One of the most striking political changes in Latin America over the last decade has been the increasing salience and centrality of local government. Since Latin America has become a largely urban continent (in 2000, the United Nations estimates that 75.4% of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean lives in urban areas [United Nations 1998, 93]), municipal government has become the arena of a emerging set of major challenges and opportunities. In a continent whose history is one of centralization, and whose population until the early 1960s was predominantly rural, this represents an unprecedented new reality.

The institutional and political format within which urban local government is being represented is a result of a long period of political and civic activity, dating back to the early 1960s. While it is not necessary to analyze this gestation period in the present context, suffice it to say that in many countries the multiple influences of a number of factors combined to focus more attention on the local: these factors included the explosion of urban social movements, the increasing impact of informality and the precariousness of large marginal urban populations, a heavy debt burden at the central government level, and a general movement toward decentralization and political pluralism as authoritarian regimes played themselves out. If it is to take account of these important new realities, a social sciences research program for Latin America will need to address a number of key questions. The conceptual and research background to these questions will be explained in the following sections.

The of the most general issues has to do with how we conceptualize the process of governing at the urban level. Until the 1970s, it was conventional usage to refer to the lowest level of government as "local government". Generally, "local governments" (at least in urban areas) collected taxes, and provided a limited range of services for their citizens. Partly as a result of the influence of business approaches to public administration in the 1960s and 1970s, what had been "urban administration" began to be called "urban management" in the 1980s. Urban administrators began to call themselves "urban managers", as they looked for ways more efficiently to deliver public services, responded (at least in theory) more directly to the "demands" of their local citizens for a whole range of public goods and services, and attempted to "streamline" their administrative operations. This movement from administration (which implies control) to management (which implies efficiency and enablement) was supported by international agencies such as the World Bank, the UNDP, and the Urban Management Program through documents and studies, local municipal projects, and a variety of in-service training programs.

The serious and comparative study of urban service management seems to have begun in Asia and Africa (Lea and Courtney 1985; Linn 1987; Montgomery 1989; Stren and White 1989); but by the early 1990s publications on urban management and the special problems of urban services began to appear in Latin America. A problem with the urban management approach was that it was never closely defined. In some ways this led to ambiguity, confusion and overlap, but from another perspective, the openness of the concept gave considerable flexibility to operating agencies (Stren 1993).

The research possibilities attached to the concept of urban management were, however, very rich. The Bank, IDRC, and a number of other agencies supported studies of the operation of different public services - in particular, refuse collection and disposal, and water distribution were popular subjects. Economists, geographers, and public administration specialists were involved in these studies. It was not a foregone conclusion that wealthier cities would be more successful, and poorer cities less successful with service delivery. As the World Bank argued in an important publication, "[t]he deficiencies in urban services in the cities of developing countries are…a reflection not merely of absolute resource constraints but also of other constraints, particularly the institutional arrangements of urban service delivery" (World Bank 1995, 14). These institutional arrangements could range from formal organizational rules, to incentive structures, to the location of a service in the public or the private domain.

A number of research studies began to document this new area. One important book, a joint publication of El Colegio de México and CERFE in Rome, looked at the involvement of citizens and planners in the "greening" of public services in Mexico and Italy (Schteingart and d'Andrea 1991). Another compilation, produced slightly later (Rodríguez and Velásquez 1991) and based on an IDRC-supported project, looks at municipal management and public services in a number of medium-sized cities in Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Brazil and the Dominican Republic. The authors conclude that these cities are typically administered by technocrats, whose decisions rarely involve popular input. Although many countries were discussing decentralization and more democratic local government by the late 1980s, few were actually practicing this approach, and "such aspects as transparency, responsiveness and citizen's control over decision-making are still very weak..."(Velásquez 1991, 393). In a prescient overview of local government first published in 1988, Jordi Borja (at the time the Assistant Mayor of Barcelona and a professor of sociology at the University of Barcelona) spoke of local democracy in Latin America as "a nonexistent tradition". While this situation was changing at the time of writing, it was very deeply rooted:

Practical politics in all its activities has given the centralized state total priority. Oddly enough, even democratic and progressive reform movements have neglected to use the local level of the state as the basic arena of popular participation and political and administrative action to benefit the majority. Cárdenas's Partido Revolucionario Institucional in Mexico, Peronists in Argentina, and the Unidad Popular in Chile did no significant work in this area.

