Giving Compass' Take:

•  Donna Bowater explains how Christopher L. Gibson’s book, Movement-Driven Development: The Politics of Health and Democracy in Brazil, offers a path forward for a backsliding Brazil. 

• What should be the role of philanthropy in advancing healthcare and democracy in Brazil and around the world? 

• Learn about migration in Brazil. 

The timing of Christopher L. Gibson’s new book, Movement-Driven Development: The Politics of Health and Democracy in Brazil, is both unfortunate and fortuitous.

It is unfortunate because Gibson’s rigorous analysis of the extraordinary achievements of Brazil’s public health system from the late 1980s comes just as analysts warn of fresh backsliding under a newly inaugurated right-wing president. At the very least, Jair Bolsonaro takes office following the first rise in infant mortality in decades, while the World Bank also notes an increase in poverty from 2016 to 2017, reaching almost 55 million Brazilians, after years of reductions under the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT).

But the publication of Movement-Driven Development is also fortuitous: it offers a timely reminder of the enormous potential for development through citizen and civil-society actors, even in a complex or unsupportive political climate.

An assistant professor at Simon Fraser University’s School for International Studies, Gibson assesses the role of Brazil’s civil-society actors in driving the move toward universal health care during the country’s transition from dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s. He especially celebrates the contributions of Brazil’s loosely defined Sanitarist Movement (Movimento Sanitário), which united activists and public health professionals, in both creating and occupying institutions and systems to deliver primary health care.

Read the full article about Movement-Driven Development by Donna Bowater at Stanford Social Innovation Review.