The political opportunities of urban decentralisation: Mobilising local governance in Buenos Aires

Political Geography 74 (2019) 102038

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The political opportunities of urban decentralisation: Mobilising local governance in Buenos Aires

T

Sam Halvorsen Queen Mary University of London, School of Geography, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS, UK

A R T I C LE I N FO

A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Decentralisation Political opportunity Local governance Buenos aires Political parties Social movements

Decentralisation – the transfer of political, fiscal and administrative authority from centralised to local bodies has re-shaped urban governance across Latin America and much of the global south since the 1980s, yet explaining this transformation remains unclear. Much analysis points to the macro-discourses of democratisation and neoliberalism as causal factors yet these are difficult to demonstrate empirically. This paper seeks to explain how and why urban decentralisation unfolded in the case of the City of Buenos Aires (CABA) and proposes political opportunity - perceived changes in the political environment that encourage mobilisation - as a useful analytical tool for doing so. Drawing on original qualitative research, archive analysis and secondary literature this paper examines CABA between 1994 and 2017 and demonstrates the key roles of political parties and social movements in determining how and why decentralisation unfolded. The analysis is divided into three time periods, each of which represents major changes in the political environment that certain party or movement actors perceived as altering the feasibility and likely benefits of decentralisation, thus triggering their mobilisation (or demobilisation): the constitution of decentralisation and the first city government (1994–2000); grassroots demands and top-down responses to decentralisation in the wake of political crisis (2001–2007); and the institutionalisation of decentralisation during the government of the PRO political party (2007–2017). By analysing the political opportunities of decentralisation in CABA across these periods the paper provides a robust analytical approach for explaining urban decentralisation.

1. Introduction

the case of the City of Buenos Aires (CABA) and proposes political opportunity as a useful analytical tool for doing so. The paper borrows the concept of political opportunity from social movement studies (Tarrow, 2011; 1996) to refer to perceived changes in the political environment that encourage mobilisation, expanding its focus to further consider political parties. Research on decentralisation has explained how and why national governments relinquish power to local levels by examining electoral strategies of political parties (Falleti, 2010; Grindle, 2000; O'Neill, 2005), yet tends to marginalise the role of social movements and rarely examines intra-urban dynamics. Geographical literature has generated important insights into mobilisation (Miller, 2000; Nicholls et al., 2013) and is beginning to address the political implications of decentralisation (Blakeley, 2005; Wills, 2016) particularly in the context of neoliberalism and austerity (Armondi, 2017; Davies & Blanco, 2017; Featherstone, Ince, Mackinnon, Strauss, & Cumbers, 2012). The paper extends these literatures by demonstrating how, in the case study of CABA, urban decentralisation is a response to political opportunities that inform both contentious and electoral mobilisation. It argues that mobilisation is most likely when perceived changes in the political environment are expected to be conducive both

Decentralisation has re-shaped urban governance worldwide in recent decades, particularly in the global south where the transfer of political, fiscal and administrative authority from centralised to local states has emerged as a common development strategy (Beard, , Miraftab, & and Sliver, 2008; Campbell, 2003; Crook & Manor, 1998; Harriss, , Stokke, & and T, 2005). In Latin America, it has reshaped most major cities through the creation of sub-municipal structures of governance (Grin et el, 2017; Myers & Dietz, 2002). Despite its pervasiveness it is under-researched, especially at an intra-urban scale, and explaining how and why decentralisation unfolds remains unclear. Much literature highlights how decentralisation has been popularised through the macro-discourses of democratisation (Campbell, 2003; Canel, 2010; Goldfrank, 2011; Heller, 2001) and neoliberalism (Furlan, 2012; Mohan & Stokke, 2000; Nickson, 2011; Radcliffe, Laurie, & Andolina, 2002). Despite their temporal concurrence, however, it is difficult to demonstrate causal relationships between decentralisation and neoliberalism/democratisation (Eaton, 2004; Falleti, 2010). This paper seeks to explain how and why urban decentralisation unfolded in

E-mail address: [email protected]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102038 Received 26 January 2018; Received in revised form 4 June 2019; Accepted 19 June 2019 0962-6298/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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List of acronyms and frequently used spanish words

Comuna Commune (decentralised unit of intra-urban governance) CGP Centre for management and participation FREPASO The Front for a Country in Solidarity (party alliance) PJ Justicialist (Peronist) Party PRO Republican Proposal (political party) UCR Radical Civic Union (political party)

Amparo

legal appeal on grounds of violation of constitutional rights CABA Autonomous City of Buenos Aires Consejo Comunal Neighbourhood council (outside formal electoral body)