Modernization of the state in Latin America is still in progress, and in the majority of the Latin American countries, relatively modern centralized administrations have been created incorporating techniques of contemporary public management. This is not generally the case in local administration, which lacks the necessary resources. Because of a dearth of technical and financial means and the scant political accountability allotted to it by the central government, local administration is mired down in outmoded procedures (Borja 1992, 133)

One of the reasons why the concept of "governance" or "urban governance" was entering the lexicon was that the context within which local government operated had become much broader and more complex. This was happening both in the north and the south. In an important article on France (where a Law of Decentralization was first passed in 1981), Patrick le Gals argues for a shift in nomenclature from "the government of cities to urban governance". To le Gals, while the term "local government" was associated with a formal description of powers and responsibilities of urban authorities, local politics and the way in which French cities were administered were changing rapidly. "The term 'governance'" he argued, "suggests …functions and actions of government, but without the idea of uniformity, rationality, or standardization. The term 'urban governance' implies a greater diversity in the organization of services, a greater flexibility, a variety of actors, even a transformation of the forms that local democracy might assume, and taking into account citizens and consumers, and the complexity of new forms of citizenship" (Le Gals 1995, 60).

This discussion of "governance" in a French context is particularly interesting, since the concept was always considered an "Anglo-Saxon" term and as such, inappropriate outside English-speaking countries. When one research network (in this case, the Global Urban Research Initiative, funded by the Ford Foundation) began to use the concept in 1994 in a series of workshops in Mexico City, Santiago and Rio de Janeiro, local feelings were often intense. One line of argument expressed at the time was that the term "governance" did not, in any case, exist in either Portuguese or Spanish; what did exist were the terms governabilidade or governabilidad, both of which meant something different from the English definition proposed originally. There was also some suspicion of the term "governance" based on the fact that such organizations as the Ford Foundation, USAID and the World Bank were actively promoting its use (although each had a different definition). But as Magda Prates Coelho and Eli Diniz argued, the problem in Brazil after the 1988 Constitution was not decision-making incapacity (or "ingovernability"), but rather the inability of leadership to achieve sufficient support and legitimacy to implement a whole host of technical measures. In an article translated into Spanish, the authors propose to keep the concept of governability (governabilidad), but at the same time to accept a new concept, governance, which comprises the state's command and steering capacity, its capacity to coordinate among politics and interests, and its capacity to implement from the centre to the local area. This concept is associated, in the authors' approach, with a less technical focus on conditions for the success of state politics, in order to overcome "the current impasse represented by crucial problems like inflation, inequality and social exclusion..."(Coelho and Diniz 1997, 110). The concept of local governance, they add, brings in the political factor, "and places the interdependence of state and civil society at the centre of the debate" (Coelho and Diniz 1997, 113).

Based on the classic treatment of administrative decentralization (Cheema and Rondinelli 1983), the decentralization experience in Latin America has covered the full range of alternatives - from full devolution, through deconcentration, to privatization. According to James Manor in an important recent analysis, there is no single reason, or even group of reasons that systematically explains decentralization (Manor 1999). The story varies from country to country, and may indeed have very complex explanations in many cases. Decentralization may have been a response to debt problems at the centre, with the central government passing functions to other levels of government because it wished to extricate itself from high levels of public expenditure on expensive public services. Or it may have served certain narrow political purposes - to strengthen certain regions or political/interest groups wishing to have more freedom to develop policies at the local level. Or it may have had a broader goal of enhancing transparency and responsiveness of government in order to increase the legitimacy of government in a general way. Or all of these purposes may have been present at the same time (Manor 1999, part III).

A more focused explanatory model is offered by Andrew Nickson, in order to explain the "invigoration" of local government in Latin America in the 1990s. He argues that the fiscal crisis of many states, combined with an unrelenting growth of urban centres and an unmet demand for local services led many governments (with support from international agencies such as the IMF) seriously to consider more decentralization to the municipal level. This inclination (in spite of a history of centralism and statism) was reinforced by the emergence of new social movements and self-help groups at the local level. "By the mid-1980s" he argues, "an uneasy domestic coalition had emerged in most Latin American countries in favor of decentralization. The main demands of these coalitions were greater political autonomy for local government, the devolution of responsibility for service delivery to the municipal level, and an associated strengthening of municipal finances" (Nicks 1995, 24). The three main groups - supported by international agencies in many cases - were the neoliberals, the radical reformers, and the technocrats.

