Resisting Co-optation? Reconsidering Social Movement Agency in Brazil’s Participatory Institutions

Citizen participation has become a governance commonplace as public authorities around the world have sought to the secure the benefits of increasing public involvement in government decision-making. The consequent proliferation of participatory institutions, however, can pose strategic dilemmas for social movements which must weigh up the pros and cons of involvement in state-organised institutions. In the social movement (as in the citizen participation) literature, co-optation is a prominent concern. However, the term co-optation is problematic due to its polysemy and is used in highly general ways that can obscure what are much more complex social phenomena. Brazil provides excellent terrain on which to reconsider the analytical utility of co-optation. Tens of thousands of participatory institutions have emerged across the country since the late 1980s and in which social movements routinely take part. In this paper I draw on long term ethnographic research in Greater São Paulo, Brazil, and examine two social movements: one, a small, favela rights movement (MDDF) that participated intensely in participatory institutions and another, a large housing movement (MTST) which eschewed such participation altogether. I focus, in particular, on how structuralist interpretations of co-optation tend to efface social movement agency and urge more historicised and situated analyses that account for diverse strategies. I further argue that the eschewal of participation by the MTST does not necessarily represent a new dialectical stage of movement strategy in Brazil.