Doctoral Dissertation Research: Social Knowledge-Making: the Relationship between Science, Democracy, and Development

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SES-1303560PI: Patrick Heller Co-PI: Diana Graizbord Brown UniversityIn 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 IMPACTSFirst, 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.