UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation tells a story of social and climate action in urban Latin America. It is a study of policy reform, taking bus public transportation as the sector of analysis and Santiago of Chile and the Greater Metropolitan Area (GAM) of Costa Rica as the case studies. Relying on inductive qualitative methods -cross-case comparison and process tracing-, and based on field research with 47 interviews conducted and official and non-official document analysis, this dissertation project finds the importance of urgency and salience around the need of a bus reform to attend social and climate concerns, as well as the capacity of policymakers to insulate the policy from organized interests, as factors that trigger the bus reform. Moreover, it portrays cases where policymakers also play the role of policy entrepreneurs bringing salience to the need of a reform. The analysis here provided acknowledges that the launch of a bus reform is not the final step to achieving social and climate action, thus it narrates the whole gradual process: from inaction to the moment when the topic is brought to the political forefront to when reform starts. It continues studying the evolution of this reform, analyzing how it shapes institutions, interest groups organization and social and climate outcomes. This research compares a case of a successful reform where oversight and monitoring mechanisms are in place and where the bus service works in an integrated and systemic way -Santiago- to one where inaction and old poor-working structures are maintained throughout time and where the bus service works in an atomized and chaotic way -the GAM. It shows how, through positive feedback, sustained action leads to the strengthening of the institutions governing the sector and data transparency, while sustained inaction leads to a deterioration of the institutions and to structurally powerful interest groups. Even though they tackle environmental, social and climate concerns and the bus is the main public transportation mode used in Latin America, bus reforms embody a type of reform that is electorally unappealing. Sectoral economic capture is focused on mega-projects in the global South and, in a region where there is a culture of automobile consumption such as Latin America, infrastructure investments for private vehicles are particularly appreciated by voters. Therefore, this dissertation provides evidence on why and how action can take place even when pushing for electorally unattractive policies and when that means redistributing power and going against entrenched organized interests.