Home > The Citizens of Porto Alegre
Democracy Parties South/Latin America
In which Marco borrows bus fare and enters politics
by Gianpaolo Baiocchi
Marco is a self-employed handyman in his mid-30s who
moved to the city of Porto Alegre from the Brazilian
countryside eight years ago. A primary-school-educated
son of a farmer, he’d had few opportunities in his
small town and had heard about the city’s generous
social services. He borrowed money for bus fare and
landed in Porto Alegre, where he found construction
work. But when his wages wouldn’t cover rent he headed
for one of the squatter settlements on the outskirts of
the city. He soon moved in with a companheira who sewed
clothes and ironed from home. In time his life became
more settled, with incremental improvements to the
house, small but growing savings, and brisk business
owing to his good reputation in the community. Marco’s
story of migration, squatting, and survival was
unremarkable—until he attended a local meeting on how
the city government should invest its money in the
region.
It is not surprising that Brazilians are, by and large,
uninvolved in civic life. Their cities are among the
most violent, economically unequal, and problem-ridden
in the world. While the elite live in fortified
enclaves, one fourth of Brazilian city dwellers live in
makeshift slum housing, often without access to any
social services and dependent on patrons for survival.
These settlements, which make up as much as a third of
some cities’ populations, share the mistrust and social
disintegration that the political scientist Robert
Putnam and his colleagues have documented in areas of
"low social capital" in southern Italy; in recent
surveys Brazilians have registered some of the world’s
lowest levels of trust in their democratic
institutions.
People like Marco are the most excluded from normal
avenues of government decision-making and also the
least likely to become involved in formal associations.
So Marco—brought to the meeting by one of his
neighbors—was understandably skeptical about what it
might accomplish. He was told that a nearby squatter
settlement had been able to collectively purchase its
land title through similar meetings; but he was sure at
first that someone had used a connection to a powerful
politician. Yet the meeting, crowded and held at a
school gym, appeared genuine. The mayor spoke about the
budget, and a dozen of the 2,000 participants got in
line for the microphone to question officials about
previous projects. Later, the whole group elected
delegates for the rest of the year. Though he did not
understand most of the technical details at that
meeting, Marco became a delegate and started to
participate week after week, learning the rules of the
process known as participatory budgeting from the
parade of city officials who attended. At the end of
that first year, he and his fellow delegates elected to
invest in paving the streets and adding sewers to the
district.
Over the years Marco became increasingly involved,
bringing many new faces to meetings, helping to start a
neighborhood association, and realizing his dream of
legalizing the land title to his settlement. Today he
and his neighbors are part of a cooperative that
collectively owns the titles to the land. And Marco,
who had never before participated in a social movement
or association, spends hours in meetings every week and
can often be found explaining technical details or the
exact role of a certain government agency to newcomers.
Participatory budgeting, popularized in Brazil by the
Workers’ Party, or PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores), is
today practiced in some 200 cities there and dozens of
others in Europe, Latin America, and Africa. It has
deeply transformed the nature of civic life in Porto
Alegre, where one of the first experiments in
participatory budgeting was introduced 16 years ago.
By turning over government decisions on investment and
spending to local assemblies open to all, participatory
budgeting has enabled several thousand Brazilian
citizens to make real decisions, to demand
accountability, and to monitor the results. The process
has become a sort of school of democracy for people
like Marco, and an entry into civic life.
* * *
The corruption and cronyism of Brazil’s government is
legendary. A recent New York Times article calls
allegations of graft in the national leadership of the
Workers’ Party the "latest reminder of the unremitting
corruption" that has marked the region since colonial
times. But among progressives, Brazil is also known for
political innovations such as the landless movement and
the World Social Forum, a global summit for social-
justice activists, as well as participatory budgeting.
In spite of the crisis in the Workers’ Party national
leadership, experiments in direct democracy by local
progressive administrations—including the governments
of the state capitals of Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre,
and Belém—continue to inspire onlookers from afar.
These cities work. Some have achieved levels of social-
service provision almost unheard of in Brazil,
including near-universal clean water and sewers and
very high rates of preschool enrollment.
