Community self-governance in São Paulo’s informal settlements through the PAA framework

ABSTRACT This comparative case study examines community self-governance in informal settlements in São Paulo, Brazil, through the Policy Arrangement Approach. Drawing on participant observation and semi-structured interviews, I highlight the importance of context in shaping self-governance and outcomes. Self-governance embodies power and politics, often not contained to the spatial boundaries of the informal settlements, and developed through intersecting nodes of people, organizations, institutions, resources, spaces. Ultimately, this study questions the notion of self-governance as a simplistic binary to propose self-governance as a dialectical continuum of self/non-self, recognizing the realities of governing communities as multiple, complex, and fluid.