Brazilian-style financialization: CEPACs and the desire to be prime

Abstract

The financialization of urban policy has received growing attention in the academic community, notably due to the substantial changes occurring in recent decades. In the Latin American context, in particular, a series of tensions are produced by the introjection of financialized instruments and practices in contexts in which financialization per se is still being socially constructed. There is a tendency for the Euro-American literature to consider such issues as peripheral financialization, force-fitting Brazilian conditions into a priori epistemological limitations. In this sense, investigating Global South through its own references is fundamental, strengthening an alternative epistemological perspective. This is the starting point of this study, discussing contemporary manifestations of the financialization of urban policies in Brazil and focusing on the use of Certificates of Additional Construction Potential (CEPACs). Considered according to their fundamental constitutive principles, the cases studied suggest certain idiosyncrasies of Brazilian-style financialization, based on a domestic savoir-faire that is far from a perfect adaptation to the formulations of the Euro-American literature and requiring a situated discussion, in which the analytical keys for decoding it are still under debate and construction.