|
Avenues for
Input into the Brazilian Budget Process and Budget Trainings Let me begin by providing some overall context. Whereas social movements were the results of the expressions of marginalised sectors of the population, NGOs are a result of a process of the re-democratisation of the country, giving technical assistance to social movements. During the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, NGOs also began to play a role in political movements. So our work in terms of training is to give support to the social movements as well as NGOs. Their participation in budget issues is different. Whereas the social movements exert pressure in terms of approval of certain aspects of the budget, the NGOs carry out analysis of the budgets and develop proposals. In the morning, Joćo and Leo from IBASE spoke about two aspects of budget work: one was the participatory budgets, and the other one was the political councils; and I would like to add another one, which is the power of the legislature. Legislative power for us could become an important vehicle for participation, because it is easier for the executive than for the legislature to resist the pressures that are coming out of the different social sectors. In Brazil we could say that the relationship established between the government and social sectors is one of clientele. So the demands of the social movements in terms of participation are frequently rejected. That is why the councils often have problems regarding their participation in the budgets because they are created on the basis of laws that have been proposed and approved by the Legislature irrespective of the pressure of the civil society. So the councils, the participatory budget and the legislative power are the three institutional channels that exist to be used by Brazilian society to influence budget decisions. My organization (the Institute for Social-Economic Studies-INESC) works to inform legislative decisions at the national level, as well as to inform civil society about the legislative process. We have been working on social public policies since 1979 and with budgetary issues since 1993. We try to have input budget into decisions and to make the budget more transparent and democratic, by affecting the decisions of the Legislature. There are different kinds of councils for different issues, like children and adolescents, socio-assistance, education and health. These different types of councils have been set up in order to deal with these different sectors. The participatory budget process is a call of the executive power for participation of citizens. Participatory budget and councils are acting on the phase when the budget is planned by the executive power. In both cases civil society comes to act and tries to advance their views and to change the expenditure. But even the councils and the participatory budget must go to the legislative power to negotiate over the final outcome. I think there is a problem with councils and the participatory budget approach because the legislature can change their decisions. That’s why in the morning Joćo and Leo said that the people who participate also go to the legislature to apply pressure. We have some experiences that show that even governments of the Labour party can prioritize the expenditure that the legislative power decided, to the detriment of the expenditure that the participatory budget decided. There is also the influence of the political parties on the legislative process. For example, when the Labour Party wins municipality power, they usually don’t win the majority of the chairs at the legislative power; so the participatory budget also can be a way to pressure the majority of opposition, to not change the executive proposal. At the same time it’s a great experience. In the case of Porto Alegre’s participatory budget they have 20,000 people participating in the process of the assemblies and there are more than 500 delegates who form a participatory budget council and decide about the expenditure. The councils of policies are the way established by the law to improve the participation of the civil society in the formulation of public policies. They exist at the national level, at the state level, and at the municipal level. The councils are usually composed of representatives of the government and the civil society, each one with 50% of the positions. But the executive power usually manipulates the composition of the councils or don’t appoint representatives that can decide about policies. So in practice the councils frequently have little power and even in the case of the budget they also have to negotiate their decisions with the true decision makers. But there is no doubt that the councils of policies are a strong step towards transparency and participation. I have been a participant of the National Council of Socio-Assistance in Brazil for two years as a representative of INESC. We now have in Brazil more than 3,000 councils of socio-assistance that have been created by the law in the cities (to receive budget funds from the federal level it’s necessary to create a council), but in fact not more than 1,000 are working. We don’t know how many of them are really working with budgets. But these councils only look for the part of the budget concerned with their own policies. The participatory budget is also deciding only part of the budget but its scope can encompass all types of policies. It depends on the experience; it depends on the city. In some cases the society that is participating can only decide 3% or 5% of the expenditure; in other cases they decide a bigger portion of the budget. There also is important information about the quality of the results of the participation. In Porto Alegre, in three or four years, investments increased from 7% to 14% of the expenditure after they began with participatory budget. In other words they inverted the priorities. There is no participatory budget mechanism at the national level of government. So our work is done with the councils and with the legislative power. At IBASE they work with children’s councils; at INESC we work with Socio-assistance councils and with the National Council of Children’s Rights. In our work on budgets within the legislative decision process, we increased some