The design of the participatory institutions is clever,
enticing the least advantaged to participate by
combining an educational component with opportunities
to win vital improvements for the community. Unlike the
delegated decision-making of representative democracy,
direct participation requires active intervention that
in effect trains people for citizenship through
problem-solving, communication, and strategizing. But
the achievement with the greatest lessons for
progressives elsewhere is the transformation of the
relationship between the government and the governed.
Critics of direct democracy say that it is messy,
inefficient, and prone to domination by an articulate
few. Defenders note the deficiencies inherent in
representative systems and point to instances when
direct democracy produces good decisions, such as
privileging the use of municipal resources to meet the
needs of the poorest. In Brazilian cities, this marks a
dramatic break with the patronage-driven politics that
has long dominated municipal finance. Having thousands
of ordinary citizens voice opinions and observe the
process increases transparency, taps into local sources
of information, and improves the accountability of
elected officials. And by allowing citizens to directly
influence the allocation of resources in their
communities, participatory budgeting energizes citizen
engagement and strengthens civil society.
* * *
Participatory budgeting was haltingly introduced in
Porto Alegre in 1990 by an inexperienced and besieged
Workers’ Party administration, elected just one year
earlier and in search of legitimacy. The idea goes back
to the 1970s and the social movements that would
eventually usher in democracy in the mid-1980s. Radical
popular educators and progressive clergy in these
movements emphasized the importance of autonomy and
participatory democratic procedures; throughout the
country citizens formed neighborhood associations and
social movements to demand a voice in such local
affairs as transportation, health, and housing. The
Workers’ Party itself was founded in the early 1980s as
a party through which movements could speak.
In Porto Alegre, activists from neighborhood
associations started demanding direct input into the
city budget in 1985. Through a process of trial and
error, participatory budgeting evolved into a year-long
cycle of meetings that allow participants to decide on
projects in their own neighborhoods as well as for the
city as a whole. Citizens took over many functions
usually reserved for bureaucrats: setting city-wide
spending priorities, planning investments, and
reviewing payrolls, not to mention setting the rules
for the participatory budgeting process itself and
monitoring its outcomes. Because since the 1990s
Brazilian cities have assumed responsibility for most
social-service provision and infrastructure
investments, citizens are able to exert significant
control over transportation, education, public health,
and public works.
The process begins in March of each year with district-
level assemblies in each of the city’s 16 districts,
followed by meetings of delegates elected from each
assembly who deliberate about the district’s needs and
specific projects. By the end of the year, projects and
priorities are passed on to the Municipal Council of
the Budget, made up of representatives from each
district, who then reconcile demands with available
resources and propose and approve a municipal budget in
conjunction with members of the administration. The
municipal legislature then votes on the budget, which
is usually approved without modification. As the
projects are implemented, street committees monitor
their progress. Near the year’s end, participants re-
draw the rules of the process for the following year
based on their experience.
A significant portion of the annual municipal budget
(between nine and 21 percent of the total) is decided
in this way, funding hundreds of projects with a
completion rate of nearly 100 percent. These projects
have achieved almost full water and sewer coverage, a
threefold increase in the number of children in
municipal schools, and significant increases in the
number of new housing units provided to needy families.
Porto Alegre’s expenditures in certain areas, such as
health and housing, are much higher than the national
average, yet the municipalities’ administrative costs
and overhead have declined over the years. And Porto
Alegre has managed a redistributive regime that is
fiscally responsible and that has remained transparent.
International institutions such as the World Bank have
again and again praised it. Preliminary results of a
national analysis conducted in the late 1990s show that
participatory budgeting tends to lower poverty rates
and improve education.
The rate of participation in participatory budgeting in
Porto Alegre is also impressive. Once the process
started to show results—three or four years after its
introduction—the number of participants grew
dramatically. By 2004, some 20,000 were attending the
first round of meetings, many of them for the first
time. A conservative estimate is that ten percent of
adults in the city have at one point participated.
Participants, by and large, are like Marco: they lack
secondary education, work in manual or service jobs,
and earn well below the city average. Women and Afro-
Brazilians participate at high rates, as do residents
of poor areas. Marco’s district consistently turns out
very high numbers of participants, despite the fact t
hat they are the least experienced in civic life. In
fact, the activation of civil society in neighborhoods
such as Marco’s has reversed a historical trend and
should be considered one of the most significant
consequences of participatory budgeting.