Heller, 2001; Isaac & Franke, 2000). This literature is inspiring and useful for developing ideal models for how decentralisation could lead to the deepening of democracy. Yet, as Heller (2001: 133) emphasises in his study of Kerala, South Africa and Porto Alegre, these cases decentralised through a ‘set of political and institutional opportunities’ that are ‘improbable’ for ‘most of the developing world’. There remains a need to explain how and why many cities (including most large Latin America cities), despite unfavourable institutional conditions, have decentralised and which actors are driving the process. Over the last two decades an expanding literature has sought to explain why central governments decide to relinquish powers to local levels, with Latin America a key focus given the extent of decentralising reforms. Research on decentralisation often begins by posing the dual macro-transformations of post-authoritarian democratisation and neoliberalism, which coincided with decentralisation since the 1980s, as key explanatory factors (Beard et al., 2008; Campbell, 2003; Tulchin & Selee, 2004). While the broad appeal to advocates of neoliberalism and democracy are likely to have facilitated the rapid uptake of discourses of decentralisation (see Paddison, 1999), attempts to demonstrate causal links have proved inconclusive (Falleti, 2010). Eaton’s (2004: 9) analysis of subnational institutional design in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay demonstrates that decentralisation is not unique to the contemporary period and found democratisation and neoliberalism to be ‘important but ultimately insufficient as explanations of movement along the decentralisation continuum’. More convincing explanations for decentralisation have instead pointed towards the active role of political parties. Several studies argue that decentralisation is the outcome of electoral strategies based on the expected outcomes for ruling, or oppositional, political parties (Boone, 2003; Falleti, 2010; Grindle, 2000; Resnick, 2017; Tulchin & Selee, 2004; Willis, Garman, & Haggard, 1999). O’Neill’s (2005: 18) landmark study of Andean states explains decentralisation as ‘the rational act of political parties seeking to maximize their electoral possibilities in presidential systems’, likely under a central government with weak national yet strong subnational (territorial) support combined with a long-term strategy. Analysing the electoral strategies of political parties may also explain re-centralisation in conditions where oppositional parties have strong subnational support (Eaton, 2013). Decentralisation not only informs electoral strategies but also, through administrative deconcentration, creates conditions for strengthening clientelistic, informal practices (GarcíaGuadilla, 2002; Eaton, 2006; Prud'homme, 1995) that have sustained many traditional parities in Latin American (Levitsky, , Loxton, , Van Dyck, & and Dom, 2016). Together, these studies provide robust explanations for the unintuitive move of central governments relinquishing authority, yet they pay relatively little attention to how noninstitutionalised actors (notably social movements) respond to and shape decentralisation, particularly at an intra-urban scale. Social movements can play important roles in both bringing decentralisation into force as well as shaping the subsequent forms that subnational institutions take. In some cases, social movements actively mobilise for the decentralisation of governance, demanding that central authorities relinquish their power. At a national scale, Falleti (2010) argues that social movements played pivotal roles in pushing for decentralisation in Brazil and, particularly, in Colombia where trade unions saw local governance as a means of addressing the unequal

to the implementation of decentralisation and to political actors' realisation of their goals. The paper provides an up-to-date analysis of decentralisation in CABA across 23 years (1994–2017) that draws on qualitative fieldwork carried out in 2016 in 2017 alongside an analysis of public documentation (especially the session diaries of CABA's constitutive conventions). It takes forward Anglophone engagements with decentralisation and local governance in CABA (Centner, 2012; Kanai, 2011; Rodgers, 2010) by providing new empirical data and proposing a fresh analysis that explains how and why the city's local governance structure has evolved. I argue that decentralisation in CABA not only provides insights into the possibilities (and limits) for urban participatory democracy (cf Centner, 2012; Rodgers, 2010) or contested neoliberal urban restructuring (Kanai, 2010; 2011); it also demonstrates the persistent political opportunities of local governance that mobilise multiple political actors. Since its constitution in 1996, CABA has decentralised governance to fifteen local “Comuna” councils. Although the process has been fraught with delays, frustration and a lack of ambition from central city government, it has continued to evolve and has remained firmly on the political agenda of various political actors for over twodecades, with 2011 finally seeing local councillors elected. The paper starts by examining literature on decentralisation and political opportunity in order to develop the analytical framework deployed here. The remainder of the paper analyses decentralisation in CABA between 1994 and 2017 and is divided into three periods: the constitution of decentralisation and the first city government (1994–2000); grassroots demands and top-down responses to decentralisation in the wake of political crisis (2001–2007); and the institutionalisation of decentralisation during the government of the PRO political party (2007–2017). Each period represents major changes in the political environment at either the national or urban scale from which movements and parties perceived distinct political opportunities in urban decentralisation. Although this timeframe inevitably tends towards breadth rather than depth of data, it provides an appropriate level of historical abstraction – 23 years - for making sense of how institutional life has evolved alongside shifts in political opportunity. 2. Decentralisation and political opportunity Decentralisation is a broad term that refers to the transfer of fiscal, political and/or administrative authority to local levels of governance, sometimes divided into a hierarchy of devolution (near-full transfer), delegation (partial transfer) and deconcentration (little transfer of power) (Beard et al., 2008; O’Neill, 2005; Rodríguez, 2004). It typically re-shapes urban governance in a two-step process: first by decentralising authority from central states to urban/municipal governments and, second, by transferring power to intra-urban, neighbourhood levels. The majority of literature considers the first step of decentralisation, although the potential for neighbourhood democracy and local urban governance has received attention (Burns, Hambleton, & Hoggett, 1994; Yates, 1973), particularly in Spanish (Borja, Valdes, Pozo, & Morales, 1987; 1989). Recently, literature on urban decentralisation has been dominated by studies of exceptional cases where left-wing municipal governments have combined with a well-organised civil society to experiment with participatory, local governance (Abers, 2000; Baiocchi, Heller, & Silva, 2011; Canel, 2010; Goldfrank, 2011; 2

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perceive them from different geographical vantage points (e.g. state, city, neighbourhood), although for this case study the urban scale is predominant. Although in some cases decentralisation may ostensibly be mobilised as a goal in and of itself, in most cases it is mobilised as part of a broader project such as establishing a framework for participatory democracy (in the case of movements) or enhancing electoral representation (in the case of parties). Only when decentralisation is perceived as being both viable and beneficial will it be mobilised and a failure to meet these conditions may lead to demobilisation. Nevertheless, as will be discussed, the ambiguity over the meaning of decentralisation (which often overlaps with administrative deconcentration) provides strategic room for manoeuvre that has been particularly conducive to its ongoing mobilisation by political parties in CABA (cf Paddison, 1999). Political opportunity demands both a temporally and geographically dynamic analysis of decentralisation. Although previous studies acknowledge the shifting temporal trajectory of decentralisation (see Falleti, 2010) there is greater scope for acknowledging the constitutive role of spatiality in mobilising decentralisation. Geographers have long demonstrated the importance of spatiality for informing how activists frame and mobilise their grievances as well as perceived political opportunities (Miller, 2000; Nicholls et al., 2013; Routledge, 2017). There is also a recognition that political institutions are spatially embedded which in turn shapes both political opportunities and threats for mobilisation (Miller, 2007; Purcell, 2006; Wills, 2019). Wills’ (2016) recent work on localism in the UK is particularly useful for suggesting that decentralisation is an outcome of the interplay between top-down policy and grassroots responses, with strong neighbourhood organisation more likely to mobilise the opportunities of localism. Although the historical ideologies of political parties play an important role, Wills (2016) also notes the recent adoption of localism as a strategy for imposing austerity (and subsequent attempts to counter or subvert it) (see also Armondi, 2017; Featherstone et al., 2012). Building on this geographical literature I argue that decentralisation is a dialectical process that is mobilised as a political opportunity when perceived spatio-temporal changes in the political environment are expected to provide conditions through which it can be both implemented and allow movements or parties to realise their goals (cf Halvorsen, 2017). As I demonstrate, the mobilisation of decentralisation can lead to varied and unexpected outcomes as it is institutionalised in the political environment, which in turn provide subsequent political opportunities or threats for its mobilisation by differently placed political actors.

