and political projects, 13, 26–27, 40, 75, 87, 103, 115, 214, 267 and private sector (market), 45, 54 reconstitution of, 80–81, 254 return to, 213, 215, 235–36, 266 role, 5, 28, 89, 103, 108, 243 and the state, 4, 23–28, 31–32, 37–38, 43, 46–49, 54, 57, 63, 69, 83–84, 95, 102–3, 108, 112, 147, 149–52, 155, 182–83, 186, 192, 194, 197– 98, 205, 207, 209–10, 243, 247, 249, 254, 256–58, 262 strengthen, 12–13, 27–28, 99, 111, 146, 154–57, 174–78, 182, 189, 210, 226, 244 clientelism, 49, 56, 59–60, 68, 103, 142, 225

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293

Communist Party (PC), 66, 75, 80–81, 165, 210–11, 215–17, 269 Concertación (de Partidos por la Democracia), 1, 6, 95, 127–28, 161–62, 173, 178–79, 215–16, 218, 224, 235, 242, 250, 268 administrations, 12, 84, 93–94, 108, 128, 139, 161, 211, 235 candidates of, 161–62 desertions of, 85, 161, 216 governments, 128, 161, 171, 174, 179, 199, 207, 209, 213, 218, 224, 226–28, 230, 233–36, 247, 258 leaders of, 128, 177, 206, 218, 222, 231, 233, 240 parties, 37, 214, 216, 229, 231, 241, 248 periods of, 93 programatic issues of, 127, 199, 234, 240 Congress (Chilean), 2–3, 32, 37, 46, 67–68, 75, 79, 84–85, 90–91, 98, 100, 112, 116– 20, 123, 135, 140, 152, 161, 173–77, 180–81, 198, 200, 202, 211, 216–26, 238, 240, 243, 245, 247–53, 259, 265– 69. See also Parliament. Constitutional (political constitution) amendments and reforms, 1, 6, 10, 46, 85, 140, 161, 177, 217, 240–41 constituent assembly, 6, 162, 215 Constitution of 1833, 64–65, 68 Constitution of 1925, 68, 75, 139 Constitution of 1980, 1, 15, 77, 79, 81, 84–85, 105, 130, 140, 215, 240–42, 245, 253–54 continuity, 2, 250 Court, 79, 84, 117, 199, 245 debate in Chile, 11, 66 framework, 3, 46, 83–85, 211, 217 new constitution, 161–62, 217 Organic Laws, 33, 107, 269 recognition of indigenous people, 121 regimes in Latin America, 5, 6, 20 safeguards, 83, 208, 242, 250 Corporación de Fomento de la Producción (CORFO), 70, 113 D Dagnino, Evelina, 27–28, 40, 207 Dahl, Robert, 5, 250 decentralization, 52, 58, 93, 130, 136–41, 146–47, 174, 224, 260

2 94

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democracy Chilean, 18, 63, 89, 98, 105 Christian Democracy (DC), 68, 71, 74, 79, 118, 206, 214–22, 227–38, 247, 266, 270 in Latin America, 7, 9, 17, 58 low intensity, 27, 108, 141, 256 participative, 4, 9, 10 quality of, 7, 15, 19, 61, 250 E El Mercurio, 73, 84, 86, 103, 200, 202, 216–20 F Ficha CAS, 129, 131 Frei Montalva, Eduardo, 70, 74, 113, 148, 216, 224 Frei Ruiz Tagle, Eduardo, 98, 113–14, 123, 12, 161–62, 171, 180, 198, 222, 228 G governance, 2–4, 7, 9, 12, 17, 30, 36, 45–48, 65, 85, 87, 101, 104, 108, 116, 161–62, 180, 184, 186, 190–92, 194–95, 209, 238–39, 243, 253–54, 260, 262, 265–69 challenges of, 18–21, 42 concept (notion) of, 2, 4, 7, 31, 37, 61, 238, 251 crisis of, 44, 103 debate on, 8, 13 and democracy, 7, 15–18 democratic, 3–4, 8, 30–31, 42, 61, 63, 165, 182, 249, 251, 258 dimensions of, 28, 186–190 hypergovernance, 8, 87, 242 impacts on, 186–191, 194–95 methods of, 187, 189, 192 model, 8, 13–14, 27, 104, 120, 137, 140, 147, 162, 173, 199, 202, 205–6, 210, 246, 251, 253, 260–61, 266, 268 modern, 46, 158 participation in, 3, 173, 176–78, 184, 189, 192 proximity, 33, 48, 53–54 ungovernance, 7 See also under public policy Guzmán, Jaime, 78, 219

