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Reclaiming Public Revenues:
Brazil’s Participatory Budget
By Gianpaolo Baiocchi, University of Massachusetts,
and Len Krimerman,
GEO Newsletter
Have you ever wondered just how public revenues get allocated, e.g., by
what process it is decided that more prisons will be built rather than
tuition-free colleges? And why we citizens have so little – nothing,
really – to say about how these revenues are dispersed? I mean, after
all, it’s our money, so we should be able to track it down. And this,
supposedly, is a democracy, so we, the people, should have a genuine say
about the uses to which our tax money is put. Sound like a philosopher’s
impossible dream? Not in Brazil.
In the late 1980s, the Workers Party (PT) of Brazil introduced the idea
of a participatory budget (PB) for the city of Porto Alegre in the
southern state of Rio Grande Do Sol. The basic idea was simple: citizens,
rather than politicians, would decide how to allocate a large portion of
the city’s annual budget - that covering new capital expenditures.
Today, after almost 15 years, this highly democratic process remains
intact in Porto Alegre, and has spread to over 500 towns and cities – of
all sizes and in all regions – throughout Brazil.
And it’s hard to think of one with more potential to bring all of us
working within the social or solidarity economies together, whether in
local currencies or urban gardens, eco-villages or worker cooperatives. In
Porto Alegre, for example, since the participatory budget got stabilized,
about 50 housing and 50 worker cooperatives have emerged. With a little
imagination, projects that we would all benefit from could receive funding
from such a budgetary process, e.g., affordable housing constructed by a
building cooperative paying its worker-owners a living wage, primarily in
local currency, and designed to utilize renewable energy sources and with
sufficient arable land to be largely food self-reliant.
For more on the Brazilian experiments in urban democracy and
citizen-controlled public budgets, see Rebecca Abers’ Inventing Local
Democracy and Gianpaolo’s anthology, Radicals in Power. Here
are some particularly telling passages from his introductory chapter:
[In] the city of Porto Alegre, the first PB reforms were introduced,
and by the end of four years, the administration had succeeded in
balancing municipal finances and in bringing in several thousand people as
active participants in forums on city investments. Largely as a result of
the success of these citizen participatory forums, the administration has
kept local opposition at bay and carried out a number of ambitious
reforms, such as introducing land-use taxes aimed at wealthier citizens,
that have funded many of the PB’s projects.
Since its first round of meetings in 1989, the PB has evolved into a
complex structure of meetings throughout the city, where elected delegates
from civic groups, such as neighborhood associations, meet regularly to
discuss, prioritize and eventually monitor the types of investments needed
in each district. The projects can include anything within the scope of
municipal government: street pavement, water, sewage, social services,
health care, housing, and primary and adult education. In addition, the
structure has evolved to include thematic forums where participants can
debate city priorities that are not necessarily specific to one
neighborhood, such as culture and education, economic development or
health. The experiment has been, by most measures, very successful.
Named by the UN as a model city government, Porto Alegre has become the
object of attention for administrators from Europe to Africa because of
its fiscal efficiency as well as its consistently high level of
participation. The last round of budget meetings for 2000 drew over twenty
thousand participants. Approval rates for municipal administration have
been consistently high, and every year of meetings features a notable
percentage of first-time participants. (From Radicals in Power, pp.
22-23.)
Moreover, Gianpaolo also sees the participatory budget as a valuable
strategy in the (dismal) context of United States politics. In a personal
communication with Len Krimerman in the fall of 2004, he wrote:
I am a fan of Participatory Budgeting as a tool for empowerment of
social movements and civil society. That is, I see it allowing us to skirt
the question of whether we prefer state solutions or voluntary solutions
to our problems, and giving us the third choice of harnessing the
creativity of civil society and the resources of the state. Participatory
Budgeting is also a very powerful tool for challenging the "technical
expertise" under whose guise we are forced to accept certain
decisions in governance. It demystifies decisions of towns and cities to
invest in ballparks and convention centers (or to give tax breaks to
prisons and Walmarts for that matter) as political decisions, and helps
the population propose its own political decisions.
It is also a strategic tool for progressives seeking to take back
government. I very much think that some of the lessons of PB are
applicable to the US, and I do not see why progressives cannot attempt to
take back administrations with platforms that emphasize participation,
transparency, and, as Len has put it, convivial government. And
while I do see there are potential pitfalls, such as
"cooptation", these dangers are very far off from our horizons
here.
Still, concerns will be raised, by progressives as well as others,
about the potential of the PB in these United States. For example, ‘Are
citizen groups in this country too adversarial and polarized to reach
agreements on how to spend public revenues?’ or ‘How would a
participatory budget initiative assist antagonistic groups to reach common
ground?’
Moreover, the PB seems to work well in a local or municipal context, but
can it be upscaled to rein in multi-national corporations and our rogue
and overly militarized nation state? How well have PBs in Brazil
worked when faced with more-than-local issues?
And: If Brazil is the model, doesn’t a new political party such as
the PT have to precede a PB? And in our two party (or "one party
with two right wings") context, how likely is that? Is there a way to
create participatory budget processes outside our current electoral
system?
Let us know your reactions to the PB as a strategy to both advance
citizen-shaped democracy and bring grassroots groups of many stripes and
agendas together.... We’ll be returning to these issues in a later
issue. To discuss this further, contact Len Krimerman at lenmvgeo@mindspring.
com or call him toll free at (800) 240-9721
Note: A portion of this article appears in the Other Economies Are
Possible Reader.
Include the citation below and GEO Newsletter grants permission to copy, use,
and distribute this article.
Permission not for commercial or for-profit use.
©2004 GEO,
P O Box 115,
Riverdale MD 20738
http://www.geo.coop
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