territorial distribution of resources. Elsewhere, Kanai and OrtegaAlcazar (2009) note that social movements in Mexico DF were crucial actors in forcing intra-urban decentralisation and, as I will discuss, they played a key role in legislating decentralisation in Buenos Aires (see also Kanai, 2011). Heller’s (2001) comparative analysis further argues that social movements' demands on local states can influence the form of decentralised governance, particularly with regards to its openness to civil society (see also Abers, 2000; Goldfrank, 2011). Importantly, in all of these cases social movements mobilise urban decentralisation within the same institutional landscape as political parties and I argue that political opportunity provides a useful concept for explaining the actions of both political actors. Political opportunity is a core concept of social movement studies that was developed by North American scholars (Eisinger, 1973; Kriesi, Koopmans, Duyvendak, & Giugni, 1995; Tilly, 1978) to refer to those ‘sets of clues that encourage people to engage in contentious politics’ (Tarrow, 2011, p. 32). Although political opportunity has been deployed in diverse ways (see Della Porta & Diani, 2006; Meyer, 2004) it is particularly helpful for drawing attention to the dynamic nature of mobilisation in response to changes in the “political environment” external to social movements (Tarrow, 2011, p. 163; Kriesi et al., 1995), which are predominantly located within core political intuitions of a regime (Tilly & Tarrow, 2015). Tarrow (2011: 165–167) highlights four factors that shape political opportunity: increasing access to political systems; shifting political alignments; divided elites; and influential allies. Political opportunities only exist in so far as they are both perceived by movement actors and indicate an increased or decreased likelihood of achieving desired goals (Gamson & Meyer, 1996; Goldstone & Tilly, 2001). Political opportunity thus provides a powerful analytical tool for understanding why social movements mobilise (or demobilise) when they perceive a change in their external political environment that is expected to shape their chances of success. This paper extends work on political opportunity by deploying it as an analytical tool to explain the mobilisation of political parties alongside social movements in the context of urban decentralisation. In recent years there has been a growing acknowledgment that the mobilisation fields of both movements and parties contain significant overlap, given that they operate within the same political environment where they both compete for resources and frequently form alliances (Della Porta, Fernández, Kouki, & Mosca, 2017; Goldstone, 2003; Heaney & Rojas, 2015; McAdam & Tarrow, 2010). To date, this emerging research agenda has focused largely on the shared repertoires of contention and organisational forms between parties and movements (Almeida, 2010; Anria, 2019; Kitschelt, 2006). In addition, I argue that political opportunity provides an analytical bridge between parties and movements by directing attention to the shared political environments in which perceived changes may lead to the mobilisation or demobilisation of both contentious and electoral politics. Acknowledging existing critiques of political opportunity that warn against the concept's perpetual expansion, in which it loses its analytical bite (della Porta and Diana, 2006; Meyer, 2004), I concur with Gamson and Meyer (1996) that political opportunity must be carefully deployed in particular studies, identifying the specific variables and political contexts being investigated. As such, the contribution of this paper is to deploy political opportunity as a means for explaining the mobilisation of parties and movements specifically in regard to urban decentralisation. In this study political opportunity refers to perceived changes in the political environment that are expected to provide both an opening for implementing/deepening decentralisation and also conditions that are favourable to social movements or political parties in realising their goals through decentralisation. The political environment may refer, but is not limited, to: the stability of the party system; electoral (re) alignment; changes and divisions within ruling governments including representatives of commissions or secretaries; as well as the balance of forces between street protest and institutional politics. Such elements of the political environment are multi-scalar and political actors may

3. Research context With a population of approximately 3 million, Argentina's capital was granted political autonomy following the amended Argentine constitution of 1994, being formally constituted in 1996 with a directly elected mayor and legislature, marking the start of its ongoing decentralisation. This represented a radical break from Buenos Aires' federalisation in 1880, granting significant political and fiscal authority to the city (and, gradually, neighbourhood councils) via a newly elected city legislature and mayor (Landau, 2018; Liberman, 2017). The article provides an up-to-date analysis of decentralisation in CABA, spanning a period of twenty-three years (1994–2017), following several years of relative neglect in Spanish and Anglophone literature. I argue that this longitudinal approach is necessary to observe and analyse institutional reform in relation to shifting political strategies (Falleti, 2010). I divide the analysis into three stages, each representing particular dynamics in the evolution of decentralisation and drawing on different research methods. The first section (1994–2000) traces decentralisation from the formal agreement to decentralise CABA in 1994, through the constitutional debates and first term of its mayor (1996–1999), ending with a looming political and economic crisis and decentralisation falling off 3

