PARTICIPATIVE GOVERNANCE
CPI The Lebanese Center for Public Information
PARTICIPATIVE
GOVERNANCE
    A case of successful participative governance in
    Porto Alegre, Brazil (part one)

    Introduction: The Participative Budget Process

    As one Porto Alegre woman said, ‘a good thing about Brazilians is that we
    have the courage to try’.

    From very modest beginnings, the Participative Budget process started to
    mobilize the citizens of Porto Alegre and their communities throughout the city,
    but most especially, in the poorest areas.  Every year, it grew.

     By 1994, 11 thousand people were participating, then 14 thousand in 1995,
    and 50,000 in 2003. With the additional participation of over a thousand
    societies, business, professional associations and special interest groups,
    over a hundred thousand persons out of a population of 1.3 Million were now
    co-creating and supervising the spending of the city’s Annual Budget.

    Moreover, by 2004, some form of the Participative Budget was being
    implemented in 194 cities and several states in Brazil.

     There are also PB experiments. in Buenos Aires, Rio Cuarto and Rosario in
    Argentina, Montevideo in Uruguay, and some of the major cities in Peru,
    Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, and El Salvador.

     In severely modified forms they have even spread to Africa, Asia, Europe, the
    UK and Canada. (Note by CPI: WHEN WILL LEBANON’S TURN COME?)

     By 2004, the citizens who took part in the Participative Budget process were
    allocating 15 – 20% of the city’s annual income.

    The nine-month process involves hundreds of meetings, tens of thousands of
    participants, hundreds of millions of dollars and reams of papers. It was
    managed by a large team of administrators, publicists and facilitators.

     When I visited Porto Alegre there were about 30 full-time employees in the
    central office and a similar number working at neighbourhood and regional
    levels. There are also a number of independent urban consultancies that work
    more or less full-time to help local people make their projects a reality.

16. Porto Alegre, in Brazil
    How the Participative Budget process works

     The process starts in the early Summer, November and December, (remember we are in
    the Southern hemisphere) with a searching review of the progress of the projects that were
    approved in the previous year.

     The citizens also put forward suggestions for how to improve the Participative Budget’s
    effectiveness in the light of the previous year’s events.

     When the Participative Budgets started they were quite simple. Within a few years,
    however, the annual reviews had caused them to be extensively modified and expanded so
    as to handle the diversity of the issues involved and the life-circumstances of the
    participants.

    Consequently, the Participative Budget process now has a complex matrix structure. In
    January and February, the timetables and structure of the current year’s Participative
    Budget processes are announced.

     At street level, small groups all over the city small groups of citizens are putting together
    proposals for nurseries or street lighting or new bus routes or some other small facility that
    will improve the quality of their lives.

    Over the next few weeks, they – and similar groups - take their proposals to one of
    hundreds of community meetings at which they are prioritized and put forward for approval
    at one of the City’s big Regional events that will be attended by 1000 – 2000 citizens and
    organizations.

    The city is divided into sixteen regions. Each Region gets part of the available annual
    allocation. The poorer, the more deprived the Region, the greater its allocation.

     The regional events not only select projects for further consideration within the Regional
    priorities, they also elect Regional Counsellors whose job it will be to oversee the whole
    process.
    How the participative budget process works (contd.)

    To ensure that the projects chosen for financing meet the needs of the citizens, they are
    weighted according to whether or not they satisfy a set of carefully developed social and
    technical criteria.

     The first stage is completed when certain projects have been selected for further
    development.

     For the next stage, the proposers start to work with independent specialists and city
    officials to produce the costing, timings, technical specifications, legal, regulatory and
    human requirements for turning their basic concept into a reality.

     In parallel with the processes for allocating funds to specific local projects, other
    assemblies take decisions on the funding of city-wide investments under the following
    headings (or “Themes”): Education Leisure and Cultural Facilities: Public Health and
    Social Welfare: Public Transport and Circulation: Economic Development and Taxation:
    City Organization and Urban Development.

    The two processes start to come together between July and September and then, in
    December, a final list of local and city-wide projects is formally approved and the funds
    allocated accordingly.

     Initially, the process was dominated by the poorest people and the middle-classes
    seemed not to be interested. With the introduction of the Thematic processes in 1994,
    however, the interest of the middle classes increased markedly and they are now very
    adequately represented in the process. Moreover, in a highly machismo culture, it is
    notable that more than half the participants are women.