From the time it was founded in the early 1980s, the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) has maintained that electoral success is not an end in itself but a springboard for developing radical, participatory forms of democracy that will enable the country to start redressing the enormous inequalities in Brazilian society. The city where the PT has made most advances in this sense is the city of Porto Alegre, capital city of the relatively wealthy state of Rio Grande do Sul, a busy industrial, financial and service center with a population of 1.2 million people. Porto Alegre has been continuously governed by the PT ever since a charismatic bank clerk, Olívio Dutra, was first elected mayor in 1989.
In some ways, Porto Alegre is not a typical Brazilian city, for it has always had an unusually high literacy rate; in 1991 the rate was 96 percent, well above the Brazilian average of 81 percent. But the city has not bucked the Brazilian trend of extreme social inequality: In 1981 one third of the city lived in slum areas. At the same time, 15 families own almost all the urban land available for development.
In Porto Alegre as throughout Brazil, city departments and their leading officials had vested interests in this inequality. Corruption was endemic. The local PT believed that the only chance of achieving change was to open up secretive municipal institutions, particularly their finances, to a process of popular participation. So when the PT gained control of the municipal government, it instituted the orçamento participativo, or “participatory budget” (PB). PB is a form of co-decision making, or shared power, in which local citizens take part in deciding the priorities for the municipal investment budget.
The process includes a series of public meetings or plenaries in which participants critique the results of past budgets and voice their views about what the city’s future investment priorities should be: Should, for instance, building sewers be made a priority, or would citizens rather see new schools or clinics? Plenary participants also elect delegates to regional forums, where budget priorities are further refined, and to the citywide budget council, a powerful body that negotiates the final investment priorities for the city. The budget council draws up the overall budget and puts it to the mayor and municipal council for final approval. The municipal council has never rejected an investment plan drawn up by the budget council or made any damaging amendments.
The participatory budget process is limited by the fact that it only applies to that portion of the municipal budget that is spent on new investment, now about 15 percent. (The largest chunk of the rest of the budget is spent on salaries.) And the overall budget was squeezed as the previous national government instituted neoliberal policies and cut back funding to municipalities. Over its 15 years of existence, however, the PB has opened up a state bureaucracy that is normally hidden. Such openness repels corruption and forces municipal officials and employees to be more accountable to local residents. The PB process also provides an opportunity to pursue broader social goals.
I was able to see the participatory budget process in action at a plenary in one of the city’s 16 regions. While people waited to register, a troupe of actors put on a kind of street theatre focused on local problems. To an outsider, the people streaming in seemed to be a cross-section of the community: white-haired matrons; eager schoolgirls; young rasta men; the anxious poor, many of them black; glamorous tanned student types; confident-looking middle aged men of various shades of brown. But the coordinators said that some neighborhoods were much better represented than others and the registration enabled them to identify areas, or groups of people, that were not well represented and find out why. Around 600 people had come, out of a community of 3,000. The majority attending that night were women.
A survey by CIDADE, an independent research organization, shows that a large majority of the participants at PB plenaries are unskilled workers with only a primary level of education. Over the last four years more women than men have attended the plenaries, and more women than men have been elected delegates. This is impressive for a region that is renowned throughout Brazil for its machismo. And in a city that up until recently excluded black people from the main supermarkets and from factory jobs, it is particularly noteworthy that at least one quarter of the budget council delegates are black or indigenous people.
Once the long queue of people registering had snaked its way into the hall and we were settling down in our seats, the chair asked for an indication of how many were attending their first PB meeting. Over 300 hands went up. This is quite common; new people are constantly engaging with the process. Despite a hostile local media, recent surveys show that over 85 percent of Porto Alegrans know about and support the PB. They find out about it through their neighbors and friends, through leaflets and through delegates, like the ones they were to elect at this meeting. PB itself has become a form of media.
The people crowding into the vast school hall saw the meeting as an opportunity to vent their feelings to government representatives, as well as to win over their neighbors in support of their chosen causes. A local tradition of public story telling made for a hall full of people able to narrate vivid tales of municipal failings, and two groups were particularly vociferous: The first group complained that in the previous year’s budget, sanitation had been a high priority and a lot of money had been spent on it but, fumed speaker after speaker, the problems of dirty water and open sewage remained. People from one neighborhood complained that a stream had become the local sewer; they wanted it covered so it could not be used in this way. Government officials at the meeting said that, for environmental reasons, the stream should remain a stream but they promised to clean it. Another vocal group came from a local school. This was the first budget plenary they had attended and they used it to simply shout out their complaints. Mayor Raoul Pont responded, urging them to elect a delegate, turn their complaints into proposals and negotiate for funds through the participatory budget process.
Regional delegates elected at such plenaries meet together throughout the year to iron out problems, monitor progress and encourage ideas for next year’s budget. And they keep in regular touch with the region’s two representatives to the budget council. These representatives are accountable to the regional delegates and could in theory be recalled by a specially-convened plenary, though this has yet to happen.
