When it was originally published in 1986, this was the first book to deal simultaneously with several aspects of social welfare provision in a developing country. The unique contribution of the book is based on the analysis of 3 substantive welfare areas - land (for self-help housing), urban infrastructure and health - which are examined in terms of the nature, motivation and effectiveness of government intervention. The book covers 3 administrations between 1970 and the mid-1980s and sets the analysis in the wider context of Latin American affairs. The author shows that although social welfare expenditure has increased, its importance as a government priority has been sharply eroded.
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Abbreviations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. Perspectives on Texas Colonies and the Project Methodology -- One Introduction to toe Border Reginn and to the Case Study Cities -- Two Land and Housing Production in the Colonias of Texas and Mexico -- Three Servicing No Man's Land: Ambivalence versus Commitment in the Texas-Mexico Colonias -- Four Settlements or Communities? Social Organization and Participation in the Colonias -- Five Social Services to Colonies: Shifting the Focos toward Means Rather than Ends -- Six Conclusion: Texas Colonias and the Next Policy Wave -- Notes -- References -- Index
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Abstract — A typology comprising technocratic rationality versus political partisanship helps to identify several local government structures found in contemporary Mexico: political machines; autonomous‐indigenous; technocratic; and modernising party governments. Case study research in over a dozen municipalities for three principal parties suggest a trend towards increasing technocratic and more administratively efficient municipal government and changing patterns of partisanship. This arises from new pressures associated with electoral opening, political alternation, new government actors, growing urban development complexity, and from federal reforms offering greater local government autonomy. However, while improved administration and technocratic governance often leads to positive outcomes, they do not necessarily imply 'good government'.
In this article I wish to provide an overview of the changing priorities that successive Mexican governments have given the social development sector since the administration of President Echeverria (1970–6). This will be set against a backcloth of political reform and an opening of the political space in which parties other than the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) have been allowed to function, albeit under certain constraints. In addition I will examine important changes that have been undertaken both in the nature of social policies themselves, but also in the patterns and efficiency with which public agencies have delivered this particular social good. I argue that in Mexico, as in many advanced capitalist countries since Bismarck's Prussia during the late nineteenth century, social welfare provision is an important element in the understanding of political management and 'statecraft'.1 As well as providing a temporary palliative to offset some of the negative outcomes of rapid urbanisation and economic growth based upon low wage rates and trickle-down, social policy provides an arena through which scarce societal resources may be negotiated. As I will describe, those patterns of negotiation change for a variety of reasons: as power relations shift; as economies reflate or turn into recession; as the level of state intervention and control intensifies or slackens; as our diagnosis of specific problems and the policy instruments we develop become more sophisticated and sensitive to local needs; and last, but not least in the context of Mexico, are included changes that arise from human agency as different presidents take executive office.
