PI: Patrick Heller Co-PI: Diana Graizbord Brown University
In recent years, civil society organizations, Mexican and international experts, state bureaucrats and elected officials have made demands for, and joined in the project of state and social policy reform. This challenging task is undergirded by a powerful and mobilizing idea about the potential for "knowledge- and evidence-based" policy to democratize and modernize the bureaucracy responsible for the design and administration of social policy, and thus, to deliver more effectively, efficiently and transparently that which the citizens of this nascent democracy have been promised. The transformation toward democratic forms of social policy in Mexico remains an ongoing project through which new forms of expertise are being crafted, new relationships forged, and through which the meaning of democracy and future of development in Mexico are being negotiated.
This dissertation seeks to explain how state, expert and civil society actors involved in social policy modernization and democratization imagine and understand this political project; how the forms of expertise that occupy the epicenter of this project are produced and used in contemporary Mexican social policymaking; and what the effects of this ongoing process are on the country's welfare and development future. This qualitative case study includes ethnographic observation of the production and circulation of social policy knowledge and policy evidence; in-depth interviews with experts, civil society leaders and state officials; and analysis of key documents and media. By providing an ethnographic account of the micro-foundations that shape social policy in Mexico this research hopes to contribute to an interdisciplinary literature on emergent welfare states in the Global South; theories of state power and statecraft; and to the growing understanding of the relationship between expertise and democracy.
BROADER IMPACTS First, as social development policy moves in the direction of "evidence-based" interventions, and as science is increasingly mobilized as a tool of democracy the findings of this dissertation will prove a valuable resource for scholars and policy practitioners in the US, Mexico and throughout the Global South. Second, given the international fieldwork component this research will enhance collaboration and contribute to a cross-disciplinary, international dialogue.
Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic observation and 75 interviews this dissertation explores the processes through which expertise comes to intervene in Mexican social policy making. First, the dissertation shows how the intra-state battles over democratization resulted in a new form of expertise occupying an obligatory passage point in policy making. I argue that democratization resulted both in political openings and epistemic closure around policy. Second, I show how expertise has been extended and crystallized through the production and circulation of policy devices – in particular Mexico’s unique multi-dimensional poverty metric. I argue for the importance of an analysis that includes policy devices and instruments in the study of statecraft. Third, I show how in the context of Mexico’s democratization experts became spokespersons for democratic state reform and a highly technical form of expertise an expression of democracy. This dissertation extends the theories on the relationship between expertise and the state, and expertise and democracy. In addition it pushes sociologists to reconsider the limits and purchase of ethnography as it is extended toward a new object: circulating forms of expertise and interventions. As social development policy moves in the direction of ‘evidence-based’ interventions, and as science is increasingly mobilized as a tool of democracy and ‘good governance’, the findings of this dissertation will prove a valuable resource for scholars and policy practitioners in the US and throughout the Global South. Already, the research has been presented to interdisciplinary audiences in the US and to audiences of both scholars and practitioners in Mexico. This work promises to be useful to scholars, practitioners and civil society groups concerned with alternative ways of impacting social policy.