The municipal government holds other plenaries based around themes, bringing together people from across the city with a common interest in such areas as education, health, culture or economics. These important thematic plenaries also elect delegates to the budget council.
Delegates at both the regional and the city level are regularly under pressure from their electors. Jussara Bechstein-Silva, a charismatic leader in the poor Vila Planetário neighborhood who represents the central region on the budget council, explained: “You have to answer to local residents who are asking. ‘Why is [a project] so delayed? Why is it failing?’ And you have to answer to the council too. You are pressured on both sides.” But city officials as well as employees who work specifically with the PB process provide some support for the delegates: “Mayor Olívio Dutra came [to a meeting] one night in the pouring rain and told us to be hopeful because our construction [project] would be completed. And we had a lot of support from our lawyer,” said a woman who worked in the planning department, part of whose job was to provide the delegates with technical advice.
PB has clearly been successful in driving Porto Alegre’s municipal administration to spend the bulk of its investment budget on making the city’s poor neighborhoods fit to live in. Most social statistics indicate progress significantly ahead of other cities: 9,000 Porto Alegran families, who 12 years ago lived in shacks, now have brick housing and the legal status of these buildings has been regularized. Nearly the whole population—99 percent—has treated water; and the sewage system covers 86 percent of the city, compared with 46 percent in 1989. Over 50 schools have been built in the past ten years and truancy has fallen from 9 percent to less than 1 percent. The number of students going on to university doubled from 1989 to 1995. And a detailed analysis of the municipal budget after 1989 shows that the lower the average income of the PB region, the higher the volume of public investment per head. The report concludes that the participatory budget has functioned as “a powerful instrument of the redistribution of wealth.”
Still, there are limits to what the PB, in its current form, can do: Argues Betânia Alfonsín, a young urban planner who used to be in the local leadership of the PT and now works with movements in the favelas (shanty towns), “You cannot plan a city just on the basis of individual investments. We have to complement that by democratizing and strengthening urban planning. If not, you can get a gulf between city planning and specific investments. An example of this lack of coordination was the expansion of the sewage network. This work was not accompanied by an investment in water treatment, which has resulted in a considerable increase of untreated sewage flowing into the city’s main water source, Lake Guaíba.”
In response, municipal leaders have encouraged the urban planning department to embark on a major new initiative in participation. How exactly will the new participatory structure for urban planning link to the PB? “I’m not sure. I don’t think the government knows either,” says Alfonsín. There are some signs, however, that participatory planning is beginning to feed directly into the budget process, even becoming the basis on which delegates choose priorities.
The participatory budget can also strengthen the hand of the municipality when it wants to gain social benefits for the city from private investors. In the early 1990s, for example, the giant French supermarket chain Carrefour wanted to build a store in the North Central Region of Porto Alegre. This region has many small shopkeepers who felt their business would be threatened by the supermarket and these small entrepreneurs decided to take their concerns to the thematic PB plenary on economic policy. “We wanted to set up a committee to negotiate compensation for the small businesses in the area, as a condition [for building] the new supermarket,” said one of the activists.
The outcome was unprecedented: While normally Carrefour supermarkets rent inside spaces for around 20 local shops, the Porto Alegre committee won agreement for 40. The company also agreed to employ young people and help fund training schemes. Carrefour had never before had to make real concessions to gain entry into a new market.
But, however good and successful its municipal policies, Porto Alegre cannot wall itself off from political reality in the rest of the world: Over the last two decades, many governments have willingly reduced their capacity to meet the needs of their poor by, for example, cutting public spending and lowering taxes on the rich. Under President Lula’s predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazil’s federal government opened the national economy to the full, unrestrained impact of global deregulation, with concomitant pressures to privatize and run down the state’s social capacities. As a result, the federal government strengthened central control over public spending and cut the funds going back to the cities. Funds going to local authorities were reduced from 17 percent of the revenue received in 1990 to 14 percent in 1999. Further cuts occurred in the interim between then and Lula’s election. Under such circumstances, a single progressive adminstration like that in Porto Alegre can become unintentionally complicit in imposing on local communities the burden of clearing up the unregulated market’s social mess.
Essentially, the logic goes like this: As neoliberal policies are imposed nationally and internationally, the poor communities that make up Porto Alegre face greater and greater social problems. Their needs intensify. In the meantime, the municipal council’s budget to help meet these needs is cut. Its capacity for providing high-quality free services, such as childcare, health, education and housing, is reduced. The individual communities and neighborhoods put forward projects for solving these problems themselves. The participatory budget approves these grassroots solutions, for they fit the basic budget criteria. But what is not discussed is the quality of the service and the level of pay provided by the community project. Sérgio Baerlie, a long-time observer of the PB process, illustrates this problem with the example of community day-care centers: “The money that the municipal government needs to run by itself just one day-care center is enough to fund several, perhaps more than ten, day-care centers run by community associations, where labor costs are much lower. The result is that today Porto Alegre has 118 day-care centers run by community associations with funds from city hall.” Baerlie suggests there is a danger here of unintentionally accepting a neoliberal transference of social policy from the state to the community and in the process undermining the principle of the provision of free public services as a universal social right.
