Vanessa Boanada Fuchs

The discussion on informality has become considerably more complex since its inception in development planning in the early 1970s. Independent discourses exist on the informal economy, informal housing, informal planning practices, informal land management, legal informality and informal institutions. Although these discussions have directly informed development policies, they have remained fragmented and narrowly focused. This is unfortunate, as the complex interplay of formal-informal practices requires a more comprehensive understanding to become useful development policy targets. In order to break with the initial pathologies of subject fragmentation inherited from past sector-based approaches, the authors propose a cross-sector investigation. A selective literature review was carried out for academic discourses relevant to urban development scholars. The authors developed a visual tool, a taxonomic table to capture and systematise thematic dimensions and associated meanings of informality, as well as its relation to formality. This taxonomy may serve as a communicative interface between different schools of thought and structure more comprehensive and interdisciplinary research agendas. For scholars, the relevance of the study lies in the proposed use of bibliometrics and the taxonomic table to encourage mutual learning experiences. For praxis, by highlighting the different elements within the conceptualization of informality, the taxonomy can be used to tackle ‘the informal’ by improving communication across sectors, including often excluded voices and different on-the-ground understandings of the same phenomena.

The governance of natural resources is intrinsically linked with the governance of people. However, in practice, social aspects are often viewed as secondary to more technical and pressing issues in the implementation of projects such as dams. The use of water for electricity production in Brazil is a cas d'excellence that exemplifies how the bypassing of socio-environmental safeguards and democratic participation of affected people leads to conflicts. These conflicts delay infrastructure works, such as the Belo Monte Dam, that are found to be crucial for the equilibrium of electricity supply. Recently, social manifestation have become the scapegoat for the sector's crisis. This article discussed the "electricity crisis" from a historical policy analysis perspective. It concludes that the present disregard for social and environmental procedures is a self-inflicted disease that only contributes to the longer-term state of conflicts in the expansion of the electricity sector in Brazil.

For a little more than five years, there has been a context of strong social tensions around the construction of a development project in the North of Brazil (Amazon). The Belo Monte hydroelectric dam presents itself as a perfect setting to demonstrate at the same time the confusing relationship between public and private sectors in the implementation of infrastructure projects, and how this relationship affects the social acceptance of the projects. In Belo Monte, the government has put in place plan for regional sustainable development, parallel to the construction of the Dam. This plan, pioneer in its format, is financed by both public and private sector and distributes resources to a myriad of local projects proposed by the local civil society and government. The plan is aimed at a better regional inception of dam, but many see it as a cooption strategy. The situation studied by this article questions the role of the State in and its influence on the “social license to operate”. We propose to address the overlap between the public and private spheres in what it concerns the implementation of services and projects of public interest, by asking: how is “social acceptance” managed in Brazil in a officially democratic context, but where historical populist (sometimes authoritarian) practices subsist? What place is left for local population and their representatives to express their voice in these debates? These questions exemplify the need to include the central role played by the State in the debates around “social acceptance” of projects, enlarging the literature until now very much focused on the binomial relationship firms-affected population.