InstitutionClaim Cited
Residents of Conjunto Palmeiras built Banco Palmas to connect locally judged credit with neighborhood production and consumption, then adapted its paper currency to digital payments. Field studies document wider access mechanisms, public recognition, currency disuse, contested community legitimacy, and digital dependence without isolating the bank's effect on poverty or local welfare.
Can a neighborhood build financial infrastructure that keeps value circulating locally without reproducing the extraction and exclusion of conventional credit?
InstitutionClaim Cited
Brazil's Family Health Strategy makes a universal right tangible through a chain of neighbors, community health agents, nurses, physicians, municipal services, and federal support. Its intended pregnancy pathway shows how territorial care can notice and accompany someone over time; uneven staffing, tests, transport, and referrals show why nominal coverage is not the same as completed care.
How can a universal health system make continuous primary care present in households and territories across a continent-sized, unequal federation?
InstitutionClaim Cited
Brazil's Landless Workers' Movement (MST) sustains landless families through occupations, camps, settlements, education, cooperatives, and nested territorial bodies. Its durability comes from joining local self-organization to national pressure and state-facing brokerage; its central accountability problem is whether discipline, representation, and settlement institutions remain answerable to families carrying the risks, people already using contested land, neighboring communities, public agencies, and affected ecologies.
How can landless rural workers turn dispersed need into enough durable collective power to obtain land, govern settlements, and sustain a political project across generations?
InstitutionClaim Cited
Porto Alegre turned part of its municipal budget into a recurring public decision process, linking neighborhood assemblies, redistributive criteria, elected delegates, technical review, and implementation—and revealing how participation weakens when government stops delivering.
Can residents exercise meaningful authority over scarce public investment without abandoning technical feasibility, citywide redistribution, or elected responsibility?
InstitutionClaim Cited
Vale's Córrego do Feijão tailings dam failed above an occupied worksite after warning signs, adverse stability evidence, fragmented risk ownership, and compromised certification failed to stop it, killing 272 people and contaminating the Paraopeba watershed.
How can a mining company possess extensive safety data and professional controls yet organize them so that no signal acquires enough authority to prevent catastrophe?