Alisha Holland - "Creative Construction: The Rise and Stall of Infrastructure in Latin America"

Описание: Alisha Holland
Gates Professor of Developing Societies, Department of Government
Harvard University

Can democracies build large infrastructure? Conventional wisdom is that elected politicians avoid long-run projects as they heed the demands of immediate and local interests. This talk instead shows how reliance on the private sector allowed Latin American politicians to invest heavily in infrastructure, while undermining its quality. At a time when politicians and pundits in the US want to replicate corporate practices and minimize community input to get things done, the building boom in Latin America underscores the risks to the public and democracy.

Cosponsored by the Kellogg Research Cluster on Democratization Theory.

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Alisha Holland is the Gates Professor of Developing Societies in the Government Department at Harvard University, specializing in the comparative political economy of development with a focus on Latin America, urban politics, and social policy. She previously served as an Assistant Professor at Princeton University and is the author of Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2017).