In the last decade Portugal had three governments with very different political orientations and proposals for the legislative organization of society, each one claiming to initiate a process of transformative politics that would have a positive impact upon Portuguese society. Social policies, legislation on labor, health, education, housing and security have been profoundly altered with each legislative change, impacting in different ways upon the institutions concerned and upon people's lives.

Furthermore, the economic crisis has engendered a crisis in the European model, which are inter-related and reveal a breakdown of social reproduction which puts into question redistribution models both at the macro (market, State), meso (mediating institutions and actors) and micro-scales of social interaction (families, social networks).

LIVEPOLITICS focus on the different ways citizens’ experience the policies which govern their lives in a daily basis, how they implement them and what kind of negotiations can take place in the framework of moral economies.  Through a detailed examination of the ways by which specific actors in diverse sectors of society experience legislation and policy orientations through a range of institutions, this project focuses on how perceptions of the legitimacy of policies emerge through policy implementation and negotiation within a wider analytical context of the workings moral economies. The project will focus on:

1)  Livelihoods, policies, everyday life strategies;

2) Grassroots economics - definition, value and care regimes, interpretation and ways out of crisis;

3) Public policies, from conception, implementation and impact upon institutions and citizens.

The project aims at reflecting on how different sectors of the Portuguese society experience their livelihoods through a permanent relation with state institutions throughout a decade of profound sociopolitical transformations. The strategies to overcome difficults of provision under an austerity regime that hinders the access to basic social facilities (education and health, p ex.), the creation of new forms of interrelations and support between generations, (material and social) and new forms of solidarity (formal and informal) are the central analytical challenge of LIVEPOLITICS. Our objective is to understand how politics, and in a certain way, the state, is always present in people’s livelihoods.

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 IR: Antónia Pedroso de Lima  | Co-IR Catarina Frois

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