It's not a math problem, it's a moral problem

I passed on a job and future publication opportunity today. A local research institute wanted to contract me for a literature review (in English) of Brazilian works that deal with the relationship between civil society mobilization and service delivery. The timing of the offer was really bad, but I also couldn’t bring myself to cut out something else to make time for the assignment. Mulling over what to do brought on a rant that I am now going to reproduce here in extended form.

The subject for the review fell under a collection of comparative poli sci/development studies literature you might call “the politics of service delivery.” Once a significant focus of my undergrad reading, I have come to detest the basic assumptions and central methodologies of this body of work, as well as its inaccessibility to anyone without a degree in advanced jargon.

PSD literature starts from the basic, unstated assumption that the problems generating crappy/insufficient public services for poor citizens are essentially technocratic. We simply haven’t discovered the right combination of interventions, strategies for “scaling up” good programs, optimum mix of public-private-international partnerships, or the best institutional innovations for participation that would give better quality of life outcomes.

PSD literature further assumes that sterile academic publications with complicated pseudo-scientific methodologies - surveys, samplings, charts and regression - will discover solutions. What irks me the most reading this type of political science literature is how de-politicized it is, as if there weren’t clear disputes over power, control, rights and resources that kept public services from being adequate or effective. When I think of PSD authors I imagine a person with mid-western protestant manners too ingrained to hang out the dirty laundry in public. They know there are nasty egoistic forces at work but they would only be willing to hint at such in hushed kitchen tones. Mostly they whitewash their publications in jargon, perhaps from a desire for things to really be so sterile, or more likely, because they are so removed emotionally/practically from actual political battles that they don’t even know it to be otherwise.

Just look at the buzz-words to see what I mean. “Public-private partnerships” are tossed about as if the two entities were neutral but somehow combined become the wonder twins of poverty alleviation. Forget any discussion of how private (read: business) interests might be fundamentally opposed to meeting certain concerns of the poor, or of the incentives that governments have to pander to business interests over those of the “to be serviced” populations. Forget that between “public” and “private” there is no mention of poor people as members of any partnership. Or how about “civil society participation?” People love the term ‘civil society’ – governments, businesses, and uncritical academics – because it is stigma-less and ambiguously positive. It also conveniently prevents us from confronting the fact that big NGOs and advocacy groups both foreign and national, staffed by people who are usually not oppressed nor marginalized, dominate many of our “open democratic forums for civil society participation.” They do so in place of the people whose quality of life is actually being discussed, complicit in at least one aspect of their oppression – preventing the poor from taking control of the decisions that affect their lives. But unless you unpack what the hell “civil society” looks like in practice, you wouldn’t notice this.

Now I agree that there are instances when good intentions and public resources combine, but the promise gets lost in the bureaucracy of it all. Cases like these could use technocratic tweakings (though I still doubt the utility of producing academic papers on the subject. A few pissed off people wanting to make it better is what is needed – both inside and outside the government).

Ok, I have finished lambasting the literature on the politics of service delivery and arrive at my counter-interpretation, thanks for bearing with me…

In my last 5 months here I have realized that the most glaring social problems and instances of oppression have little to do with good intentions getting lost, technocratic and bureaucratic mix-ups, and/or a severe lack of statistical regressions. They have lot more to do with a simple refusal of those who have to treat those without with common human decency, while those not directly involved in oppression and violence nod in support or look the other way. The real problem is a deep moral failing in the body politic. Some might say it is a problem with our souls.

I’ll give an example. On Monday I participated in a protest by São Paulo’s homeless population and their allies in reaction to municipal efforts to clean up the city center. The problem with this type of “hygienic” politics, alleged the protesters, was that it failed to distinguish between trash and people. To clean up public spaces, the city was sending municipal water trucks to parks in the middle of the night to spray them down with high-powered water hoses, including the human beings sleeping there. Some homeless reported having their blankets taken and being subject to pepper-spray when police aided in the operations.

Further complaints from protesters include recent efforts to shut down some of the city’s homeless shelters, some of which were already forced to close and are now trying to re-open. In an online op-ed column criticizing the event in Brasil’s version of Times Magazine, one author dismisses a protester’s claim that the homeless “have nowhere to go” by citing the ability of these same shelters to meet demand. Frustrating enough, but I also learned directly from a man who works with São Paulo shelters that most cook their books to make it appear that people who were turned away for lack of space actually left the shelter voluntarily because they did not accept rules for curfews and no drugs.

Naming and confronting the backers of this hygienic politics was the main focus of the protest. Bearing signs and blankets painted with slogans such as “clean city, dirty conscience”, the mass marched to the buildings of several entities around Centro. At the Brazilian stock market protesters awarded a “Trophy of Hygienicizing” to a staff member; at the Merchandise & Futures Market they symbolically camped out on the distinctive blankets most homeless use; at the building of the Sub-Municipality and the headquarters of the Associação Viva o Centro (Live Centro Association – an influential business consortium) they dumped soapy water on the buildings’ the front steps to clean their dirty consciences; at city hall they repeated the water stunt and attempted to turn in their letter of demands to a mayor’s representative but were not received, being kept from reaching the front door by a circle of metal gates and security guards.

[PICTURES from CMI Brasil]
www.mediaindependente.org

(These are cartadores, workers who pick through trash for recyclables to make money. The city is also trying to run them out of Centro. Here they decked out their carts with Brazilian flags and carried the water for the protest.)

We don’t need a survey with a snowballing representative sample size to tell us what is going on here or to come up with a solution. Some people want to appropriate public space for the interest of upper-class citizens and private business, and are content to treat human beings like trash to do so. The solution is to decide this is morally reprehensible and to stop abusing homeless people. Don’t steal their blankets or spray them with hoses, and instead of closing homeless shelters, open more. That’s a good first step, is that so hard to come up with?

Or in a second example, see the part of my post on Real Parque titled “evictions.” The problem here is that a coalition of people want to kick other, impoverished people out of their shacks without regard to what might happen to them in the future. Teargas and rubber bullets if necessary. Don’t f-ing kick people out of their homes!! Buy off the landowner if he/she/it has a legitimate claim to the property (often doubtful, as Brazilian land titles and ownership histories are usually a cluster-fuck of competing swindles), but let the poor folks have a damned house.

Long story short, I passed on the literature review and spent the rest of my day visiting a collectively-built land occupation to the east of the city, watched a women who had been participating in the neighborhood movement for 3.5 years get awarded a house for her and her daughter, and I wrote this blog post. Feeling good about my decision at the moment.