Browsing by Subject "Latin America"

There is a growing number of people going through deconstructive faith experiences in Latin American Pentecostal churches. Factors like globalization, individualism, high educational rates, the post-colonial experience of the Latin American church, fundamentalism, connectivity, and others contribute to accelerate this trend and shape the environment of faith communities that find themselves amongst increasingly postmodern tendencies. Most pastors are either ignoring the situation, rejecting deconstruction all together, or embracing it blindly. I propose a pastoral response from a distinctively Pentecostal perspective that engages deconstruction of faith critically, while staying open to conceive it as a tool for Spirit-led discipleship that can produce a more mature faith.I examine six affirmations made by Jacques Derrida that explain deconstruction as something that happens, happens from the inside, is not a method, is call, is a yes to the other, and is affirmative of institutions. Each of these is contrasted with specific examples of cultural changes in Costa Rica, Peter’s experience at the house of Cornelius, and a Latin American Pentecostal perspective. By exploring a variety of authors, I have identified different tools that can help Latin American Pentecostal pastors to better engage in discipleship practices that can produce mature believers in a postmodern era.

This dissertation addresses the effect of informality on three key dimensions: social policy

preferences, partisan attachments, and citizen-politician linkages. Many Latin American

labor markets have large informal sectors where workers are not covered by formal labor

arrangements and earn meager wages, as well as truncated social security systems that

target benefits to the well-off at the expense of the poor.

I first analyze how economic informality conditions voters preferences regarding the redistributive role of the state (Chapter 3). I examine the effect of labor informality on individual preferences over contribution-based programs (such as social security and public health insurance) and means-tested programs (such as CCTs). The analysis of micro-level data for both Latin America and Mexico suggests that, counterintuitively, voters in the informal sector are no more likely to support increased spending in social security and welfare institutions. On the contrary, labor market outsiders tend to favor only social programs with no eligibility requirements.

In the second part of the project, I study patterns of party identication among citizens

in the informal sector (Chapter 4). I argue that the low utility derived from social policies

and the obstacles to class identity formation contribute to depress partisan attachments.

The findings indicate that economic informality weakens ideological attachments between

voters and political parties. Results also show that outsiders trust less in political parties.

Finally, I analyze how economic informality conditions linkages between citizens and

politicians (Chapter 5). I theorize that given the characteristics of the members in the

informal sector, political parties will have incentives to approach them using

clientelistic offers and vote-buying strategies. I find that voters in the informal sector are particularly sensitive to some types of clientelistic offers. Furthermore, labor market outsiders seem to be more likely to switch their vote toward candidates offering private benefits.

Despite global improvements in maternal mortality rates, preventable maternal deaths are still an issue for many populations. Indigenous populations, especially those in Latin America, often do not utilize delivery services for a number of reasons, not the least of which are cultural beliefs, geographic challenges, and ability to pay for services. The primary objective of this study is to examine the birth location and birth attendance trends across time of Amazonian Indigenous women compared to women of Andean Highland decent. Additionally, the study aims to compare the education levels, urban status, and income levels of these populations. This analysis uses survey data from families in Amarakaeri Communal Reserve in Amazonian Peru. Bivariate analysis and multivariate logistic regression were used to examine birth location and birth attendance across time. Since 1990, Amazonian Indigenous women in the study sample are increasingly giving birth at health posts in the attendance of nurses, but most still elect to give birth at home with a relative as an attendant. From this, it is concluded that women of Amazonian Indigenous decent are increasingly seeking out skilled birth attendants, but barriers to utilization may remain. Further descriptive research is necessary to ascertain the reasons why Amazonian Indigenous women still prefer giving birth at home, and additional modeling is necessary to determine the effects of potential influencing variables, such as urban status, education levels, and income levels.