Whatever the specific factors explaining individual initiatives to decentralize in Latin America, there is a general feeling in much of the academic literature that real devolution of power is more shadow than substance. A major comparative study of urban poverty and decentralization in 7 south and central American countries (supported by the EDI) concluded that decentralization has been differently understood both between and within countries, and that - at least at the level of municipalities - there is still a lack of adequate resources for the new powers and functions, and there is a lack of strong connections between neighbourhood groups (and organizations) and the municipal agencies who need to provide services. Other "obstacles" affecting municipal operations which the case studies indicated include corruption and clientelism, low level of professionalism and trained personnel, and an absence of planning (Urzua and Palma 1997, 423-7).

While there is some concern about the overall effectiveness of large-scale decentralization policies, in some specific cases fiscal decentralization "has been executed in a way that favors local government budgets" (Peterson 1997, 5). Thus, in Brazil, the 1988 constitutional changes reassigned approximately six percentage points from the central government's share of public-sector revenues, and passed them to state and local authorities. Colombia's 1991 constitution assigned a growing portion of centrally collected revenues to local governments. Decentralization legislation in Venezuela increased the states' share of centrally collected revenues; while both Guatemala and Bolivia directly transferred revenues to local governments and municipalities. A table on decentralization (Table A.1) in the World Development Report of 1999/2000 notes the following changes in proportion of total tax revenue obtained by "subnational government" from 1990 to 1997: Argentina, from 38.2% to 41.1%; Bolivia, from 15.1% to 19.1%; Brazil, from 30.9% to 31.3%; Chile, from 6.4% to 7.0%; Guatemala from 1.3% to 1.7%; Mexico, from 19.0% to 20.6%; and Peru, from 1.2% to 2.1% (World Bank 1999, 216-17). These figures show (1) the tremendous variation in proportion of centrally-collected revenue coming back to state and local governments; and (2) a uniformly upward trend during the 1990s, even though of modest dimensions.

If decentralization has characterized central-local relations in the 1980s and 1990s in Latin America, the quality of urban life and the elaboration of institutional reforms at the local level has been more directly related to democratization. One of the most striking trends has been the election of municipal councilors all across the region; and the extension of the elective principle to mayors. Except for Costa Rica, which has planned for its first mayoral elections in 2001, all Latin American countries now have elected mayors. The most recent case, that of the Federal District of Mexico, saw its first elected mayor take office in early 1997. According to one estimate, there are now democratically chosen executive and legislative officials in more than 13,000 units of sub-national government in Latin America (Campbell 1997, 2). This massive change from nominated to elected officials has brought a much higher level of professionalism to office holding, and has in turn led to innovation and reform in municipal governance. Thus, surveys of office holders during the mid-1990s in Central America, Paraguay and Colombia showed that the proportion of professionals seeking public office increased from 11% in the early 1980s, to more than 46% in the 1990s. A Colombian study showed that the ratio of total staff to professionals dropped from 12:1 to 4:1 in Colombia (Campbell 1997, 3).

While decentralization is not necessarily linked to local democratization, and vice versa, the combination of these twin trends has resulted in an almost bewildering range of local innovations throughout the continent. Compared to other regions of the world, Latin America is a virtual hotbed of local governance reform. While many countries have participated in this process, the most prominent has been Brazil; and one of the main reasons why Brazilian reforms have moved so quickly has been the passing of a new Constitution in 1988. This Constitution strengthened municipal autonomy, validated the participation of community groups in municipal decision-making, and extended important social and economic policy functions to municipal authorities.

Under Brazil's Constitution, municipalities are given the opportunity to establish "organic" laws, by which they may structure their own operations and set up what are called "municipal boards". These boards, in turn, have the formal function of mediating between the local government and organized civil society. A study of the organic laws of the fifty largest Brazilian cities in the mid-nineties observed that all except three had created municipal boards. Thus, there were twenty urban development boards, twenty-two transportation boards, six housing boards, two sanitation boards, and thirty-five environmental boards. The most important functions of these boards were health and education (defined in the new Constitution as municipal powers), with forty-five, and forty, respectively, having been created in the fifty cities studied (Ribeiro, 1995).