expenditures for important programmes such as for children. Other social movements that didn’t work with budgets before saw our effectiveness and asked us to train them. There are important movements in Brazil to defend black people; and we organized one training last year, and we are organising four more this year for this specific social movement that wants to participate and that has alternative policies to propose. Many social movements and NGOs don’t know how to see if in the budget, the government is really doing what they said they were going to do. Because if NGOs don’t know how to read the budget, the government can just say: "we are going to do it" or "we will put it in the budget." They can say a lot of things without being held accountable. We also must know how the budget works, not only to read the budget, but also how the process of decision-making operates and how the government, legislative power or executive power is going to implement the new policies or new programmes in the budget. INESC is an NGO but we also work in coalitions with other social movements. In these coalitions we discuss, propose and go to the legislative power with proposals. Sometimes the social movements go with us; sometimes not. But at the Brazilian National Congress many deputies and senators know our work, know that we are in coalitions and know that when INESC says that the social movement thinks a particular way, that it’s true. Because if we say something that the social movements don’t agree with, we are going to be in trouble afterwards when the coalition meets. Participation in our training activities consists of members of these coalitions, the members of the councils, and these new actors that want to work with the budget. Our training has some objectives. First, participants must learn how to read the budget. Second they learn about the process of decision making. It’s very important for us, because if civil society knows the budget process then it can have the opportunity to make its input. Sometimes we discuss in the course how to change the process to improve this participation. And lastly, we provide training about the relationship between policies and budgets. This is very important because sometimes it seems that we are just talking about budget, and we are not talking only about the budget; we are also talking about policies. The budget is a way to influence the policies of the government and this is very important for us. But we have some problems with our training. Even after the training, social movements don’t have the structure to work with the budget. So many times we go there and train them, but they lack the structure or the human resources to input the government and to participate all the time in the decision-making process, and we can not always be of ongoing assistance. It would be very good if we could train them and we could help them every time after that, but it’s not possible for us because we are a small NGO and we are training social movements in so many states far from our city. Our base is in Brasilia and it’s very difficult to be with them all the time. In our experience we see that it is more important that the training teaches them to know how things work, to understand when the government is negotiating with them about policies than to prepare them to make a sophisticated budget analysis. They just need to understand when the government is saying the truth and when the government is lying. Sometimes it’s so difficult to teach someone who only studied two or three years in his life about how the budget is organised and the composition of the budget and the classifications. We have so many classifications in Brazil. It can be very easy to follow once one understands it, but it’s not so easy to learn it. Sometimes we have to develop a big exercise to make it understandable for people who don’t have a high education level. It’s one of the characteristics of our training. I’d like to finish by saying that in regards to these different kinds of participation in Brazil -– each one has good features and bad features. As far as participatory budget I spoke about two problems; sometimes the expenditure of the participatory budget does not come to be a reality. And if promises are not kept, nobody believes any more in the participatory budget process. So if government wants to begin this process, it must be very careful about this kind of problem, because a lot of times in the first year they plan big revenue and they don’t have this revenue and they don’t make the expenditure of participatory budget. That is a problem. For the social organization, if participatory budget makes the assemblies with the people and calls the people and 20,000 people go to the meetings to know about budget, sometimes it makes the organizations of social movements weaker because they don’t have a representative in this kind of budget decision-making. The representation is one-person, one-vote and the organizations are not considered in this process. We have some organizations that say it is bad for them, this kind of process; even when we have a big participation. In the councils we have the other problem. The organizations are there, but the people are not, so sometimes they can use it to their own interest and not in the interest of the people. They can use it to approve programmes in which they will spend the money and, with this, they will be a bigger and stronger organization. They forget that they are there to discuss policies for the people – marginalised people. In the legislative power we have another kind of problem. The legislature can change some parts of the budget in Brazil but not all parts of the budget. At the same time our executive and legislators also have a relationship with social movements based on clientele. They don’t want participation; they want to say, `I’m giving this to you.’ It’s difficult to participate with deputies. In Brazil they decide only about expenditure in maximum detail and they don’t see all the numbers of the budget. The big numbers are the result of the little changes they do to give money to their clientele – people and clientele objectives. So when they are discussing the budget in the Legislature they are not examining the overall merits of the budget; they are looking for their own details and for what affects their clientele. QUESTION: I was particularly interested in the exercises you do. Could you describe the exercises, particularly the ones for those with little education? ANSWER: We really need three days to make a good training, but we never have that. The maximum we have had was two days. But sometimes we must spend one afternoon just to discuss one policy . We want to propose one policy. Okay! What kind of policy? E.g. Black people have trouble with anaemia. It’s a genetic enemy for black people. In the last training we proposed a policy for this problem. All afternoon we discussed how to classify things; and we have four or five different classifications. We have PPBS - the nature of the expenditure with the modality of expenditure with the revenue. Each expenditure in Brazil has the indication of what kind of revenue by a numbered revenue code. So we decided the policy and we started to classify one by one, one kind by one kind, to work with them until we finished; and we finished a proposal about this. I don’t know if you can understand how difficult it is to do this. We need 3, 4 or even 5 hours to do only this kind of exercise. That’s why we need more than two days because it takes one afternoon to do this kind of exercise. QUESTION: If in your training you work oftentimes with people in social movements, I could imagine that they would be interested in exploring ways to reform local governments – not just to understand the budget. Do you also do training that would cover issues like the bidding and purchasing functions of a local government, or do you give training that would help people to monitor the way in which local government spends their money over time? ANSWER: No, our focus is on policy, not on the operation of local government. But we do discuss the law of the budget decision process. We have a federal law about this – and we have proposals to change it. In these meetings and training sessions we are always trying to say that we have this project in the National Congress and that we must participate in this process, because they will change this law, and this change could either be good for us and our lobby, or not. We are always discussing the nature of the decision-making process and how we can change it, but to change it, we must change the federal law. Even when we are doing training at the local level, they can change it. QUESTION: When you were talking about the nature of the different kinds of organizations you said that the participatory budget has its `one-person, one-vote’. So in Porto Alegre you have 20,000 people as individuals participating. When you talked about the councils, the social assistance councils, the education councils, you said those tend to be dominated by people who represent organizations. You have all these different forms of organizations trying to affect the budget. You have councils, you have the participatory budget. You have the legislature. You have the executive. Do all these cancel each other out, or does it produce the perfect budget? ANSWER: It’s not a perfect budget. In Brazil the budget is not mandatory. It’s an authorisation for spending money. We are describing the process of training to provide input into when the government is defining the law of budget - that is this authorisation. After that everybody here wants to see how the expenditure goes all through the year because the executive branch or the executive financial branch gives the last decision. They work with the budget and they decide the priorities when they give the money to each secretary, to each programme. So our work at INESC is monitoring the budget of each programme. When the executive branch makes its proposal, we register that; when the legislative power decides, we register that; and throughout the year we are registering and looking at how the spending is going. The first priority at the federal level is to pay the debt. Second, is health. The third is the programme of food for schools. QUESTION: If I understood you correctly, you work more on policies; and I hope the experiences are contrary to what a person like me has. The policies, in a country like mine, are good intentions of the government, but the government acts contrary to the policy. In some cases, you have bad law but a very good policy. The policy doesn’t empower. It is not an instrument to implement. So you find a gap – you could discuss a policy, prepare it, spend a lot of time and effort on it, and find it not being implemented in a true sense on the ground – even through a budget or by enacting a separate law. ANSWER: When we look at the law of budget, we see that the expenditure is expected to occur in a certain way. When we look at the final expenditure, we see that it happens in a different way. In Brazil we do it for five years - historical analysis – we will see that the plan has one tendency and the expenditure has another one. Why? Because they never say when the law is in debate at the congress that they spent so much money on debts. They don’t want to recognise it. So they have a plan and they know the plan for the population. But they don’t announce the expenditure. Our work is to see how things are going – with children, rights of Indian population, environment, land policy, grand reform and social assistance. We are trying to develop a global vision of expenditure to social programs, because we don’t have this. We are looking for these policies. We are trying to develop this model to analyse expenditure on social programs. Sometimes the government budgets inflate revenues and expenditure, so they have great freedom to decide about expenditure because every thing is inflated. What they don’t expend, they can just deny having revenue; but they inflate the authorisation of the budget’s law to have this kind of freedom. QUESTION: Who supports your social activist training, from a financial point of view? ANSWER: For our budget project a foundation supports us financially. When we have to train, they pay certain expenses – travelling and accommodation costs. We give the training. The Secretary of Justice of the government pays for the training of black people movements in Brazil. They make an agreement with the movement and the movement provides us with the money. |