Background: Peru had more COVID-related deaths per capita than any other country. Given its relative wealth as an Upper Middle Income Country, Peru did not receive many COVID vaccine donations through COVAX, and challenges directly negotiating for vaccines with pharmaceutical companies delayed Peru’s initial response. However, once vaccines were procured, Peru successfully initiated wide-spread vaccination campaigns. This study was done to understand Peru’s unique COVID challenges and successes and aims to explore barriers and enablers of Peru’s pandemic response to offer lessons for the scale-up of vaccinations, health innovations, and pandemic response capacity in Peru, Latin America, and globally. Methods: 31 semi-structured in- depth interviews were conducted in Lima, Peru with 35 individuals from public, private, academia, healthcare, and civil society sectors that worked in diverse geographies across Peru. Participants were recruited through purposeful and snowball sampling via WhatsApp, based on the inclusion criteria of being involved in Peru’s COVID-19 pandemic response and preparedness (i.e., with vaccine procurement and distribution, emergency health innovations, and community responses). Ethics approval was received from the Duke University Campus Institutional Review Board. Written and verbal consent was obtained from participants before each interview. A qualitative content analysis is currently being done on the interview transcripts. Afterwards a force field analysis will be applied to understand which factors most negatively and positively impacted Peru’s pandemic response capacity. Results: Preliminary findings from the 31 interviews indicate political instability, cross-sector competition, a fragmented health system, and limited medical resource manufacturing and regulations limited Peru’s pandemic response. However, previous experience with vaccination campaigns, community-based support, and cross-sector collaboration influenced effective COVID vaccine distribution and vaccination levels. Conclusion: Peru experienced some small-scale effective COVID response measures, but these were overshadowed by large-scale systemic and political issues, hindering Peru’s pandemic response. This study explores economic, cultural, political, and social factors that impacted Peru’s COVID response, and includes diverse perspectives from various sectors and geographies, increasing the validity and generalizability of findings. However, future studies should include equal representation of sectors and geographies, as most participants represent the public sector and worked in Lima.

My dissertation, “Fictional Timing: Neoliberalism and Time in the Contemporary Latin American Novel”, studies recent developments in the Latin American novel to better understand the relation between economics and time in contemporary Latin America. I analyze Alberto Fuguet’s Las películas de mi vida (2002) Jorge Volpi’s No sera la Tierra (2006), Pedro Mairal’s El año del desierto (2005), Diamela Eltit’s Los trabajadores de la muerte (1998) and Mano de obra (2002), as well as Barataria (volume 1 published in 2012, volume 2 published in 2013) by Juan López Bauzá, to argue that at the heart of the Latin American novel’s examination of the shifting signifier that is “neoliberalism” (Brown 20), we find a return to matters of time and temporality. Since the early 1970s, Latin America has provided a site for political experiments in reshaping the dynamics between the social and economic spheres, thus between citizens and the market. The region became the third great stage for the neoliberal model, as well as the first systematic experiment of neoliberal reforms during Pinochet’s dictatorship (Valencia 478). It has become all but commonplace to credit changes in technology, debt reforms, privatization, austerity, and global markets for a distinctively contemporary experience of time as the acceleration and compression of lived experience that ensures a predictable future (Harvey 1989; Lazzarato 2012). While taking this now commonplace view into account, I conclude that contemporary Latin American novels insist on the heterogeneity of temporal experiences. Each chapter explores these diverse times at work within neoliberal rationality, discourses, practices, and subjectivities.

While property rights-based management is theoretically purported enhance economic efficiency in fisheries by reducing over-capitalization and extending fishing seasons, the social and economic empirical outcomes are less comprehensively understood. International adoption of rights-based management to manage pollution, fisheries, and water-quality increasingly modifies these management approaches to achieve a wider set of policy goals. Argentina, in particular, interjected economic, social, and ecological objectives into a fisheries individual and transferable quota (ITQ) program through a use-it-or-lose-it penalty, a unidirectional quota transfer restriction between coastal and offshore processing vessels, and a social quota reserve.

The present dissertation utilizes historical data, including legislative documents from 1998 to 2016, monthly fisheries effort and landings data from 2007-2016, and annual data on quota allocation and transfers from 2010-2016, to evaluate the process through which Argentine designed its ITQ program and its social and economic outcomes.

The first chapter is an institutional analysis of the ITQ program in Argentina and lends insight to how and why configurations of rights-based managed differ across socio-economic contexts. The next two chapters build on the results of the first chapter to evaluate to what extent it achieved social and economic objectives through two specific policy modifications: a use-it-or-lose-it penalty and a social quota reserve.

In the second chapter, I develop a two-stage empirical model to evaluate how ecological and economic uncertainties influence intra-seasonal production decisions in an ITQ fishery. The results demonstrate that fresh catch fishing vessels are disproportionately impacted by this policy, relative to offshore processing fishing vessels. This unintended consequence of a policy meant to protect small and medium sized vessel owners could be due to an interaction with the unidirectional trading restriction or the substitution of fishing effort into the more lucrative shrimp fishery.

Finally, I estimate determinants of fishing vessel exit from an ITQ-regulated fishery and evaluate to what extent additional social quota allocation extends the expected lifespan of coastal, fresh catch fishing vessels in that fishery. The results demonstrate that both social quota allocation and participation in the shrimp fishery extend a fishing vessel’s participation in the ITQ-regulated hake fishery.

Together, these results suggest that policy modifications to rights-based management regimes can influence social and economic outcomes, although whether the intended outcomes are achieved depends on the heterogeneity of the fishery, the ability of fishing vessels to substitute effort into non-regulated fisheries, and macroeconomic conditions, such as fuel and export prices.