Aside from the promotion of municipal boards, eighteen of the fifty cities instituted the "participatory budget" - by which neighbourhood and then higher level committees discuss and finally decide on the allocation of a proportion of a city's capital allocation, on a regular basis. Among public management reforms over the last two decades, argues one Brazilian scholar, "participatory budgets constitute what is perhaps the single most advanced experiment in the democratization of local governments" (Boschi 1998, 11). The same researcher conducted a survey in 1994 of 832 delegates to nine "regional forums" in Belo Horizonte; of the total, 45% were women, most had low levels of schooling (thus making the group broadly representative of the entire population of the city), nearly 60% had resided for no fewer than 10 years in their current neighbourhood, and 70% stated that they normally participated in voluntary organizations of one kind or another (Boschi 1998, 14-15). In the Belo Horizonte case, the participatory budgetary system reinforced the establishment of the 9 regional (decentralized) administrations in the city, since the local populations were brought into a more direct relationship with administrators.

But the most well known of the Brazilian cities practicing the participatory budget system is Porto Alegre, a city of about 1.3 million in the south of the country. According to an article by Rebecca Abers, the system is based on the work of 16 forums based on local regions of the city; there are in addition five thematic forums (created in 1994) involving education, health and social services, transportation, city organization, and economic development; and a municipal budget council with representatives from the regional and thematic forums. The system was originated in 1989 by the Union of Neighbourhood Associations, resulting in some 400 people participating in 16 assemblies around the city. By 1995, some 7,000 people were participating in the regional assemblies, and 14,000 more in further meetings to negotiate compromises between the demands of one region and another. The system is complex, and continues virtually throughout the year. The regional forums even micro-manage the actual implementation of capital projects (Abers 1998). According to the municipality, more than 70 cities elsewhere in Brazil and throughout the world (including Buenos Aires, Barcelona and Saint Denis) have adapted this system to their own needs (Porto Alegre 1998, 10). The current mayor of the city claims the popularity of the participatory budget system has contributed to a tripling of the tax revenues of the city (Raul Pont 2000); and an outside study of the city demonstrates that even from 1992 to 1995, the city increased its total tax receipts by 34% (Pozzobon 1998, 22).

The significance of participatory budgeting does not only lie in the potential for increased tax collection and citizen involvement in municipal affairs in general. Participatory budgeting demonstrates, for the first time, a systematic involvement of citizens in decisions on social policy at the local level. This represents a significant movement in the delegation of power in Latin America. Participatory budgeting, although it generally involves relatively small projects in the area of social policy - such as giving support to day-care and community centres, building small additions or adding playgrounds to schools, improving the access of people to local healthcare - is the beginning of a larger process by which social policies will be considered both a local and a national responsibility. So far, the operation of centrally initiated social policies for the benefit of the poor has largely bypassed local municipalities (Schteingart 1999), but as municipalities develop more professional capacity, this may change.

One of the most important underlying factors supporting the processes we have been discussing - the broadening of urban governance relations, decentralization, and local democratization - is the active participation of civil society at the urban level. In many respects, the Latin American experience has been a model for other parts of the developing world. In the 1960s, for example, the planner John Turner, on the basis of his experience in Peru, proposed his theory of "progressive improvement" for slums and squatter areas. According to this approach, which was later incorporated into major housing development programmes by the World Bank and USAID, slums were the expression of a need for upward mobility in the urban system, rather than an "eyesore" or a "blight", and would readily be improved by the residents themselves if they had basic security of tenure (Turner 1969). And the important insight that "marginal" urban populations were actually closely integrated into the urban fabric and survived through tightly-organized systems of social solidarity (Lomnitz 1975; Perlman 1976) led to urban policies (such as squatter upgrading and participatory planning) that attempted to harness popular participation rather than to exclude the marginals from the city. Finally, the extraordinary explosion of urban social movements and urban self-help organizations in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s were central to the emergence of a strong civil society which, in turn, became an important element in the process which led to the dismantling of authoritarian government in the 1980s. While many northern countries and foundations did not want to give assistance to authoritarian governments or government-dominated political parties during the 1960s and 1970s, they were prepared to support local NGOs, which often worked with community groups.

