publications

2025

1. Building Resilience in the Global South: Evidence from a Decentralized Water Policy in Brazil

   Marcelo S O Goncalves

   R&R, 2025

   Abs

   Climate change poses increasing risks to population well-being through heightened water scarcity. This threat is particularly pronounced in low-income and climate-vulnerable regions, where traditional water infrastructure may not be feasible in the near term. This study evaluates the effectiveness of a decentralized water policy as a climate adaptation strategy, focusing on Brazil’s Cisterns Program — a large-scale rainwater harvesting initiative designed to build climate resilience in remote, underserved communities. The analysis shows that access to cisterns reduces severe cases of waterborne diseases by approximately 32%. Beyond these average health gains, the study assesses climate resilience by examining how the program moderates the impacts of drought shocks. Using multiple definitions of drought, the analysis shows that these events substantially increase disease burden. However, these adverse effects are significantly mitigated or fully offset by the program, indicating a sharp reduction in vulnerability to climatic stress. Evidence on mechanisms suggests that effectiveness depends not only on water availability but also on beneficiaries’ capacity to manage water safely and on program implementation. Impacts are significantly larger in more educated communities and where local civil-society organizations play a central role in implementation. These findings highlight the potential of low-cost, decentralized interventions as viable climate adaptation strategies, particularly in settings where large-scale infrastructure projects are impractical, and offer a scalable model for resilience-building development policies in the Global South.

2024

1. Book bans in political context: Evidence from US schools

   Marcelo S O Goncalves, Isabelle Langrock, Jack LaViolette, and 1 more author

   PNAS Nexus, Jun 2024

   Abs DOI

   In the 2021–2022 school year, more books were banned in US school districts than in any previous year. Book banning and other forms of information censorship have serious implications for democratic processes, and censorship has become a central theme of partisan political rhetoric in the United States. However, there is little empirical work on the exact content, predictors of, and repercussions of this rise in book bans. Using a comprehensive dataset of 2,532 bans that occurred during the 2021–2022 school year from PEN America, combined with county-level administrative data, multiple book-level digital trace datasets, restricted-use book sales data, and a new crowd-sourced dataset of author demographic information, we find that (i) banned books are disproportionately written by people of color and feature characters of color, both fictional and historical, in children’s books; (ii) right-leaning counties that have become less conservative over time are more likely to ban books than neighboring counties; and (iii) national and state levels of interest in books are largely unaffected after they are banned. Together, these results suggest that rather than serving primarily as a censorship tactic, book banning in this recent US context, targeted at low-interest children’s books featuring diverse characters, is more similar to symbolic political action to galvanize shrinking voting blocs.

2021

1. Data-Driven Implementation: The Role of Information and Technology in Public Responses to Social Emergencies

   Bruno Baranda Cardoso and Marcelo Silva Oliveira Gonçalves

   Jun 2021

   Abs DOI

   In April 2020, the Brazilian Government established an Emergency Payment to minimize the economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. This ad hoc policy strengthened the Brazilian welfare network to cover low-income, informal workers. During this period, social protection reached its historical peak in Brazil; however, to implement this massive policy, the federal government had to revisit its own institutional configuration and operations. This chapter presents an overview of this governance challenge to explain the implementation of the Emergency Payment. It assesses how the Brazilian federal government used ICT (information and communication technology) and large administrative databases to build a prompt response to an unprecedented emergency. We address this topic on two fronts. First, we develop a critical approach to discuss the limitations faced by traditional policy structures when dealing with a novel kind of public emergency. Secondly, we assess how governmental agencies managed to incorporate new technology-based routines in order to design and implement a new public policy. Most importantly, we focus on the adoption of ICT solutions in the implementation of the Emergency Payment. We argue that ICT solutions were pivotal to define (1) how many people were eligible to the new benefit; (2) how to reach these public; and (3) the design of a public policy. Besides, ICT solutions were essential in the governmental response since the usual implementation venues were blocked by lockdowns and other restrictive measures. However, these new technology-based routines interacted with preexisting infrastructure and policies. More precisely, we argue that ICT solutions require a set of informational, technological, and institutional conditions that shape the extent in which data can be helpful in designing and implementing rapid responses to large-scale crises. Moreover, we argue that, despite its positive impacts, ICT solutions may empower system-level bureaucrats and impose serious threats to accountability and democratic values.