Global changes, national development and urban poverty: Political engagement among the poor in Mexico City

As the world approaches the point in which urban poverty is to become the primary characteristic of global poverty by 2030, understanding the drivers, contexts, and conditions for urban poverty is increasingly urgent. This dissertation contributes to such needed understandings by carrying out an historical, multi-scalar analysis of the politics of urban poverty within the context of urban and global restructuring. In Mexico City, where vast wealth has been generated in some sectors, poverty has been chronic and increasing. In an effort to explore the fundamental drivers behind poverty, the point of departure for this research is that the global institutional context of political and economic neoliberalism penetrates the context in which urban poverty is produced and resisted at the local level, and that urban poverty is not the result of isolated urban phenomena, but is a reflection of unequal power relations in need of political analysis. Contextualized in extensive literature on political and economic transformations in Mexico from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, this study contributes original insight into the political opportunities and barriers experienced among low-wage civil society organizations, obtained through in-depth interviews, to uncover the meaning of political action. In answering the research question of how political agency among low-wage groups in Mexico City changed during this era of transformation, the dissertation also offers reflections on the theoretical boundaries of International Development Studies and International Relations and gives reason to look beyond them in order to place up-scale poverty from a local to a global phenomenon.