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electorally consolidate their dominant standing in Buenos Aires (their traditional stronghold). Both sides appeared to win, with Menem being re-elected for a historic second term in 1995 and the UCR's Fernando de la Rúa becoming the first Jefe de Gobierno (mayor) of CABA in 1996, before going on to succeed Menem as president in 1999. Granting Buenos Aires autonomy was thus a product of the UCR's perception of a political opportunity at the national scale in the context of a weakness in the Peronist's grip on government. This generated, in turn, a new scale of political institutions in Buenos Aires that parties would be forced to quickly respond to as mayoral elections were accompanied by the election of members of the city's “constituent convention”, setting in motion an ongoing process of urban decentralisation. During the Argentine winter of 1996, 60 members of CABA's newly created legislature were put in the unprecedent position of determining the form and extent of decentralising the city's governance structures. The members represented four political parties: the centre-left coalition FREPASO (El Frente País Solidario) (25 seats); UCR (19 seats); PJ (11 seats); and new right-wing party Nueva Dirigencia (5 seats). Crucially, the assembly required a two thirds majority to pass legislation, effectively forcing FREPASO and the UCR into a decision-making alliance. A close reading of the session diaries from 19th September 1996, together with public documents from the preceding months, demonstrates the importance of perceived political opportunities for shaping parties' positions on decentralisation and determining the legislation that followed. First, although parties demonstrated consensus on the need to decentralise there was an implicit tension between ideological and pragmatic motivations. Most politicians expressed a commitment to decentralisation in order to deepen democratisation in Buenos Aires and several referenced the renowned scholar and advocate of urban decentralisation, Jordi Borja, who had been invited to CABA to share experiences from Spain (see Cosacov, 2013; Herzer, 1996). However, the session diaries also document politicians from different parties arguing that Borja could not simply be “imported” to the Buenos Aires context and, showing impressive reflexivity and honesty, that greater attention should be given to the internas (internal debates or disputes) of political parties. In the speeches of several constituent legislators there is a contradiction between their stated ideological commitment to decentralisation and their public acknowledgment of the party politics that shape and determine its outcomes. For example, a debate present throughout the session diaries is on the potential impact of decentralisation on clientelism (the exchange of material goods for political support), a common practice in both the UCR and PJ. While one PJ member claimed that decentralisation would break clientelistic practices by holding corrupt officials accountable in public elections, a FREPASO member disagreed and claimed that decentralisation is likely to bolster clientelism by creating an infrastructure to support its administration. The session diaries thus demonstrate that political parties were actively seeking to measure the expected outcomes of decentralisation on their resource basis and ongoing success in CABA. At this stage, however, all parties perceived potential electoral gains from the creation of a new scale of intra-urban institutions thus explaining why there was such as broad consensus for urban decentralisation. Second, a central point of debate was over the question of when intra-urban political decentralisation should come into force, giving us further insights into the political opportunities perceived during 1996. In an initial twist to the UCR's national strategy for decentralisation, while they won the mayoral elections with a landslide on June 30th, they simultaneously lost the elections for constituent legislators to the centre-left FREPASO. Despite mobilising under the slogan “bring politics closer to the people” (see Herzer, 1996) sectors of the UCR in CABA were growing cautious of embarking on a decentralising project that could favour the rising FREPASO and sided with Mayor De la Rúa who came out against political decentralisation, preferring instead the deconcentration of purely administrative tasks (De la Rúa, 1996: 282). As the session diaries indicate, as well as the contrasting proposals that had

the public agenda. Methodologically, this section draws on a range of public documentation, including the online archives of CABA's Commission for Decentralisation and Citizenship Participation (which contains records of proposed laws on decentralisation that were submitted over the years) and speeches and campaign documents of candidates and political parties. Most centrally, it draws on the session diaries from the CABA constitutive conventions undertaken in 1996 in which the process of decentralisation was debated.1 Across these documents the differing arguments presented on why and how decentralisation should take place were grouped by political party, in turn drawing out key themes. These were then cross referenced with existing secondary literature, mainly published in Spanish and in Argentina, that included interviews and surveys with politicians and members of civil society during the mid-1990s in CABA. Across these different sources, this section develops a spatio-temporal analysis of political party strategy to examine the political opportunities of decentralisation. The second section (2001–2007) follows the emergence of grassroots mobilisations for decentralisation and the institutional responses, including the Comuna Law (2005), ending with the removal of mayor Ibarra (2006) and local governance subsequently falling off the public agenda once again. Methodologically, this section draws on 6 in-depth interviews with key actors during this period: 4 activists (one of whom founded a core grassroots campaign promoting decentralisation) and 2 people who worked within CABA's institutions during the Ibarra administration (one for the Secretary of Decentralisation and Citizenship Participation and one administrating a local council). Interviews have been triangulated by examining decentralisation proposals submitted to CABA's legislature (available through their online archive) and the substantial secondary literature on this period (including three PhD theses: Kanai, 2008; Olivieri Alberti, 2011; Schneider, 2007). This allowed for an analysis of the unfolding political opportunities of decentralisation for both institutional and non-institutional actors. The third section (2007–2017) traces decentralisation's evolution during CABA's centre-right Propuesta Republicana (PRO) government, exploring new institutional and grassroots opportunities and threats for local governance. Methodologically, this period relies primarily on two rounds of qualitative fieldwork in CABA (2 months in 2016 and 6 months in 2017) in which I attended approximately 20 meetings in institutional (offices of local and central city government) and non-institutional (social movement meetings and neighbourhood assemblies and events) spaces of decentralisation and conducted 22 in-depth interviews with councillors – covering 12 of the city's 15 Comunas, with 9 from the ruling government and 13 from the opposition – as well as 6 interviews with neighbourhood activists and 2 with city legislators involved in decentralisation. During fieldwork I was granted extensive access to CABA's Commission for Decentralisation and Citizenship Participation as well as to the offices of local Comuna councillors. To date there are very few studies of this period of decentralisation and this section aims to bring the analysis of political opportunities up-todate, drawing out central themes for institutional and non-institutional actors. 4. Constituting decentralisation from above (1994–2000) The first step of decentralisation - granting the city autonomy from the state - was a top-down process that emerged from private negotiations between Argentina's two dominant political parties in the early 1990s: President Carlos Menem's (1989–1999) Partido Justicialista (PJ) and the official opposition Unión Civic Radical (UCR) who led the postauthoritarian transition (1983–1989). A centrepiece of these negotiations was a deal that gave Menem a constitutional amendment allowing for his re-election in return for the decentralisation of CABA. Decentralisation was a key demand of the UCR who hoped to 1

