Ethnographic Encounters: Using Ethnography to Study Brazil’s Participatory Governance Institutions

Abstract This article explores the contributions that ethnography and ethnographers can make to understanding governance institutions. Told through the story of a collaborative research project on participatory health governance in the municipality of Cabo de Santo Agostinho in north-east Brazil, we explore how the principles of ethnographic research intersected with other principles: of collaborative enquiry, participatory research and a methodological ethics grounded in the reversal of the conventional relationship between researcher and researched. Picking up on some of the core defining features of ethnography as a methodology, we examine how these came to inform our understanding of the dynamics of politics, power, and participation. In doing so, we reflect on how it is the pliable and improvisational nature of ethnography in practice that contrasts most substantially with the conventional tools of the political scientist and that makes ethnographic encounters so rich and valuable for the study of political institutions.