H health reform, 107, 112, 133 Plan AUGE, 99, 100, 112, 135, 170 human rights, 25, 40, 79–82, 111, 199–200, 212, 215, 217 I Ibáñez del Campo, Carlos, 68, 70 Independent Democrat Union Party (UDI), 74, 78, 86, 162, 202, 217, 219–20 indigenous movement, 74, 116, 120–24, 259. See also Mapuche. interface, 31, 37, 43, 46–47, 60–61, 107, 112, 118, 137, 197, 205, 257–58, 266 L Lagos, Ricardo, 1, 94, 99, 107, 110–11, 122–23, 131, 155, 171, 174–76, 212, 216, 225, 227–29, 232, 235, 239 local administration, 141–42, 162 (see also municipalities) innovation, 124, 143, 183, 187, 259 (see also under public policy) M Mapuche, 64, 74, 120–24. See also indigenous movement. Marshall, Thomas Humphrey, 5, 10, 22 municipalities (Chilean), 48, 51, 77, 102, 109–12, 118, 128–31, 137–54, 167, 177, 183, 188, 192, 195, 206, 242, 258, 260– 61. See also local: administration. N National Renovation Party (RN), 162, 217, 219–21, 266 NGOs, 37–38, 56, 79, 82, 104, 116, 118, 126, 146, 151–54, 168, 175, 179, 183, 188, 192, 197, 202, 213–14, 222, 230– 31, 238–39, 254 and the church, 244 development, 39, 49, 53, 106, 150, 183, 238 international, 25, 198, 213 leaders, 153, 200, 210, 230, 232–33, 248 in the 1980s, 102, 110, 118, 125–26, 172, 214, 233–35 nongovernmental actors, 58, 60, 126

Index

professional, 212, 246 and public policy, 41, 192, 196, 200, 215, 228, 236, 243–46, 255 See also under civil society P Parliament (Chilean), 68, 120–21, 163, 174, 178, 194, 202, 226, 229, 231, 235, 241– 42, 245. See also Congress (Chilean) participative mechanisms, 8, 10. See citizen participation: mechanisms for. participatory approach, 24, 37 budget, 22, 43–44, 47–48, 51, 59, 137, 143, 145–46 democracy, 20–21, 24, 36, 41–43, 61, 251 (see also democracy: participative) initiatives, 157, 165, 194, 207 institutions, 29, 42, 133, 180, 258, 267 policies, 17, 24, 42, 110, 178 (see also citizen participation: and public policy) processes, 35, 126, 191, 264 Party for Democracy (PPD) 211, 216–19, 226, 229, 231–32, 238–41, 244 Peru, 6, 10, 38, 51–52, 64, 90, 143, 146, 167, 210, 260 Pinochet, Augusto, 1–3, 68, 71, 77–81, 83, 85, 87, 89, 100, 106, 122, 121, 164, 199, 211, 215–17, 220, 241–42, 253, 256. 258, 266 Piñera, Sebastián, 86, 100, 114, 123, 131– 32, 146, 148, 161–62, 177, 216, 220–21, 226, 266 political elite, 9, 18, 161, 199–201, 208, 217, 221, 231, 233, 239, 246–48, 253, 266 Chilean, 62, 178 constitution of, 14–15 and economic elite, 73, 203 new, 83, 205, 209, 215–18, 236 reconfiguration of, 94, 210, 218, 236 reproduction of, 251, 266 techno-political, 223–24, 266–67 Popular Front, 66, 70 populism, 34, 88–89 Portales, Diego, 64, 68, 87 poverty anti-poverty policies, 49, 51, 99, 127– 32, 148, 258

