Month: September 2017

Austerity Diasporas – Households in Crisis: Austerity, Migration and Family in Portuguese London

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In today’s post Lisa Rodan introduces a series of publications on her ongoing PhD research into how Portuguese migrants understand their lives and experiences in relation to the political and social changes wrought by the 2008 financial crisis and the austerity measures that followed. For the past 12 months Lisa has been carrying out ethnographic interviews with university educated, Portuguese people in their 20s, 30s and early 40s in London, supplemented by time spent in Portugal where she has been lucky to meet some of their families. In a series of posts Lisa will share her initial analysis of some key themes arising from her fieldwork data, which she began to collect in June 2016 just after the Brexit vote. These encounters have ranged from one-off interviews to valued friendships and time spent with each other’s families. The content of the series will be a very close reading of  fieldwork notes in their raw form. Lisa welcomes any input and suggestions from interested parties.

Today’s blog, the first in a four-part series, will focus on social changes in Portugal leading up to the 2011 austerity measures. I will continue next month by reviewing how migration has shaped Portuguese history and what makes this latest wave different. Part three will look at London and how Portuguese migrants exist within it as a changing, global city in a time of European-wide austerity. Finally, I will discuss predictions for life after Brexit and how my research participants view recent positive changes in Portugal in terms of their own futures.

The following blog post is the first in the series on austerity and family – on the theme of “the changing role of the family / state in Portugal”.

“Things were going well, there was so much to do in Portugal, people were positive about their lives, their futures and then the crisis happened.” Carlos, 45

Carlos, 45, Lisbon, teacher turned IT consultant. Cecilia, 26, Vila Real, nurse. Sofia, 35, Porto, scientist[1]. Different worlds and stories but there is one thing they can all agree on- that they are a product of a ‘golden age’ of social and economic expansion in Portugal throughout the 1980s and 90s that no longer exists. These are the children of Europe, making their way in a very different world from the one their parents aspired to on their behalf. This was a world defined by prosperity, with education- via a proliferation of new universities all over the country- at its centre. The graduates of this expanded educational system form the backbone of a new middle class who found themselves with no place in the Portugal during the first decade of the 21st century.

Changing expectations is the key concept here. Values had transformed from the days of the Salazar dictatorship (1926-1974), and in the years following Portugal’s 1986 admission to the EU. Education was the key to an exciting new world where, for the first time, a ‘good life’ was accessible within Portugal, as long as one worked and studied hard for it. A long tradition of migration in search of a better standard of living, albeit through low paying jobs, was being turned on its head in favour of a prosperous future at home.

This new middle class, many of them the children of migrants who had returned to Portugal during the ‘golden years’, saw their expectations for a life different to that of their parents diminish before their eyes when austerity measures crippled the Portuguese economy in 2011. The industries worst hit were represented by thousands of unemployed graduates in nursing, teaching and construction- graduates who would now join the traditionally less educated migrant groups in seeking their fortune elsewhere.

The older ones I’ve spoken to are still angry. They remember what life was like before, although their anger has significantly diminished in the six years since the hardest repercussions of austerity were felt. However, it is the under 40s who have crossed my path more, and they define their experience as fleeing the prospect rather than experience of unemployment or stagnant careers. Expectations have once again changed in the ten years following the financial crash and again and again I am confronted by stoicism, a confidence in their ability as Europeans to find a way around the challenges of Brexit, but most of all a hope for the future rooted in trust in the same educational capital that prompted them to seek a world away from family and friends back home.

These graduates in their 20s and 30s encompass the values of a generation raised with Erasmus exchanges, travel opportunities and an affinity for the English language that, they explain, contrasts them to their parents, whose clinging to job security above all else is alien to what they have been brought up to believe. Nevertheless, the two sets of values are inexorably linked, not just through the obvious affective family bonds but through ongoing support networks. These networks are both financial, allowing young people to undertake internships, language classes or simply the space to save and figure out what to do next, and emotional, communication technology offering an opportunity for transnational connectivity in a way hitherto unexperienced by previous generations of migrants.

