Latin America is often cited as a laboratory for participatory institutional innovation, because many countries have adopted and implemented institutional reforms aimed at including citizen participation in democratic decision-making processes. Located at all levels of government and in a variety of public policy arenas, different models of participatory institutions have indeed been developed, implemented, and diffused across the region. Although some of these participatory institutions have emerged from the bottom up, many have been established in the context of national legal frameworks that require the creation of permanent participatory mechanisms aimed at engaging citizens and civic associations, along with policy makers and bureaucrats, in decision-making processes in a variety of policy areas. Nationally mandated participatory institutions, although quite common in Latin America (in 17 of 18 countries), have, however, been overlooked by the literature and constitute the object of Lindsay Mayka’s important contribution.

Nationally mandated participatory institutions, like the local ones, have the theoretical potential to profoundly transform not only policy-making processes by making the state more efficient and responsive to citizens’ needs, but also to society itself by giving a voice to otherwise marginalized citizens and creating institutional spaces for civil society to engage in the social construction of citizenship rights. However, as Mayka’s puzzle emphasizes, not all national participatory mandates meet their ambitious goals: many “exist only in the books, but not in practice” (p. 2). Why do some nationally mandated institutions never become viable institutions? What are the factors underlying successful cases of participatory institution building in Latin America? These are the central questions addressed by Building Participatory Institutions in Latin America. The careful comparison between two cases in Brazil and two cases in Colombia allows Mayka to provide a compelling theory of participatory institution building that not only contributes to scholarship on participatory democracy in Latin America, but also provides insightful contributions to the study of institutions in comparative politics.

Chapter 1 systematically develops the theoretical framework and the argument of the book. One of the important tasks it undertakes is to provide a novel definition of successful participatory institution outcomes with regard to the two complementary dimensions of institutional building processes that Mayka fleshes out: institutional design and implementation. This definition not only contributes to institutional scholarship by operationalizing the concept of institution building and bringing together insights from different institutionalist traditions, but it also unpacks the process, thereby introducing the possibility of observing variation across cases of participatory institution building over time. First, institution building entails crafting a strong institutional design, one that grants participatory institutions formal authority and clear prerogatives, formal decision-making power, and enforcement capacity. Although she does not take influence on policy outcome as an indicator of the success of participatory institutions, Mayka shows that, in Brazil, strong institutional designs were established in the areas of social assistance and health policy and have thereby become sites to advocate policy change. In Colombia, weaker institutional designs were created for planning councils and health committees, making them less relevant as institutional sites for influencing policy outcomes.

If designing strong institutions is important, Mayka rightfully contends that implementing them requires a process of institutionalization of the rules, practices, and authority of participatory institutions, which then become unquestioned as part of the policy-making process. Drawing from both rational choice and sociological institutionalism, she suggests that institutionalization happens when participatory institutions are routinized into an organizational structure that shapes participation and gains the informal legitimacy among actors needed to influence behaviors and practices. Here again, she finds differences in terms of institutionalization between Brazil and Colombia. Health and social assistance councils in Brazil are backed by financial resources, trained officials, and a decentralized organization that structures civil society participation. However, she does observe higher legitimacy for participatory councils in the health sector, which makes them a bit stronger than social assistance councils overall. In Colombia, the state neglected the implementation phase for its nationally mandated planning councils and health committees, and planning councils were taken over by civil society organizations, resulting in weaker institutions in the health sector.

How then to explain the differences observed in Colombia and Brazil and across policy sectors within each country? Starting from the premise that “participatory institution building requires creative destruction to reconfigure (or even dismantle) existing state agencies, lines of authority and decision making practices” (p. 4), Mayka offers a twofold argument (p. 52) that goes beyond and builds on existing theories focusing on state capacity, partisan strategies, and civil society’s strength. She then empirically assesses her argument through a carefully crafted and systematic case comparison developed in chapters 4 and 5 (Brazil) and 6 and 7 (Colombia), drawing from extensive qualitative and quantitative data. First, she argues that nationally mandated institutions can take root when they are embedded in sweeping sectoral participatory reforms, which not only allow participatory institutions to be included in the policy-making process but also create opportunities for mobilizing support among reformist policy makers and incentives to create pro-participation coalitions. Second, she highlights that, beyond these reforms, successful participatory institution building requires the involvement of what she calls “creative” policy entrepreneurs among state or civil society actors. Those policy entrepreneurs, who pitch the idea of participation to reformist politicians as key to achieving the policy reform’s objective, also play a central role in activating support and coalitions for participatory institution building, sometimes even among surprising allies (both stakeholders and policy makers).

Comparing participatory institution building in two policy sectors in Brazil and Colombia is ambitious, and the detailed analysis that Mayka provides of all four cases is particularly enlightening in guiding the reader as the argument unfolds empirically: it highlights both similarities and differences in participatory institution-building trajectories across and within countries. As she shows, Brazil’s health and social assistance sector’s successful participatory councils emerged in the context of sweeping policy reforms that profoundly transformed them and fostered collective action among stakeholders. In particular, a variety of stakeholders (including beneficiaries, workers and bureaucrats, among others) united and mobilized in a large pro-participatory coalition behind policy entrepreneurs, who took advantage of the opportunity created by policy reforms to push their agenda for participatory institutions.

In Colombia, even though participatory institutions emerged in a context comparable to the Brazilian one (chap. 3), the participatory institution-building outcomes Mayka finds are different and even display variation across policy sectors. In the planning councils, on the one hand, the outcome is mixed, because the institution-building process remains incomplete. This is explained by the fact that, even if civil society policy entrepreneurs supported the reform, these councils emerged in the context of a procedural reform with only limited benefits for stakeholders that did not carry strong incentives for actors to coalesce and mobilize behind it. The case of Colombian heath committees is, on the other hand, classified as a case of failure, showing that even if the policy sector reform is sweeping, policy entrepreneurs are key to activating the successful implementation/institutionalization of participatory institutions in policy makers’ and stakeholders’ practices.

Lindsay Mayka’s Building Participatory Institutions in Latin America is certainly a must-read for students of participatory democracy, who have generally overlooked the cases of nationally mandated participatory institutions and focused instead on local experiences with participation. Her important comparative endeavor allows us not only to go beyond existing arguments to explain the implementation gap in practice, but also builds on analyses of civil society’s strength to understand the mechanisms by which civil society and politicians can be mobilized and coalesced behind the project of building participatory institutions: in doing so, it unveils the crucial role and creativity of a generally hidden actor—policy entrepreneurs. More generally, Mayka’s book offers an important contribution to comparative politics and the literature on institutional change by proposing a compelling definition of institutional strength that focuses on the process by which this strength is built—or not—over time. But where there is successful participatory institution building, as in the case of health councils in Brazil, can the process be overturned? In the face of incoming political leaders who have no political will to comply with nationally mandated participatory institutions, can wide stakeholders’ coalitions mobilized in favor of health councils do enough to secure their institutionalization? These are questions that certainly will attract attention in the coming years, and Mayka’s book is an important contribution that gives us some keys to start thinking about them.