http://www.infoleg.gob.ar/basehome/constituyente_bsas/inicio.htm. 4

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ahead to the 1999 Presidential elections. This alliance was immediately re-scaled to the city and went on to win 37 out of 60 seats in CABA's first legislative elections. Nevertheless, an impending financial crisis kept parties focused on national matters as they debated who would stand for president and, when the alliance settled on Mayor De la Rúa, there was little perception of any political opportunities of intra-urban decentralisation and no parties were mobilising for its implementation. Moreover, as the UCR's De la Rúa assumed the presidency in 1999 and FREPASO's Aníbal Ibarra won CABA's 2000 mayoral elections the alliance was straining, and this reflected in the alliance's loss of majority in CABA's 2000 legislative elections. As the 2000–2001 milestone for implementing political decentralisation arrived, Mayor Ibarra lacked either the parliamentary majority or the political will to implement it and decentralisation remained firmly off the institutional agenda (Olivieri Alberti, 2011).

been previously submitted for consideration, the UCR had become split between a majority, close to De la Rúa, who favoured administrative deconcentration ahead of political decentralisation and a minority that favoured the latter. For their part, FREPASO legislators presented a unified argument for political decentralisation yet made repeated calls in the debates for it to be implemented gradually, with one member arguing that failure to do so could create ‘a city in a situation of ingovernmentability’.2 FREPASO was a new party that had yet to establish strong territorial roots in the city (Medina, 2009) and their strategy suggested they needed time to better establish themselves at a neighbourhood level before embarking on local elections (Schneider, 2007). The PJ was the only party pushing for immediate decentralisation. While they ostensibly did so due to ideological commitments, they also perceived immediate political opportunities. The PJ had governed Buenos Aires since 1989 due to the Presidential system of deciding (unelected) mayors and had built up local political networks across the city (Levitsky, 2003). There was thus a greater likelihood for the PJ's electoral success at the neighbourhood rather that city scale, due to their strong local presence yet historically weak electoral performace at the city-wide scale (Landau, 2018). Evidence for the PJ's perception of such an opportunity is visible in the session diaries through their repeated insistence on debating local electoral procedures (e.g. voting system, form and extent of local councillors) leading one FREPASO member to claim that the PJ only had electoral interests, with no ideological commitment to decentralisation. Without a majority, however, the PJ had no chance of winning legislation. The final decision hinged on the FREPASO and UCR who had met regularly prior to the constituent debate and appeared to have agreed on a compromise plan for political decentralisation to be implemented within 4–5 years’ time (i.e. during 2000–2001) that appeased all sectors of their parties. Crucially, neither party perceived an immediate opportunity in intra-urban decentralisation, yet both saw future opportunities. Further details relating to the form of decentralisation, particularly regarding the number of administrative units and elected positions, received no clear consensus and were all delegated to subsequent debate, to be decided upon by a two-thirds majority in the new city legislative body of 60 members that were voted in 1997, replacing the provisional cohort of constituent members. This left intra-urban decentralisation in a precarious and ambiguous state with no concrete plans for its implementation. In the first year of his term as mayor De la Rúa perceived this vacuum as a political opportunity to regain control over the decentralisation process and, living up to electoral promises, used executive powers to bypass the legislature and implement his own form of deconcentration by setting up 14 “centres for management and participation” (CGPs) in 1997. This allowed the UCR to undermine the 14 neighbourhood councils that had formed under the 1972 “City Law” and were largely a stronghold of informal (clientelist) PJ networks (Landau, 2014; 2018) and replace them with its own local infrastructure that could sustain the party's informal, clientelist relations without exposing them to elections (Rodríguez, 2004; Schneider, 2007). The political opportunities of decentralisation perceived by political parties should not only be understood as electoral, as is sometimes argued (O'Neill, 2005), but must also factor in the implications for informal governance of local resources (cf García-Guadilla, 2002). By early 1997 the UCR government had effectively choked off further electoral or non-electoral gains of decentralisation and as the party system stabilised in the city parties no longer perceived a political opportunity in decentralising CABA and were turning their strategic focus to the national scale. In a further twist, the national parties of FREPASO and UCR decided to form an electoral alliance in 1997, with a view

5. The grassroots and new political opportunities (2001–2007) The second step of decentralisation – bringing it into legislation – relied heavily on grassroots mobilisation from outside city government or political parties. Based on my interviews with institutional and nonintuitional actors involved in this period, alongside secondary literature, the political opportunity for grassroots mobilisation around decentralisation can be understood as arising in the intersection of two perceived changes to the political environment in Buenos Aires and Argentina. First, the grassroots demand for decentralisation emerged at a time of profound crisis for representative democracy in Argentina that saw an explosion of grassroots activism outside parties or institutions, providing a resource base from which decentralisation campaigns would mobilise. A growing national financial crisis during the late 1990s had, by the turn of the century, become a deep political crisis in the Argentine state that culminated in a popular uprising of lower and middle classes that swept across CABA on the 19th and 20th of December 2001, chanting ¡que se vayan todos (get rid of the lot of them!) (Dinerstein, 2003; Svampa & Pereyra, 2003). De la Rúa fled the Pink House by helicopter and three further presidents resigned over the next ten days. What followed was a period of intense grassroots political organising that rejected the legitimacy of the state and the entire political class and sought to develop alternative spaces for economic, cultural and social production (e.g. solidarity economies, occupied factories, grassroots media) (Chatterton, 2005; North & Huber, 2004). The most visible outcome in CABA was the spontaneous development of grassroots assemblies in barrios across the city through which urban citizens sought to practice non-hierarchical decision-making in order to govern their neighbourhoods from below (Bielsa et al., 2002; Triguboff, 2015). Two central themes in my interviews with activists involved in the decentralisation process were the perceived failures of political elites to govern in the interest of CABA's inhabitants and the capacity of ordinary citizens to transform society during this initial period of mobilisation (2001–2003). Surveys conducted with civil society organisations in the 1990s had demonstrated there was little prior grassroots interest in decentralisation (Dufour, 1999). This changed when several small neighbourhood organisations begun taking notice of the strong potential for implementing participatory democracy in CABA's 1996 constitution. Inspired by events in nearby cities such as Porto Alegre, famed for its participatory urban democracy, activists were also bolstered by the rapid growth of neighbourhood assemblies across the city. Juan told me how he helped found the “red de vecinos de Buenos Aires”, which he claimed was the first network to mobilise for the passing of a Comuna law, at a political-cultural gathering organised by the Palermo Viejo neighbourhood assembly in May 2002: ‘A group of neighbours had begun discovering that there was something interesting in [the comunas] and out of a roundtable discussion we formed a network [Red de Vecinos Buenos Aires] … our