But what are the main differences between the EU generation in London and their parents, the children of the dictatorship? The former overwhelmingly present their experience as providing hope, meaning and pride through success (or the potential to succeed) in a career which is both internationally transferable and offers recognition of the individual’s talents. The irony at work here is the root of such hopes in the earlier prosperity wrought by neoliberal expansion which could only temporarily mask the inability of the economic and political framework of periphery countries to support the excesses of global finance and failures of the monetary union. What we are seeing now are the social repercussions of expectations of access to global consumerist comforts and existential fulfilment without the need to migrate. For many, this is now only attainable through planning a future outside Portugal.

Those Portuguese who recall pre-EU days defined by lack of both consumerism and the welfare state claim the younger generation don’t know the truth of how hard life can be and undervalue security. Those who have migrated and remained abroad describe their home country lovingly but as being devoid of opportunities befitting their qualifications and experience- a country mired in a system based on nepotism that undermined ‘EU values’ of efficiency, prosperity and merit. The young people I have spoken to refer to a favours system based on pre-revolution mentalities where contacts, rather than ability, are the key to getting ahead and have led to a country stuck in the past, where aspirational and intelligent young people migrate, leaving the same old names in charge.

Lisa Rodan is a third year PhD student in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent where she is working with three colleagues on an ESRC funded project entitled Household Survival in Crisis: Austerity and Relatedness in Greece and Portugal.

[1] All names have been changed

Popular Democracy – Response by Adrian Bua

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In this post Adrian Bua continues CURA’s third book debate by replying to Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Ernesto Ganuza’s first post outlining the argument in their recent book “Popular Democracy: the Paradox of Participation”.

Popular Democracy deals with an important question for contemporary debates on democratisation – what is the democratic potential of participatory governance in a context of deepening neo-liberalism? To answer this the book develops a history of changes in public administration theory and practice, and then focuses specifically on the origins and travel of Participatory Budgeting (PB) from Porto Alegre in Brazil to Cordoba in Europe and Chicago in North America. In doing so, the authors draw on years of research into participatory governance including ethnographies in the European and North American case studies.

On one hand, Popular Democracy tells a story of the neo-liberal usurpation of what was originally a radical and innovative attempt to revive the socialist project in the context of disillusionment with the pseudo-socialist regimes of Eastern Europe and elsewhere. However, as is clear from the author’s first post, as PB travelled the globe, it became disconnected from its original attempt to provide a collective space for the pursuit of distributive justice, to one oriented towards the individual expression of preferences (for an overview of this process of disconnection see here). On the other hand, the book also tells a more positive story about possibilities opened up by PB. In this post I invite the authors to elaborate upon the implications of their arguments for (a) the potential and limits of institutional design, and (b) the relationship between social struggle and participatory governance, and the role of the former in generating opportunities for empowerment.

First, a key argument of the book is that institutional design matters. Thus, as Ernesto and Gianpaolo argue in their initial entry, if participation is to be a genuinely democratising force, it should be clearly linked to binding decisions of state administration, which itself must adopt a participatory ‘modus operandi’  to accommodate participatory inputs. For reasons I won’t repeat here, but have summarised in another review, this was achieved in Porto Alegre – which turns minds to the claim that processes and institutions can be designed by elites to empower citizens. This is a key tenet of “top-down democratisation”.  I would like to ask the authors, firstly, to what extent is success down to the technicalities of getting the institutional design “right”, or is it more to do with politics? The second question is about how far institutional design can go – to what extent can a well-designed Participatory Budget influence fundamental questions about political economy, including how resources are distributed; where economic power lies? The challenge here might be that there is space for participatory governance in times of plenty, but it hits the buffers when resources are scarce and there is more conflict over both the size of budgets and distribution.