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295

extreme, 99, 111, 127, 129 Foundation to Overcoming, 113, 123, 150–55, 181, 258 line, 12, 14, 95, 156 National Program to Overcoming, 98, 107, 127, 153 reduction in Chile, 2–6, 12, 95–97 public policy, 2, 22, 24, 28–33 agenda, 10, 12, 40, 110, 117, 143, 268 and citizen participation, 7–8, 15, 22, 28, 34–38, 42–45, 51, 57, 192, 54, 136, 157, 173, 188, 204, 249–52, 260–68 (see also participatory: policies) cycle of, 37, 48, 126, 157, 176, 205, 260, 263 and democratic process, 19, 31, 42–43, 155, 194 design and formulation of, 17, 21, 43, 48, 118, 153–55, 175, 182, 184, 199, 223 focalization, 93, 258 and governance, 4, 8, 187–88, 191 (see also governance) implementation of, 9, 32, 190, 192, 222 innovation in, 104, 109, 129, 186 (see also local: innovation) management of, 10, 42 networks of, 15, 43–46, 62, 113, 126, 145–48, 184, 196–99, 206, 251, 257 rights approach, 32, 37, 99 role of, 4, 17, 251 public space, 17, 22, 26, 28, 36, 54–60, 163, 184, 189, 192, 264 R regional, 13, 29, 51, 61, 94, 100–01, 112, 133, 138–42, 145–46, 180, 182, 258, 261, 265 Regional Council (CORE) 101, 136, 140 Regional Government (GORE), 138, 140, 182 Roman Catholic Church, 72–74, 79, 81, 116, 118, 174, 218, 220, 233–34, 256 S Schumpeter, Joseph, 5, 30, 48, 61, 250 Sociedad de Fomento Fabril (SOFOFA), 70, 72

2 96

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social movement, 3, 22, 44–45, 56, 58, 60, 67, 92, 162, 204 autonomous, 74 and democratic transition, 83, 92, 111 history of, 20, 199 participation in public policies, 29, 38, 116, 119, 124–26, 157, 201–2, 245, 258 and political parties, 68, 75, 217, 245 and the state, 20, 23, 38, 118, 145, 198 social policies, 3, 6, 13, 41, 49–50, 63, 67, 71, 75, 95–98, 102–7, 126, 140, 153, 165, 172–73, 185, 194, 196, 206, 209, 250, 255,–56, 263 social policy, 4, 12, 15, 65, 71, 78, 86–87, 94–97, 104–7, 111–15, 121, 124–25, 128–32, 141, 149, 153, 155, 167, 192, 227, 243, 252, 257–58, 261–64 social programmes, 50, 57, 93, 102, 104, 126, 130, 174, 192, 195, 209, 225, 242– 45, 260, 267 Socialist Party (PS), 66, 150, 211, 215–21, 229–32, 235, 238–41, 243–45 student’s movement (Chilean), 32, 110, 118, 161, 173, 198, 202, 214, 217–18, 221, 224, 230, 232, 234, 247, 258 T think tank, 33, 79

transition, 2, 9, 15–19, 58, 63–67, 79, 86, 89, 84–98, 103–111, 116, 120, 130, 155, 163–64, 178, 198, 202, 207–8, 215–221, 226, 234, 238, 242, 245–49, 252–53, 258–62, 267, 269 agreements of, 85, 162, 198 Chilean, 3, 18, 27, 83, 86–7, 93, 174, 209, 213–14, 223–25, 254–55 designs of, 110, 116, 212, 253, 267, 269 democratic, 1–2, 6–7, 13–17, 63, 86, 89, 104, 113, 116, 158, 161, 170, 209–10, 214, 249–50, 254 negotiated, 11, 80, 82, 140, 210, 212, 250 period, 15, 85, 97–98, 114, 121, 162, 267 political, 2–3, 6, 12, 18, 54, 83, 88, 92, 104, 111, 164, 209, 213, 215, 224, 252 process, 3, 19, 58, 99, 208–12, 254, 256, 262, 289–90, 261, 266 theories of, 7, 18, 21, 42, 47 transitology, 7, 18, 42, 47 U Unidad Popular, 1, 68, 71–72, 79, 164, 215 University of Chile, 69, 72, 209