In the face of such realities, however, Porto Alegre has not only tried to use PB to spend limited funds fairly, it has also worked to increase revenue through municipal enterprises. André Passos, chief of the municipal budget planning department, points to an information technology company, originally created to administer public departments, that now sells its services to the public. The increased revenue will enable the company to invest in optical fiber technology, which will be a future source of revenue. The city’s water company is also municipally owned, and most of Porto Alegre’s buses are built by a highly successful company owned by the city council. There is also a growing network of municipally owned but cooperatively run recycling projects—all this at time when elsewhere in the world governments and corporations try to persuade us that “modernization” means privatization.
It is not an easy nor a quick process to construct the kind of participatory democracy practiced in Porto Alegre. In 1998 the PT won the elections for the government of Rio Grande do Sul, the state that has Porto Alegre as its capital. The new government began to extend PB across the state but faced resistance in many rural areas still dominated by reactionary landowners. It was unable to get the system running as effectively as it had hoped. Although other factors were involved—including bickering between different PT factions—the PT lost the state government elections in Rio Grande do Sul in October 2002. It was a bitter disappointment for the local petistas, tempering their delight at Lula’s triumph.
But in Porto Alegre, the transparency and publicly negotiated character of the rules for PB ensure that it is widely respected and supported. It is perceived to have a legitimacy distinct from the electoral institutions of the mayor and the municipal assembly. The government cannot change PB rules by its own authority—everything has to be negotiated in a process that, until the last moment before the budget is approved, is heavily weighted towards the popular participants. To close the process down now would provoke an eruption. And not just in the poor parts of town. PB is an extension of democracy, not a competing structure. It effectively makes the mayor’s electoral mandate a daily living pressure on the state apparatus.
Celso Daniel—the PT mayor of the São Paulo town of Santo André who was murdered, probably by a drug mafia, last year—believed that PB principles, so far applied only at the local level, could also be applied to the federal government, something that has gained a new relevance with Lula’s victory: “If the president of Brazil becomes committed to the participatory budget process at the central level, this could be very important for the construction of a new kind of federalism in Brazil,” he had told me. He explained how the present federal system in Brazil is “very tied to the old oligarchies, the old elites in Brazil.” Daniel, who was a close Lula adviser, would undoubtedly have held a key position in the PT government.
Meanwhile, the local success of the participatory budget process has moved the Brazilian Workers’ Party on to brand new political ground: In contrast to the conventional model in which a winning political party controls, or perceives itself to control, a state apparatus, PB has unleashed a more potent, more broadly based, means of controlling a key part of the state. Traditionally a party that had won a local election, in this case the PT, would play the leadership role in the formation of municipal policy and strategy. The party would choose a direction, stay a step or two ahead, collectively develop a clear vision, and be, in effect, the brains behind the process. Under PB, instead of monopolizing the role of conscious political brain, the PT has encouraged many political “brains,” many self-conscious agents of social change. This implicitly challenges the nature—though as yet not the fact—of the PT’s leadership, in so far as the PT continues to act like a conventional political party.
Some of the potential tensions are apparent in Porto Alegre: When the PT came to office and turned to its own supporters to join the government, about 10 percent of the local membership moved into government jobs. This process led early in the life of the local PT government to what experienced PT member Luciano Brunet described as “a rupture between party and government, which weakened the party. At times it seemed as if people in government didn’t care what the party thought.”
This rift is still felt. There is a growing gulf between party members inside and outside the government.The weakness of the links between party and government except at election time has been reinforced, Luciano feels, by changes in party governance which made the PT more like other traditional social democratic parties, with elections for delegates to the party conference and other leadership positions held only once every three years. Luciano and others believe the PT should be moving in another direction, to become more pluralistic, more closely connected with the NGOs and campaigns that many petistas are a part of anyway. “If you want to have a participatory democracy, you need a party which reflects it,” concludes Luciano. In his view, if the PT is a conscious brain, it needs to adapt to the fact that in creating a source of democratic power beyond the state, it has dismantled its monopoly of radical brainpower.
Olívio Dutra, the Porto Alegre mayor who began the PB process there, is now serving as minister for urban policy in Lula’s cabinet. If it is still unclear whether or how the new government could apply PB principles on a national level, PB’s appeal to those who have already taken part in it is evident: Says Porto Alegre urban planner Betânia Alfonsín, “Participation is addictive.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hilary Wainwright is the editor of Red Pepper http://www.redpepper.org.uk, the London-based independent magazine of the green and radical left. This article is adapted from her book Reclaim the State, Adventures in Popular Democracy, to be published by Verso in May.