International research into collaborative governance led by us at CURA broaches the question of what happens to collaborative practice and ideology during capitalist busts – in times such as the present one, of low growth and austerity. Our cases vary. To give two examples, in the UK it is clear that participatory governance has lost the normative power it once had amongst local state actors. It has become a tool for the local state to manage the consequences of, and adapt to, austerity and scarcity – a far cry away from the empowering and democratising claims associated with it in earlier times. However, in Barcelona, municipal government is experimenting with radicalised forms of participatory governance. Although hopeful, this experiment is severely limited. It is a crosscurrent, even if a strong one, to a hostile Spanish state which continues to deepen neo-liberalism. Still, the fact that such experiments are taking place in various Spanish cities indicates a more generalised ambition for a more participatory democracy and an alternative, more socially just, political economy.

The experience in Barcelona, and Spain more broadly, is rooted in the oppositional and pre-figurative politics of post-crash social movements based around the 15-M demonstrations. The influence of PB upon these social movements is alluded to in the book, which argues that despite their clear limitations, the experience of US and Spanish PB ignited a radicalism which lived on in mass mobilisations such as occupy in the US and the indignados in Spain. It evoked new political subjects and expanded social imaginaries beyond the boundaries of representation in ways that contributed to the alternatives proposed by these movements. This is an interesting argument because critics of elite democracy promotion (or ‘governance-driven democratisation’ for others) argue that it forecloses, and diverts energy away from, more critical and bottom up forms of participation and struggle which have historically been perhaps the main democratising force. Given the different outcomes observed in our own research, at which point, and why, do the authors think that the demands they made translated into this substantive reform agenda within formal political institutions? At the level of direct participants this seems counter-intuitive – surely, taking part in the kinds of individualised, zero-sum processes the authors describe in their initial post must be a disappointing and disempowering experience? I would like to ask the authors to expand on how is it that more radical and democratic subjects emerge from this, particularly in light of the much-discussed diminution out of the Porto-Alegre model?

This question brings me to my final point.  Ernesto and Gianpaolo’s account points to a non-dichotomous, even complementary, relationship between top-down and bottom-up spaces of participation. Municipal governments like Barcelona en Comu and Ahora Madrid evidence this kind of relationship – they are rooted in grassroots oppositional politics, but now engage in institutional design and policy making. Their move into the state means a move “from protest to proposition”. At the end of the book the authors argue that the challenge for the future is to make the most of the critical energies summoned by participatory experiences like PB. I would like to close by asking what advice the authors have for radical administrations currently experimenting with participatory governance.  Do they think that this participatory milieu in urban governance can be shored up and avoid neo-liberal co-option – and what is the role, if any, for critical and oppositional forms of participation and social struggle in this?

One respondent from the fieldwork in Barcelona (see p. 17 here), put the contextual challenges faced by this project well:

“The tools are very tiny and the expectations are great. How can the City Council of a city that is globally located on the map of the relevant cities in the world, which attracts migratory flows, capital flows… how can it manage a power that it does not have? The City Council does not have the power of the city. It is a very small portion of power”.

Adrian Bua is a researcher and a core member of CURA.

Urban Futures Podcast – Tackling City Decline with Andy Pike

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In this second edition of the Urban Futures podcast we talk to Andy Pike, Professor of Local and Regional Development and Director of the Centre for Urban and Regional Development studies, at Newcastle University about recent work he and his colleagues have carried out into city decline in the UK.

You can download the podcast on soundcloud and itunes.

The Declining Cities report, analyses city decline in the UK and reviews international experience for learning. The research seeks to address a gap in urban research agendas that have tended to focus on successful, thriving cities rather than the situation of and policies needed in cities coping with relative decline. The report develops an index of city decline and a typology of relatively declining cities which is used to measure the scale and nature of city decline in the UK. It also includes a review of UK and international literature on policy responses to city decline as well as an assessment of the implications of the evidence for declining UK cities.