Institutions, Networks and Activism Inside the State: Women’s Health and Environmental Policy in Brazil

Abstract

This article examines institutional activism between 2011 and 2018 in two Brazilian government programs, ‘Green Grants’ and the 'Stork Network’. Institutional activism is defined as collective action in the defense of contentious causes conducted within the boundaries of state institutions. The two policies were designed and implemented by bureaucrats committed to social movement causes, environmentalism and women’s health, respectively. The environmentalist bureaucrats were mostly permanent public employees with few ties to movement networks, while the women’s health group included mostly temporary employees with long histories of civil society activism. I argue that diverse locations in state institutions and movement networks gave these groups access to different combinations of institutional and relational resources. In dialogue with theories of situated agency and activist strategy, I show how those differences both led actors to engage in different kinds of strategies and influenced the way those strategies changed as political conditions became increasingly hostile.