Scholars have long agreed that organized collectives
are best able to meet collective needs, but they have
also noted that those most in need are often the least
able to organize. In the case of urban Brazil,
government has long frustrated efforts to found and
maintain associations organized for the collective
good; associations seeking a particular improvement
would often come into open conflict with local
governments and afterward have a difficult time
sustaining themselves. It is for this reason that in
Porto Alegre and elsewhere in Brazil, poor people’s
neighborhood organizations have often been little more
than electoral corrals for charismatic politicians who
selectively made improvements in exchange for voter
loyalty.
In the late 1980s Marco’s district of 20,000 had only
two active associations, both connected to powerful
political figures. Today it has almost 20, all working
through the participatory budget. In Porto Alegre as a
whole, the number has doubled since 1989, with the
biggest increase in the city’s poorest areas. And while
in the past the main activities of neighborhood
associations and civic groups were protests and
petitions, today these associations are most likely to
organize around deliberative and pragmatic problem-
solving rather than protesting or mobilizing for a
powerful politician. The strong educational component
of the process means that local associations and civic
life constantly draw new participants.
The way that decisions are made in participatory budget
meetings marks a real break from past models of civic
engagement. Participants spend a fair amount of time in
deliberative discussions. Though most decisions are
made through votes, significant deliberation, in
meetings and at the edges of official forums, paves the
way for them. This complex process is spread out over a
year, and participants regularly resolve conflicts over
priorities. A district like Marco’s could choose to
divide available funds into many small projects, such
as paving 100 meters of dirt road in each of the 20
settlements, or spend them all on a major collective
priority, such as a thoroughfare or a school. Arriving
at a decision sometimes involves tense moments and much
negotiation. Active participants such as Marco play key
roles in creating solutions and finding ways to balance
the needs of neighborhoods and the whole district.
Beyond providing a forum to choose projects and
priorities, participatory budget meetings enable other
forms of collective action and discussion. Government-
sponsored meetings on the technicalities of street-
paving projects would seem at first unlikely places for
discussions of, say, the setting of poor urban
peripheries. Yet in the meetings, participants
regularly carve out these spaces for open-ended
discussion. People come together in a regular meeting
place and address all kinds of needs, fashioning a
language of public responsibility and rights that
evolves from their work together. Participants bring
newspaper clippings to meetings to discuss current
affairs; they recruit volunteers for outside projects;
they organize protests, some aimed at the
administration itself. The participatory budget has
been so successful at drawing participants and
delivering results that administrators have accepted
these other discussions as healthy democratic
discourse. For many participants, like Marco, budgeting
meetings have become a central part of community life,
a place "where the whole community is present" and
where "you can discuss a wide range of issues, not just
the budget."
It is in these ways that participatory budgeting
affects, and ultimately shapes, civil society and civic
practice. Much of democratic theory, and much of the
policy discussion in the United States today, assumes
that democratic influence travels from civil society
toward the state. A well-organized and virtuous civil
society oversees state institutions and prevents them
from falling into corruption. To foster democracy, in
this view, is to strengthen the ways that citizens help
themselves. But the participatory-budgeting story shows
us how reforming the state—by radically increasing its
openness to the public mandate—can shape the way civil
society functions. A state that is closed to all but
the demands of the politically sympathetic creates
incentives for cronyism and militancy. A state that
responds to direct participation creates incentives for
civic organization. In the case of participatory
budgeting in Porto Alegre, state reforms have created
incentives for the participation of the poor by
focusing on basic infrastructure.
Here the state has created not only incentives but the
conditions that enable the poor to participate. There
is a pedagogical component built into participatory
budgeting. By attending meetings and making demands,
new participants learn all the skills required for
collective action, such as how to run a meeting and how
to negotiate compromises. They learn the intricacies of
governmental affairs, previously the privileged domain
of policy experts. Perhaps most importantly, in a
country where the "masses" have traditionally had no
voice but to consent to leaders, participatory
budgeting asserts the value of their voice.
After the Workers’ Party introduced and established the
participatory budget in Porto Alegre, the process was
exported to dozens of other municipalities throughout
the country. By 1992, a dozen Workers’ Party
municipalities had participatory budgeting; by 1996 the
number had increased to 36. And as the Workers’ Party
continued to increase its electoral strength and
regional presence, participatory budgeting spread
throughout the country. Over 100 municipalities
experimented with it between 1997 and 2000, and at
least 200 did so between 2001 and 2004, at least half
of which were run by other political parties.