This dissertation explores the history of industrial fisheries in the Humboldt Current marine ecosystem where workers, scientists, and entrepreneurs transformed Peru and Chile into two of the top five fishing nations after World War II. As fishmeal industrialists raided the oceans for proteins to nourish chickens, hogs, and farmed fish, the global "race for fish" was marked by the clash of humanitarian goals and business interests over whether the fish should be used to ameliorate malnutrition in the developing world or extracted and their nutrients exported as mass commodities, at greater profit, as a building block for the food chain in the global North. The epicenter of the fishmeal industry in the 1960s was the port city of Chimbote, Peru, where its cultural, social, and ecological impacts were wrenching. After overfishing and a catastrophic El Niño changed the course of Peruvian fisheries in 1972, Chile came to dominate world markets by the early 1980s due to shifting marine ecologies along its coast that shaped the trajectory of the ports of Iquique and Talcahuano. As Peruvian anchoveta stocks recovered in the 1990s, new environmentalist voices--from local residents to international scientists--emerged to contest unsustainable fisheries practices. This study demonstrates how global, transnational, and translocal connections shaped Humboldt Current fisheries as people struggled to understand the complex correlation between fish populations, extractive activity, and oceanic oscillations within a changing geopolitical context.

Transnational governance has been advanced as a viable option for regulating commodities produced in emerging economies—where incapable or unwilling states may undersupply institutions requisite for overseeing supply chains consistent with the quality, safety, environmental, or social standards demanded by the global marketplace. Producers from these jurisdictions, otherwise left with few venues for securing market access and price premiums, ostensibly benefit from whatever pathways transnational actors offer to minimize barriers to entry—including voluntary certification for compliance with a panoply of public and private rules, such as those promulgated by NGOs like the Fair Trade Federation or multinational retailers like Wal-Mart. Yet, such transnational “sustainability” governance may neither be effective nor desirable. Regulatory schemes, like third-party certification, often privilege the interests of primary architects and beneficiaries—private business associations, governments, NGOs, and consumers in the global North—over regulatory targets—producers in the global South. Rather than engaging with the international marketplace via imported and externally-driven schemes, some producer groups are instead challenging existing rules and innovating homegrown institutions. These alternatives to commercialization adopt some institutional characteristics of their transnational counterparts yet deliver benefits in a manner more aligned with the needs of producers. Drawing on original empirical cases from Nicaragua and Mexico, this dissertation examines the role of domestic institutional alternatives to transnational governance in enhancing market access, environmental quality and rural livelihoods within producer communities. Unlike the more technocratic and expert-driven approaches characteristic of mainstream governance efforts, these local regulatory institutions build upon the social capital, indigenous identity, “ancestral” knowledge, and human assets of producer communities as new sources of power and legitimacy in governing agricultural commodities.

The Global South, and particularly Latin America, experienced a remarkable expansion in conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs in the last fifteen years. Although a large literature examines the effects of CCTs on human development, the political behavioral consequences remain underexplored. In the dissertation, I address this gap by analyzing the effects of CCTs on political participation and policy. I also explore the implications of these effects for human development.

My central argument is that CCTs increase political participation among beneficiaries, and both program transfers and conditionalities contribute to these positive effects. More specifically, CCTs provide beneficiaries with politically relevant resources, including civic skills and access to state officials and community leaders. These resources reduce the costs of political participation and facilitate more involvement in political activities, particularly in more demanding forms of participation. In addition, I argue that CCTs increase the private provision of local services and influence the outcomes of some non-national elections.

To test this argument, I use four main sources of data: (1) existing survey data from Latin America in 2012; (2) original survey data from Mexico in 2014; (3) experimental data from Mexico in 1998-2000; and (4) in-depth interviews and focus groups from Mexico in 2012. Multilevel models and linear regression models are used to estimate the effects of CCTs on political behavior and service provision. The in-depth interviews and focus groups help to unravel more of the causal mechanism that connects CCTs to political participation.

The evidence largely supports my argument. I find that CCTs increase participation in a wide variety of political activities, including electoral and non-electoral activities. In addition, the pathways to increased participation include improved civic skills and increased access to state officials and local leaders. Moreover, CCTs increase the private provision of sewerage services.

I conclude that CCTs have both desirable and undesirable consequences. On the one hand, CCTs increase democratic political participation, improve civic skills, reduce the distance between beneficiaries and government officials, and increase access to local services. The increased access to sewerage services creates an indirect pathway to improved human development outcomes. On the other hand, CCTs reduce the pressure on local officials to provide local services, and in some contexts contribute to electoral rewards for undeserving incumbent parties.