Is it possible to motivate front-line bureaucrats to exert effort in their work without relying on traditional punitive forms of oversight? We examine the motivation and performance of school principals in their administration of a free meal program targeted at school children in an Argentine province. We work with the provincial auditing body to implement an encouragement design in which some principals are offered the opportunity to volunteer for an audit. We expect that volunteering will increase intrinsic and extrinsic motivation as well as school-level outcomes. Preliminary results suggest that the intervention increased principals’ intrinsic motivation with respect to the meal program and increased the likelihood principals report that the opinion of the auditing office is important to them. We find no effect on extrinsic motivation or self-reported hours worked.

Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University. Her research explores sources of variation in the quality of representation, government accountability to citizens, and public opinion in lower and middle-income democracies. Her book, "Curbing Clientelism in Argentina: Politics, Poverty, and Social Policy" was published with Cambridge University Press (2014) and received the Donna Lee Van Cott Award from the Political Institutions Section of the Latin American Studies Association. She has published articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Politics in Latin America, and elsewhere. Current projects include a field experiment on bureaucratic oversight in Argentina,
large surveys on citizen oversight of corruption, and a conceptual and empirical project on political knowledge and access to state services.

Rebecca Tarlau will speak about how the over the past thirty-five years the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), one of the largest social movements in Latin America, has become famous globally for its success in occupying land, winning land rights, and developing alternative economic enterprises for over a million landless workers. The movement has also linked education reform to its vision for agrarian reform by developing pedagogical practices for schools that foster activism, direct democracy, and collective forms of work. In her talk Occupying Schools, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education, Rebecca Tarlau will explore how MST activists have pressured municipalities, states, and the federal government to implement their educational program in public schools and universities, affecting hundreds of thousands of students. Contrary to the belief that movements cannot engage the state without demobilizing, Tarlau will show how educational institutions can help movements recruit new activists, diversify their membership, increase technical knowledge, and garner political power. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic field work, Tarlau will document how the MST operates in different regions working at times with or through the state, at other times outside it and despite it. She argues that activists are most effective using contentious co-governance, combining disruption and public protest with institutional pressure to defend and further their goals. Through an examination of the potentials, constraints, failures, and contradictions of the MST's educational struggle, her talk will offer insights into the ways education can promote social change, the interactions between social movements and states, and the barriers and possibilities for similar reforms in democratic contexts throughout the world. Rebecca Tarlau is an Assistant Professor of Education and Labor and Employment Relations at the Pennsylvania State University, affiliated with the Lifelong Learning and Adult Education Program, the Comparative and International Education program, and the Center for Global Workers’ Rights. She has a Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Berkeley (2014) and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University (2015-2017). Her ethnographic research agenda has three broad areas of focus: (1) Theories of the state and state-society relations; (2) Social movements, critical pedagogy, and learning; (3) Latin American education and development.

Environmental education is essential in the diffusion of the ethics, values, and skills that are critical to sustainable transformations. This talk presents the experience of non-formal environmental education approaches held in schools in the Petrópolis region of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil between 1997–2016. The talk intends to firstly convey the commonly identified environmental sustainability challenges that the communities of the Petrópolis region are facing. Secondly, the talk aims to convey key insights on how non-formal environmental education practices can strengthen gardening skills, environmental ethics, and sustainable food practices. These approaches have the potential to enhance the capacity of students toward sustainable transformations through encouraging them to be engaged with local social-environmental challenges. Finally, it hopes to add new insights to the growing literature on, and practice of, non-formal environmental education, and it is hoped, to inspire new educational approaches among sustainability educators. Átila Calvente, PhD student at the Public Policy Program, UFRJ/Rio de Janiero. Átila has been working for over 20 years in Petrópolis with neighborhood schools in the favelas and the rural countryside, bringing farmers and disadvantaged children together to plant school vegetable gardens and learn about the origin of the foods they eat, and how it relates to their own lifestyles as they grow. In addition, he has experience among settlers in the Amazon, ranchers and indians on the Ilha do Bananal in Tocantins, as well as his own experience as an organic coffee and dairy farmer in the Atlantic Forest in the Serrana area of Rio.