Why and how do societies transform the environmental rules of economic development, or fail to do so? This article compares the experiences of Chile and Peru in the regulation of smelting activities between 1990 and 2010. Air pollution from smelters in Chuquicamata and La Oroya, each emblematic of the two countries’ mining industries, did not give rise to nationally destabilising protest. Nevertheless, despite the absence of pressing discontent with pollution, the environmental rules for mining could still be improved as a result of policy network activism and through highly idiosyncratic institutional channels. The analysis shows that policy entrepreneurship for Chuquicamata was enhanced by a national institutional environment that favoured bureaucratic autonomy, while parallel action for La Oroya was constrained by a political economy of state weakness and elite disregard.

Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, has long been held up as a model of how grassroots social movements, in alliance with a Left party in power, have deepened democracy in a highly clientelistic context. But what happened to this democratic reform when the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' Party, PT), which supported this initiative while it held the mayorship of Porto Alegre for 16 years, lost political power? This article examines the shifting fortunes of the participatory budgeting process following the defeat of the Workers' Party in the 2004 local elections. It explores how and why succeeding local administrations weakened participatory budgeting amid the changing political configuration of Porto Alegre, underscoring the critical role played by considerable executive branch powers in the process. The article concludes by examining what questions this raises for the sustainability of local democratic reforms.

In late eighteenth-century Mexico City, Spanish colonials, particularly members of the urban middle and popular classes, performed a number of weddings and baptisms on puppies (which were wearing clothes or bejewelled collars) in the context of fandangos or dance parties. These ceremonies were not radical challenges to orthodoxy or conservative reactions in the face of significant economic, political, religious and cultural Bourbon reforms emanating from Spain. Employing Inquisitorial investigations of these ceremonies, this article explores the rise of pet keeping, the meanings of early modern laughter and the implications of the cultural and religious components of the Enlightenment-inspired Bourbon reforms in late colonial Mexico.

The arrival of Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva and the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' Party, PT) at the helm of the Brazilian federal government in 2003 represented the culmination of a slow and deep-rooted process of party transformation. Attributable partly to the inevitable consequences of the party gradually inserting itself into governmental institutions, and partly to strategic decisions made by the dominant coalition that had controlled the PT since 1995, these transformations significantly changed the organisational features of the party, paving its way to the federal government. This article analyses these processes, and the subsequent changes throughout the Lula government, from an organisational perspective, linking exogenous challenges and the party's genetic model with the strategies consciously adopted by the petista leadership.