Political Representation and Political Atrophy of the Metropolises: The Brazilian Case
Recent reflection about the challenges faced by the construction of entities of metropolitan governance has been centred on analysis of the politico-institutional effects of a double process : those of globalisation and neoliberalisation. Associated to a dynamic of power resource allocation upwards and downwards, the globalisation process of the metropolitan economies has been translated into the strengthening and autonomisation of local and supranational political actors, with weakening of intermediate instances of power — locus of the national state and metropolitan government. The neoliberalisation process, in turn, implies not only the deactivation of instances of regulation of already known distributive conflicts and market externalities, but equally the disincentive to activation of regulatory mechanisms for new externalities and conflicts, inherent in the metropolitan dynamic. The two processes combined would imply configuration of the metropolises as zones with deficits of governance, in the strict sense, and of politics, in the broad sense. If the perverse effects of this double process with regard to the construction of metropolitan governance seem unquestionable, in this paper we follow a complementary analytical path, focused on the brazilian metropolisation process : we try to verify to what extent internal variables of the metropolitan dynamic in Brazil are equally generators of politico-institutional blockages to the construction of metropolitan governance.