Credit governance of housing and the institutional production of housing access in Ecuador

Abstract This article examines how housing access in Ecuador was reorganised around mortgage credit between 2023 and 2026. Using an instrumental case study, it combines an institutional analysis of seven policy instruments with a critical discourse analysis of the regulatory texts that introduce them. Interest-rate subsidies, public lending, down-payment subsidies and public–private co-financing work as a connected regime. The regime is stratified: full subsidies are reserved for households in poverty identified through the Registro Social, while households above that threshold are directed to credit, whether partly subsidised or not. Access to credit depends on passing a lender's credit assessment and paying a down payment, the partial subsidy adds an income ceiling, and lending by the social security bank also requires a contribution record that is longer for workers without an employer. With 52.8 per cent of employed people working in the informal sector, these conditions can leave many households outside the credit-based instruments. The regulatory texts invoke the constitutional right to adequate housing while addressing beneficiaries as credit subjects. The article proposes credit governance of housing as an analytical concept for regimes in which the state organises access by structuring households' capacity to borrow. Because the evidence is documentary, the findings describe how the regime is designed, not how households experience it.