Happiness is Like Water in a Net:
 Presentation notes on the Porto Alegre Participatory Budget 
by Sergio Baierle

CIDADE, Centro de Assessoria e Estudos Urbanos, is a small NGO working in Porto Alegre, South Brazil in research, advocacy and empowerment concentrating on the two main areas of urban reform and local democracy.  CIDADE has been working directly with the participatory process since 1994, with support from MISEREOR/Germany, as well as researching it from its very beginning a decade ago.

Tolstoy once said that happiness is like water in a net. When you bring the net out, it loses its density.  The same happens to the democratic process. You can sell its basic rules (regular elections, freedom of speech and organization, rule of law), but you can’t sell its flesh. You can’t have an entire society reproduced.

According to our view, Participatory Budgeting is not only a government program, we think of it as part of a broader process, the building of a new social contract. It combines a structure and a social process, which involves:

  • The cultural and institutional changes Brazil has facing since transition from Authoritarian Rule;

  • The special learning capacity the Worker Party has developed in South Brazil (different from Sao Paulo and Rio, for example), building internal democracy due to absence of a dominant group (despite nowadays it’s risking to be broken);

  • A large tradition of Neighborhood Organization since the fifties, when the first slums appeared in Porto Alegre;

  • The major political parties giving up large-scale active hegemonic actions (exchanged by big media effects and economic governance), so common people have been relatively “free” from traditional clienteles and populism and became available for new political ties (hegemonic actions are understood here in the Gramsci sense, i.e., as build on the basis of an active citizenship).

  • The tremendous lack of city access (in terms of sewage, pavement, housing, land, transport, health care centers, primary schools, job and cultural opportunities, etc.) poor people face in 1/3 of Porto Alegre urban area;

  •  The courage of City Hall authorities (Popular Front) raising local taxes paid by rich people (on properties and services) and then providing enough funds to finance a cycle of investments in the poorest areas of the city;

As a process, Participatory Budgeting has two main features:

q       People make the rules they agree to be submitted to (what means conflict as a permanent part of its day-by-day life)

q       People, especially working class people, for the first time in our history of exclusion, of four hundred years of slavery and a century of Authoritarian or Military Rule, conquered the right and the freedom to act as an active public in the political arena (the “conquered” is because Participatory Budgeting has not emerged in the political scene as a program, it emerged as an answer to social movements demands on transparency and popular control over the city budget)

q       Since just two years ago, a similar process is occurring at the state level (raising the scale of political tension to an unimagined gradient

So, what are this working class public doing with the city and state budget?  They are using it to recreate themselves as a renewed civil society.  They inverted budget priorities; they gave support to the reform of the local tax system (as mentioned before) ─ of course the major part of the tax system is located at federal level and very difficult to transform; they have frozen expenditures on support areas of the City Hall bureaucracy and concentrate the increases obtained in the budget on the target areas (water supply, sewage, housing, pavement, health, education, social care), as the graph shows.


So we reached paradise on earth, an island in the neoliberal desert?  There is almost 100% coverage of water supply, electricity, public transport, primary school and garbage collection, our sewage service covers ¾ of the city and our public health system works (about collapsing, but it works). However, one third of Porto Alegre citizens still live in bad housing conditions.  Almost 20% of the active economic population face unemployment. The mass of wages decreased and most of the jobs are informal ones. And, sure, violence and drug dealing has not decreased.  Besides that, we still face a serious ethnical prejudice, specially considering unemployment and wage levels. Despite the participation of women in the economic and educational system shows improvements, male chauvinist practices at work and inside the families are common.

PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING could transform the quality of city services and it offers opportunities for compensations from social inequalities and perhaps it makes possible to establish tensions at the federal level to complain about the lack of effective federal social policies, BUT IT ONLY TOUCHES the unfairness social fabric.

What are the challenges Cidade have in our learning agenda:

HOW TO DEAL WITH “SHADOWING” PROCESS?  As Participatory Budgeting grew up, it tangencies other spaces, not only other powers like Legislative and Justice, but also inside the Executive Branch. We have in Porto Alegre something like 35 councils. More than 1 council for each department of the City Hall. It’s a participatory fever. As you can imagine, many times the councils have conflicting decisions. Besides that, we don’t have enough community representatives to participate volunteer in all these councils. If you only consider the Budget Council, each member has an average of 17 hours a week attending official and/or community meetings.

HOW TO ENSURE A DEMOCRATIC MANAGEMENT OF PUBLIC RESOURCES BY THE NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATIONS?

  • Crèches

  • Literacy popular schools

  • Garbage recycling Cooperatives

  • Housing Cooperatives

  • Income Generation Initiatives

How to deal with a new social economy that relies on public support.
How could we guarantee that communities will manage public money with transparency and in the interest of the public will? If  we increase bureaucratic controls, the poorest among the poor will find it difficult, time eating, to maintain accountability and if they have to pay professionals, their costs will increase vis-à-vis the benefits they’re supposed to assure to their communities.

HOW TO DEAL WITH MASSIVE PARTICIPATION AT LOCAL AND STATE LEVEL?

v     How to disseminate relevant information?

v     How to empower the newcomers and prevent of manipulation from the side of the old ones?

v     How to guarantee people from different parts of the state to meet and not only the ones with time and money to displace themselves without risking to loose their jobs

HOW TO ARTICULATE DEMOCRATICALLY ALL THE PARTICIPATORY EXPERIENCES IN BRAZIL?

v     Nowadays we have a lot of research job at the academic level, but it’s impossible to have legitimated articulations did only through NGOs. It doesn’t make sense to engage in old fashion articulations, which were supposed to help rooted and vivid movements, but that have produced instead, most of the time, bureaucratic committees.