Given its accomplishments, it came as some surprise
that the Workers’ Party, after 16 years of
uninterrupted rule, lost the municipal election in
October of 2004 to a competing left-of-center party.
Opposition politicians cheered that Porto Alegre "does
not belong to one party." The reasons for the defeat
were not straightforward. The opposition candidate ran
a well-planned campaign that capitalized on anti-
incumbent sentiments, calling on Porto Alegrenses to
vote for "democratic alternation" (the tradition of
parties alternating in power) and an end to "one-party
rule." There were also lingering negative sentiments
from the one term of state- level Workers’ Party rule,
not to mention the dissa tisfaction with President
Lula’s national administration. The opposition ran a
campaign of "keeping what is good, improving the rest"
that proved particularly effective with middle-class
voters who were ideologically opposed to the Workers’
Party but who recognized its effective style of
governance. Campaign materials promised "change in a
safe way, the way we want. He [mayoral candidate José
Fogaça] knows that some changes are necessary, but
without destroying the good things the city has
achieved in the last few years, such as the
participatory budget, and the World Social Forum."
Unable to claim that a vote for the opposition was a
vote against participatory budgeting, the Workers’
Party lost one of its trump cards in its bid for a
fifth municipal term. In the first day of campaigning,
the opposition candidate met with councilors of the
participatory budget, visited their neighborhoods, and
discussed ways to preserve and improve the process.
While the vote was polarized, with poorer neighborhoods
voting for the Workers’ Party, the vote among poor and
working-class neighborhoods was not nearly as solid as
in previous elections. While Marco voted for the
Workers’ Party, he knew people who voted for the
opposition, confident that the new mayor would devolve
more funds to the participatory budget. He himself was
skeptical but willing to participate and see before
judging.
At the time of this writing, participatory budgeting in
Porto Alegre is continuing much as before, with some
former staff members even working for the new
administration. The previous year’s rules, ratified by
participants at the end of 2004, remain in force. The
number of participants is lower in some districts, but
the overall number of participants is comparable to
previous years. What happens next to the participatory
budget depends in large part on whether the new
administration tries to alter the principle of
participant-set rules or use its facilitators to
manipulate the proceedings.
The Workers’ Party leaves behind thousands of
participants in dozens of new neighborhood
organizations who are connected to their communities
and intimately familiar with the ins and outs of
government and budgetary affairs. This organized civil
society has an immense capacity for monitoring and
influencing the government. It would be practically
impossible to run a process of participatory budgeting
that did not conform to high standards or that tried to
manipulate participants.
Experience suggests that it would be difficult to
entirely dismantle a successful participatory scheme
even after the defeat of its sponsoring party. Parallel
cases, as in Recife in the late 1980s, have ended in
the eventual re-adoption of the scheme—if not the re-
election of the party that promoted it—in response to
the organized pressure of former participants. Had
participatory budgeting been a different kind of
institution, one without the democratic openness that
makes it so vibrant, another party might never have
been able to claim to be for the participatory budget
and against the Workers’ Party.
In the end, whatever the future of participatory
budgeting in Porto Alegre, its model of effective
governance and vibrant civic life offers a striking
contrast to newspaper headlines about corruption and
civic disaffection. But if these two images seem at
odds, it is only because of how we look at democracy.
It is not simply that Brazilian democracy is in
shambles and Porto Alegre is an island of civic-
mindedness in a sea of apathy. Looking at citizen
attitudes and behaviors in isolation from the state
institutions and the politics behind them reveals
little about democratic possibilities. The story of
participatory budgeting is useful beyond the template
it offers for other cities in Brazil and throughout the
world. It also raises questions about the way we
discuss declining civic engagement in the United
States. Perhaps we should be asking not only about
television-watching habits and other social behaviors
but about the nature of our national and local
governments. We should be asking how transparent,
responsive, and accessible they are to the citizen.
Gianpaolo Baiocchi is an assistant professor of
sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
His most recent book is Militants and Citizens: The
Politics of Participation in Porto Alegre.