Research evidence for the explosion of community-based and self-help groups during the 1980s is abundant. In Santiago, Chile, for example, a survey found that in the 1980s, 20% of the marginal urban population participated in popular organizations, one-third of which were involved with health problems. In the health area alone, there were some 673 "self-help health organizations" operating at the community level, including some 201 soup kitchens, 20 community kitchens, 223 cooperative buying organizations, 67 family garden organizations, 25 community bakeries, and 137 health groups; these organizations had 12,956 active members. Most of the members, as well as the leaders and managers of these organizations, were women (Salinas and Solimano 1995, 148-9). In Chile during the 1980s, there were thousands of NGOs, many relying on external financing for their local operations (Loveman 1995). In Lima, Henry Dietz reports, "the urban lower classes...had over the years created elaborate and enduring self-help mechanisms for which many of them contributed time, money, and effort. In the late 1980s Lima had an estimated eighteen hundred communal soup kitchens, serving approximately seventy thousand individuals daily, and some thirty-five hundred Vaso de Leche neighborhood committees delivering some 1 million glasses of milk a day in Lima". Dietz argues that the number of kitchens may have doubled after the initial economic shocks of Fujimori's adjustment policies in the early 1990s; in 1994 the USAID estimated that it was feeding one of three Peruvians (Dietz 1998, 253). Partly as a result of this massive self-help and NGO effort, it was argued, people did not systematically protest the economic policies of the government, even though they were initially very much affected by them.

In some countries, NGOs helped to maintain political pluralism; in others, they kept authoritarianism at bay. In Brazil beginning in the late 1970s, for example,

…civil society breathed the air of the political 'opening', which heralded a return to democratic rule after 20 years of authoritarianism. Mobilization took root in the factories, but soon spread beyond the labour movement and political parties. In both poor neighbourhoods…and middle-class areas, the population organized to demand the right to basic services - water supply, sewerage, school facilities, health facilities, roads - and protested against ecological dangers, development plans which ignored residents' interests, housing evictions and a host of other causes (Valladares and Coelho 1995, 88).

The emergence of urban social movements in Mexico and Peru, involving in particular the mobilization and organization of low-income communities, predated the Brazilian awakening. But the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, and a growing concern over urban environmental risk - especially as a result of high levels of air pollution in the capital - led to a diverse range of protests and popular activity in the area of human settlements. As Latin America urbanized, the link between protests and organizational activity to secure land and improved urban services, and demands for the reduction and control of air and water pollution in the cities became more pronounced. Both, in any case, were central to the democratization process in Latin America. A case in point of the relationship between environmental protest and democratization is Cubatão in southern Brazil, described in the late 1970s as the "valley of death" and the "most polluted city in the world." In Cubatão, water, air and soil pollution caused by the effluents of a petrochemical complex, had been causing severe health problems and birth defects among the city's population. Once democratic governance was restored at the state and urban level, however, local social movements were able to work with elected officials and technical experts (with help from the World Bank) in order to reduce pollution very significantly (De Mello Lemos 1998).

As Latin America continues to urbanize, its largest cities expand to enormous proportions; and even medium-sized cities begin to incorporate more and more peripheral villages and smaller towns as the suburbs become integrated into a seamless metropolitan area. In his introduction to a book on urban trends in the region, originally published in 1988, the late Jorge Enrique Hardoy called attention to the enormous social and physical problems of the largest cities during (what was then) a period of economic stagnation. "While the central city in practically all metropolitan areas [has] stagnated", he observed, "the peripheries have grown demographically and extended physically to dimensions that challenge the combined capacities of central, state, and local governments to provide solutions to the most pressing needs of the population. Neither politicians nor technocrats have found ways to overcome, for instance, the effects of growing poverty and the proliferation of squatter settlements and sites of illegal urbanization, where around 40 percent of the population in metropolitan areas and large cities lives in degraded environments" (Hardoy 1992, xvi).

While intermediate and large cities have grown considerably since the late 1980s, Hardoy's essential point remains, with even more force. As the effects of globalization are felt in the region, it is in the largest cities that spatial transformations and social contradictions are the most visible and profound. In the year 2000, Latin America is estimated to contain 4 of the world's 20 megacities (Mexico City at 18.1 million, Sao Paulo at 17.7 million, Buenos Aires at 12.4 million, and Rio de Janeiro at 10.6 million), and an additional 45 cities with one million or more inhabitants (United Nations 1998). The problems of these large cities - social and spatial fragmentation and polarization, jurisdictional fragmentation, extreme air and water pollution, deteriorating infrastructure, the spread of violence and crime, and transport gridlock - have become a major challenge at the beginning of the 21^st century (Eure, December 1999). But as in the United States (National Research Council 1999) and other European and northern countries, solving complex questions of regional governance, social distribution, and productive efficiency within these large, extended city-regions is both difficult and elusive.