2 ‘11a REUNIÓN - 7a SESIÓN ORDINARIA’, http://www.infoleg.gob.ar/ basehome/constituyente_bsas/inicio.htm.

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Comuna Law that would come into effect in 2005. A key institutional factor was the arrival of Roy Cortina as new director of the Commission for Decentralisation and Citizen Participation that, according to all my interview sources and secondary literature (e.g. Oliviera Alberti, 2011) was particularly conscious of the strong grassroots mobilisation and saw an opportunity in claiming a political victory by being the first person to bring decentralisation into law. As Juan told me, many activists now had the Comuna Law within sight and actively participated in the 46 neighbourhood meetings during 2004 where the Comuna Law was discussed (see Kanai, 2008). Through these and other meetings each point of the law was debated between legislators and activists until an eventual compromise was reached. In this way the 2005 Comuna Law 3 - which created 15 Comunas, replacing the 14 CGPs, with 7 elected councilors each (see Fig. 1 for map of the Comunas) - was a result of the temporal coalescing between top-down and bottom-up political opportunities, a short-lived moment that would soon fall apart. The period following the passing of the law (2005–2006) was one of intense reconfiguration, both in CABA's political institutions and among neighbourhood activists, which withered any remaining perceptions of the political opportunities of decentralisation and left a 6-year vacuum until the first elections for Comuna representatives would be held. From the perspective of CABA's government and legislature the city was entering a period of renewed crisis and transition that made decentralisation slip far off the political agenda (Heras, Córdova, & Burin, 2007). In 2005 Mayor Ibarra's government fell apart in the wake of a nightclub fire tragedy that would lead to his impeachment and the subsequent rise of the new centre-right PRO party that consolidated itself as the main urban opposition, eventually winning the mayoral elections in 2007. From the grassroots perspective, the limitations of their decentralisation movement quickly became apparent. In passing the Comuna law, activists had relied heavily on technical-legal knowledge that had produced a “juridicialisation” of grassroots politics (Triguboff, Pautasso, Garibaldi, & Morgan, 2013) which, combined with a strong middle-class profile (Kanai, 2008) and NIMBYist tendencies (Gravano, 2011), led to their alienation from the larger mobilisations of unemployed working-class movements in the poorer suburbs, weakening their wider support. Moreover, the decentralisation movement had failed to consolidate itself within a durable institutional form, missing the opportunity to construct new neighbourhood political parties, and had agreed on large Comuna sizes (approximately two hundred thousand people each), that limited their representational capacity to push for further participatory mechanisms, including budgeting, in subsequent years. Despite suffering from fragmentation, disillusionment and burn-out, however, a core group of decentralisation activists continued to mobilise and, after a filing a barrage of legal cases (known as “amparos”) demanding that the Comuna law be implemented, eventually received a positive response in 2009, with 2011 eventually set as the year for implementing local elections.

conviction was that the entire political class was against implementing the comunas …. and if we did not mobilise nothing would ever happen.’ Juan was inspired by the organisational capacity of neighbourhood groups across CABA during 2001–2002 and considered that there was sufficient energy and resources to begin mobilising for decentralisation, a theme that he and others had recently started learning about in meetings such as those in the Palermo Viejo assembly. Their ambitions were to mobilise decentralisation as a means of promoting a participatory form of democracy, as had taken hold in cities such as Porto Alegre, against the strongly representative democracy that prevailed in Argentina. In the context of a multi-scalar crisis of political representation in Argentina, Juan (and others expressed similar sentiments) was convinced that any realisation of participatory decentralisation in CABA would rely on it being mobilised by neighbourhood activists, who soon looked for clues in CABA's political institutions for how to take this forward. The second context of perceived changes in the political environment was the unfolding dynamic within CABA's government and legislature that provided favourable conditions for grassroots actors to take a lead in the process of implementing a decentralisation law (see Poggiese, 2009). After a successful election in 2000, Mayor Ibarra faced an ongoing loss of support due to a combination of party fragmentation within his coalition and the poor public image of the political alliance that had supported his electoral victory (see Mauro, 2012). In the run up to the 2003 elections Ibarra's government sought to bolster support both inside and outside institutions in the hope of earning a second term, providing clues that activists perceived as political opportunities for mobilising for decentralisation. On the one hand, the city government was demonstrating a commitment to democratising its structures through the implementation of participatory budgeting in 2002. It has been convincingly argued that Ibarra's implementation of this policy can be partly explained as a form of “crisis management” that emerged as a concession for receiving the support of a rival party leader who wanted to develop participatory budgeting as a means of building their territorial and clientelist base in CABA (Rodgers, 2010). Yet this also demonstrated that reform was possible, particularly at a time when progressive governments (as Ibarra's was understood to be) were undertaking sweeping participatory and decentralising reforms across Latin American cities (Chavez & Goldfrank, 2004). In my interview with Pablo, the “general coordinator” for participation and decentralisation (2002–2004) and responsible for implementing participatory budgeting, he claimed to have a genuine belief in the radical potential of the “participatory wave” and looked to the Worker's Party experience in Brazil as both inspiration and blueprint. Pablo and his colleagues had significant interaction with grassroots activists such as Juan and this context bolstered the aspirations of grassroots demands for decentralisation. On the other hand, activists were increasing their dialogue with CABA's political institutions, providing clues that they would be responsive to their demands. As Juan explained to me, while many involved in the assembly movements of 2002 had decided to eschew institutional politics altogether there was another faction, including those focused on decentralisation, that had opened up dialogue, first with the local CGPs (created by De la Rúa) and later with politicians from the city government, in order to generate support for specific neighbourhood projects and start probing them on following through on the pending Comuna law. At the same time, as Rossi's (2017) research with the assembly movement demonstrates, the increasingly weak position of Ibarra's government (which ended up losing the first round of votes in 2003, only gaining re-election in the second round) motivated it to seek the support of this relatively strong social movement and it thus begun reaching out to neighbourhood activists, incorporating some of their demands in the hope they would become allies. The year of 2004, following Ibarra's re-election, demonstrated an intensifying articulation between bottom-up and top-down mobilisations of decentralisation that crystallised in the eventual passing of the

