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external actors. In that sense civil society has played a secondary role in the policy process
through a more informal participation.
3.2. Porto
Alegre
An important example for the potential of participatory settings in local and regional politics is
the Participatory Budget (PB), where the city-administration of Porto Alegre, the capital city
of Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of Brazil, implemented an international “best
practice model” in 1989 (Novy/Leubolt 2005; Leubolt 2006). The question of participation in
decision-making was first taken up by neighbourhood movements in the 1970s. Residents,
mainly of irregular, poorer districts, rebelled against the government's lack of interest in acting
for their benefit. Their primary demands were investments in urban infrastructure and services
as well as the autonomy of neighbourhood initiatives. They criticized the city government and
underscored their demands through spectacular actions, such as roadblocks. They linked their
material demands to the discourse of rights. These initiatives were brought together through
the active civil society and also by the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT).
Because of this background, these neighbourhood movements were already particularly well
developed during the democratisation process in the 1980s. It was within this context that
these movements collectively voiced the demand to democratise the budget (Fedozzi 2000),
which was realized after Olívio Dutra, the PT's candidate for the mayor's office won the
municipal elections in 1988.
Since its initial phase, PB has never been understood as a completed finalised concept, but as
one that was to develop through conflicts, as a step-by-step institutionalisation of popular
participation in local politics, combined with ongoing participant-oriented evaluation and
modification of the process. PB has been conceptualised as an experiment which divides
power between the government and the people. PB takes place in an annual cycle. Instruments
of direct democracy are combined with committees of representatives elected from amongst
the participants. This expands and decisively strengthens democratic participation in the local
state’s economic policymaking process. The unique feature of this model is its participatory
decision-making processes. Therefore, the participants not only make suggestions but are also
responsible for the ranking of the proposed projects that takes place in assemblies both on a
regional and on a thematic basis. During this process, the participants of the direct democratic
plenaries vote representatives from amongst themselves who will take care of further
negotiations with the municipal government. The basic structure of participation also includes
an annual review and any modification of the procedural rules for participatory budgeting.
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This allows the committees to adapt constantly to new conditions and allows for an on-going
learning process. Participatory budgeting is an instrument of decentralisation that successfully
avoids spatial fragmentation. The city is the sole local authority in charge of local revenue
collection.
8
It is, however, divided administratively into 16 areas which are the decentralised
units of the PB. Central, transparent and publicly discussed indicators
for the allocation of the
local state’s resources among the areas are decisive instruments in ensuring distributive
equality. In Porto Alegre, civic participants also contribute to making democratic decisions on
distribution criteria. Because the distribution criteria are renegotiated each year, the system is
flexibly adapted to changing needs. The decisions made within the framework of PB soon
showed positive material effects. Particularly between 1989 and 1996, the city’s basic
infrastructure markedly improved. The percentage of households with access to the sewage
network rose from 46 per cent in 1989 to 85 per cent in 1996, and access to running water rose
from 80 per cent to 98 per cent during the same period (UNDP 2002: 81). There were also
noticeable improvements in education, as the number of children in public schools more than
doubled between 1989 and 1999. Efforts to satisfy basic needs were reflected in Porto
Alegre’s Human Development Index of 0.865, which was among the highest of all the
Brazilian capital cities in 2000 (PNUD 2003).
In a comprehensive study on the redistributive effects of participatory budgeting, Marquetti
(Marquetti 2003) proves that a greater amount of public resources per person is invested in
poorer areas than in richer areas, empirical studies have shown that social groups that have
been largely excluded from public life – particularly the poor and women – have profited from
the introduction of PB. Another important aspect of PB in Porto Alegre is that a majority of
the participants are from the lower classes. In addition, there is above average participation
from women and ethnic minorities (Baierle 2002). Therefore, the case of Porto Alegre is
different from others, where the number of participants decreases during the process and only
an elite holds on (e.g. in Denmark, c.f. Pløger 2007: 3). Discussions in the public sphere also
served to broaden appreciation of the needs of others, thus building solidarity, as Roselaine,
one of the participants, describes:
8
The question of resources was very important in Porto Alegre. With only 3.2 per cent of the municipal budget available for investments
and little experience in planning by the government, hardly any of the investments decided on in the first participatory budget were
actually constructed. Frustration led to a decline in participation between 1989 and 1990. Threatened by these problems, the government
began to introduce administrative reforms in order to be better prepared for the demands of participatory government. They worked on
the co-operation of the different administrative departments as well as on an institutional setting. In 1988, a new constitution was
approved which decentralised resources and responsibilities to the municipalities. A progressive tax reform further increased distributable
resources leading to a boost in the share of investments in the municipal budget from 3.2 per cent in 1989 to 11.2 per cent in 1990 and
17.5 per cent in 1991. After the PT-candidate lost the elections in 2004, resources for the PB got scarce again, which led to a decline in
participation again and substantively threatens the continuation of the process (cf. Baierle 2005).