The metropolitan governance challenge is particularly acute as Latin American cities - like large cities around the world - begin to position themselves within a competitive system, in which (it is presumed) only the very best will succeed in attracting external investment. In his introduction to a book entitled Competitive Cities. Succeeding in the Global Economy (Duffy 1995), the former mayor of Seattle, Charles Royer, says, "[s]uccessful cities of the future, both large and small, and regardless of where they are on the world map, must use all their resources if they hope to compete and prosper in a new world economy""(Duffy 1995, x). Many Latin American cities seem to have taken this advice to heart. As a single example, we can cite two papers on Rio de Janeiro presented at "The World Competitive Cities Congress" held in Washington in 1998. Discussing Rio's experience in financial reform during the period 1993-6, the Secretary of Finance discusses the steps undertaken by the city's newly-elected administration to make the accounting and budget management system more transparent and professional. Party as a result, she says, the city became "the first Latin American city to issue securities abroad...thus ratifying investors' confidence in the soundness of the municipal finances" (Braule Pinto 1999, 66). In a companion piece, the Mayor, Luiz Paulo Fernandez Conde argues that "[t]oday, we can no longer ignore the evidence that it is up to the cities to determine the greater or less degree of countries' competitiveness", given the evidence that "there exists, and will continue to exist, growing competition among cities, regions and countries, in which there will be winners and losers." Detailing a number of areas in which major initiatives were undertaken during his term of office (in tourism, the hosting of international meetings, infrastructural projects, nuclear energy and software development), he approvingly refers to a 1998 survey in Fortune magazine, in which the city was highlighted "as the best city for investment in Brazil, and the fourth best in Latin America" (Fernandez Conde 199, 92, 94). Perhaps inadvertently, both authors make little or no reference to some of the cities "problems": high local crime and murder rates, a high and increasing level of poverty and homelessness, deteriorating local services and widespread unemployment. But for all Latin American cities, whether they consider themselves "winners" or not, it is an open question as to whether, or indeed how, they can "compete" with wealthy, northern cities in the high-stake sweepstakes for international investment.

Six years ago, a network of researchers from Canada, Latin America, Africa, and Asia attempted to survey the corpus of urban research production in developing countries from the 1960s to the early 1990s. Based on this survey, we proposed a research agenda for each of the major regions. In the case of Latin America, this work led to a volume which contained four major essays - three by groups of researchers in each of Brazil and Venezuela; Mexico, Central America and Colombia; and South America, including Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia. Ecuador and Uruguay - and an important overview essay by Jorge Enrique Hardoy. The research themes treated and proposed for future work by the sub-regional groups were extremely rich and varied, and can in any case be consulted in the published work (Stren 1995). In his overview essay, Hardoy emphasized a number of key substantive research themes which the sub-regional studies had highlighted, and which he felt were particularly important: the general pattern of urbanization and its relationship to the current model of development; the economic structure of cities; the dynamics of the built environment; urban poverty and social policies to mitigate this problem; city government; vulnerable groups (in particular, children); and the urban environment. At the same time, he questioned the support structures for urban research in the region, and asked researchers to consider for whom they were writing their studies, and for what purposes (Hardoy 1995).

The present article, while focusing more narrowly on governance questions, has focused on a much more limited number of areas of investigation: local governance processes and reforms, decentralization and social policy, democratization, new structures of participation and the role of civil society, and metropolization. Within each of these subject areas are issues of efficiency, social equity, and environmental sustainability. Based on my reading of current debates and urban research discussions in Latin America today, these are important questions which can be focal points for questions and further research. (For a suggested list of project proposals, see Annex A).)

While different countries will put different emphases on any particular sub-set of research issues, it is important to develop networks of communication and exchange of research findings that will make clear how contextual differences ultimately affect and determine local policy choice. Although Latin American cities appear to share many similarities with developing cities elsewhere, the region has its unique characteristics and will undoubtedly respond to global forces in a unique fashion. Strong networks of local researchers can be a bulwark against unmediated global influences, while at the same time they can make informed and reasoned judgments about how best to incorporate useful external ideas and concepts into the local reform process. To function effectively, such networks need adequate support over an extended period, a free hand to decide on their own memberships and activities, and access to similarly minded researchers and activists in other regions.

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