6. Institutionalising political decentralisation (2007–2017) Despite the implementation of the long-awaited Comuna elections in 2011, the latest phase of decentralisation provided few political opportunities for the deepening of decentralisation and much of the Comuna Law was yet to be put into practice. Since 2007 CABA has been ruled by the centre-right PRO political party (who have also ruled at the national scale since 2015) that have provided few indications they are interested in the decentralisation agenda. This stability in the city's political institutions combined with a weak political opposition provided few opportunities to mobilise decentralisation. Moreover, the newly elected Comuna councils have had significant political and 3 http://www.buenosaires.gob.ar/areas/leg_tecnica/sin/normapop09.php? id=77544&qu.

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Fig. 1. Map of comunas and neighborhouds in CABA.

financial constraints to their authority, placing real limits on the scope of decentralisation that has led to a climate of frustration and disillusionment among many activists that have followed the process. While this stage of decentralisation has been largely determined by a lack of political opportunities and hence overall demobilisation, drawing on my fieldwork with Comuna councilors and neighbourhood activists in 2016 and 2017 I argue that there are indications that certain movement and party activists continue to perceive political opportunities for deepening decentralisation which, at minimum, has kept the project of local governance alive. First, despite their lack of financial and political autonomy, the Comunas provided a new scale of electoral mobilisation. The creation of 105 fully salaried electoral positions in CABA provided an opportunity for all parties to re-scale their electoral mobilisation to the local level. Although there is relatively little interest in Comuna elections vis-à-vis elections for CABA's legislature and mayor, many of the Comuna councilors I interviewed told me that they campaigned hard to earn their seat, often competing with colleagues from the same alliance in a first round of voting. Despite their limited political authority, all parties expressed to me a clear desire to hold Comuna positions, which give them greater clout within their electoral alliances as well as greater exposure of their party to CABA's citizens. Moreover, my interviews highlighted that, particularly among oppositional (i.e. non-PRO) candidates, politicians with a specific interest in promoting decentralisation were attracted to standing in Comuna elections. Several councilors from the Kirchnerist coalition (who supported the national centre-left government between 2003 and 2015) told me they were motivated to

stand as councilors in order to gain resources and visibility to mobilise around the decentralisation process. Their elected position allowed them to build bridges between neighbourhood activists and CABA's legislature, promoting the greater implementation of local democracy, while gaining the confidence and support of local activists in return. Second, a key space for activists mobilising decentralisation was the “consejos comunales” (neighbourhood councils), which had been created in the Comuna law as forums for neighbours and civil society to participate in local governance, including with decision-making. Although they too suffered from a lack of political authority (in some Comunas they are ignored by the local council) they have provided a new forum to hold the government accountable on decentralisation. Attending consejo meetings, I saw participants hold up and read from their copies of the Comuna Law, advocating for its implementation in practice. More importantly, I observed attendees continuing their strategic use of legal mechanisms (amparos) in order to follow through on implementing parts of the Comuna law (including, for example, the consejo's formal recognition as a decision-making body in CABA's government). The PRO have responded by a divide and rule approach that seeks to grant minimal concessions to those neighbourhood councils it considers legitimate, e.g. by allowing them the use of office space for meetings (one consejo member told me of the “great victory” of earning their own filing space in Comuna offices), while isolating and condemning those it deems have become “politicised” (the word used by several PRO councillors in interviews) by oppositional forces. This has led to the existence, in some Comunas, of two parallel consejos: an official one sanctioned by the PRO and an unofficial one consisting of 7

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interview it was renamed the “Secretary for Citizen Attention and Management”, which several oppositional councillors told me was a clear signal of the city government's dropping of the decentralisation agenda. For the foreseeable future, it is thus unclear if and where new political opportunities for decentralisation may arise yet, as CABA's history demonstrates, new opportunities for its mobilisation could reappear at any moment.

oppositional activists. Third, initial steps towards decentralisation in CABA have generated conditions for new grassroots alliances within civil society that may plant the seeds for future mobilisation. Although most urban social movements in CABA continue to mobilise their demands at the citywide or national scale (e.g. Rodríguez & Di Virgilio, 2016) the Comuna is slowly gaining symbolic weight in urban disputes. During fieldwork in 2016 I observed the appearance of a new “multi-sector” movement that mobilised against the drastic hike in utility fees (approximately 500%) caused by the Macri government's withdrawal of subsidies. Rather than mobilising the “place-frame” (Martin, 2003) of traditional and more publicly recognised barrios (neighbourhoods) (see Fig. 1), the multi-sector movement used the Comuna as their scale of representation and, drawing on experiences from 2002 to 2003, held public assemblies in order to establish links with other political organisations (including parties) from within the Comuna. The territorial boundaries and legal framework of the Comunas also allowed for new legal challenges (amparos) to be mounted against the tariff-hikes on behalf of residents. Although they were unable to prevent the tariff-hikes, Comuna-based activists were successful in delaying their implementation, forcing the government to hold public hearings and allowing some residents to successfully appeal for exemption. Such experiences inform activists' assessment of the potential benefits of decentralisation that, if combined with favourable institutional conditions, may be expected to lead to new rounds of mobilisation in the future. Overall, however, any perceptions of the political opportunities of deepening decentralisation by parties or movements have been neutralised or countered by the central PRO government which have instead pursued an agenda of administrative deconcentration and political recentralisation. The PRO has dominated elections in CABA, winning majorities (and absolute control) in nearly every Comuna as well as in the city legislature and has been reluctant to transfer political or financial authority away from its central city government. In 2011 the PRO created centrally managed neighbourhood Units of Citizen Attention, which administer key services to neighbours (from housing to marriage certificates), effectively undercutting the Comunas' financial autonomy (Triguboff, Pragier, Pautasso, Gregoric, & Garibaldi, 2012). Under Mayor Larreta (2015-present) they have also launched new participatory governance schemes (including an innovative deployment of online participatory budgeting) that bypass Comunas and are managed exclusively by central government. Grassroots movements for decentrasliation have been strongly critical of Larreta's participatory budgeting proposals that they see as hollow and largely a marketing exercise, although further investigation is required. Nevertheless, in CABA's legislature the PRO (since 2015 part of the Cambiemos alliance) have persistently blocked attempts at developing participatory decentralisation from oppositional legislators and have rigorously maintained close control of political and fiscal governance from CABA's central government. Recent evidence indicates that the PRO government is continuing to pursue a strategy of political re-centralisation. Specifically, in late 2017 the CABA government begun sending their own representatives to directly oversee and manage the affairs of the 15 Comuna councils, further undercutting their autonomy. On the whole, PRO councillors remain supportive of the central city government's strategy. During interviews, most defined their role to me as one of “management” and promoting “efficiency” in urban governance, a technocratic vision of decentralisation in line with the PRO's managerial discourse (Vommaro & Morresi, 2015). This vision is well represented in the PRO council's regular “management updates”, that highlight neighbourhood improvements such as pavement repair or removing graffiti from public space. Others, however, were more critical and Miguel, a PRO council leader, described himself to me as “a frustrated person” as his Comuna became increasingly governed by central government via CABA's Secretary for Decentralisation, which he jokingly said should be renamed the “Secretary for Centralisation”. Coincidently, not long after our

7. Conclusion Based on the case of CABA, this paper has argued that political opportunity provides an effective means of analysing how and why urban decentralisation unfolds. By providing an up-to-date analysis of CABA it has demonstrated why, despite much frustration, setback and lack of will from central city government urban decentralisation has remained on the political agenda of multiple actors. Although at the time of writing few political opportunities are perceived by most movement or party activists in the city, changes in the political environment at the urban and/or national scales can be expected to lead to higher levels of mobilisation in the future. In making this argument the paper has sought to move beyond normative analyses that concentrate either on the benefits (e.g. Campbell, 2003) or perils (e.g. Mohan & Stokke, 2000) of decentralisation and instead understand how and why its implementation has evolved in practice. Through a focus on political opportunity it has also moved beyond accounts that prioritise ideological motivations for decentralisation (e.g. Convery & Lundberg, 2017; Toubeau & Wagner, 2015) by demonstrating the pragmatic incentives in which parties or movements perceive an increased likelihood of realising their goals via decentralisation. Finally, the paper has extended recent work on the inter-relations between political parties and social movements (e.g. della Porta, 2017) by highlighting the shared political environments within which both actors mobilise. I end by drawing out two further implications of my findings for future research on the political opportunities of decentralisation. First, the paper has argued that research on urban decentralisation should pay greater attention to the unfolding political opportunities of both political parties and social movements. In so doing it has taken forward literature that examines decentralisation as an electoral strategy (Falleti, 2010; Grindle, 2000; O'Neill, 2005), emphasising that social movements are also crucial actors in mobilising decentralisation, particularly during moments when parties are in crisis and movements have greater capacity to inform urban policy. Although CABA's 1996 constitution is widely considered a model example of decentralised and participatory governance (Portas, 2006; Rabey y Martínez, 2006) the city's governments have had little interest in institutionalising political decentralisation and social movements have been crucial for implementing it. The paper also provides a counter-argument to Falleti’s (2010) seminal path-dependency model by demonstrating that both the institutional forms and political actors of decentralisation can rapidly evolve from their starting points and that although parties may see little electoral opportunity in decentralising they can have their agenda transformed by strong grassroots mobilisation (cf Kanai & OrtegaAlcazar, 2009). In sum, political opportunity allows for an analysis of decentralisation as an ongoing process involving both contentious and electoral mobilisation. Second, the paper has demonstrated that there is greater scope for explaining urban mobilisation in response to perceived changes in the institutional, political environment. Despite an impressive literature on the spatialities of mobilisation there has been a tendency in human geography to downplay the importance of institutions vis-à-vis informal politics such as social movements (Low, 2007; Wills, 2019). This paper demonstrates that institutions matter, among other reasons, due to their role in structuring mobilisation and demobilisation. Across the three periods analysed, CABA's evolving political institutions, and the composition of parties and alliances within them, have created shifting opportunities for grassroots mobilisation of decentralisation, reaching a 8

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peak in the buildup to the passing of the 2005 Comuna law when grassroots mobilisation was combined with a politically committed government (cf Goldfrank, 2011; Heller, 2001). Yet subsequent years made little progress in implementing the law as social movements were left disillusioned and disempowered by a local state with no capacity or interest in implementing political decentralisation (cf Miller, 2007). The mobilisation of decentralisation by political parties, and factions within them, in electoral and policy arenas can also be explained by examining their perceived opportunities for not only implementing but also benefiting from the outcomes of (intra)-urban decentralisation. Examining the shifting perceptions of the political, institutional environment of urban decentralisation can thus help explain cycles of mobilisation and demobilisation in which both social movements and political actors are central actors.

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