Putting democratic principles into practice
Participatory democracy - and especially the participatory budget - is what has turned the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre and its Workers Party (PT) local government into a point of reference for the global justice movement around the world. It was this 12-year long experiment in letting the people decide directly how the town hall's money should be spent, which made the city an obvious choice to host the World Social Forum.
But the participatory budget idea - "OP" as it is known in Portuguese - has been taken up by many other local administrations in Brazil and beyond, and applied in many different ways. Some are far from radical, some claim to be revolutionary. Socialist Outlook talked about the possibilities and contradictions to Edinho Silva , who is just completing his first 18 months as PT mayor of Arraquara, a city of 200,000 inhabitants in the north of Sao Paulo state. Edinho is a member of Socialist Democracy, the left tendency in the PT that supports the Fourth International
EDINHO: As soon as we won the elections in October 2000 we began a series of discussions to decide our priorities. We settled on three main areas – popular participation, policies to promote social inclusion, and a more efficient delivery of services to the population.
In this latter area we wanted to wrest back the idea of modernity from the right, and show that it was possible to apply measures of efficiency and technology with a completely different logic – to promote popular interests.
But of course the first two, popular participation and social inclusion, were to be our strategic priorities. The popular participation had two main aspects, the participatory budget and municipal councils. The social inclusion was centred on the idea of workers’ self-organisation – that is that workers are capable of organising themselves to generate jobs and income without being entirely dependent on the whims of capital.
So, for example, we’ve encouraged the formation of co-operatives. One of them, a recycling co-operative formed by families who used to live on the council rubbish tip sorting through garbage, has now become the basis of the town hall’s recycling programme and has won national recognition.
These two areas then – popular participation and social inclusion – were the strategic axes because they were the ones which, within a capitalist society, could show the city as a whole that it IS possible to build relations of power based on very different ideas.
We had a long debate on what kind of popular participation we wanted to promote.
How much power do these municipal councils have to take decisions, say about where a new bus route should go…?
The town hall does what the popular council says.
Is it obliged to?
Yes, and we’ve already lost a number of arguments in the transport users’ council – areas we really didn’t think were priorities for new routes, but the council insisted… and the town hall had to carry out their decision.
It’s the same in health and education. We’ve set up users’ councils for each hospital and health centre, for each school. …
So we’ve adopted a model where the town hall administration stimulates the organization of the population, and where these popular organisations have decision-making powers and are autonomous.
These popular councils are separate from the Participatory Budget process, because we realized that the PB cannot cope with all the population’s demands. The Participatory Budget is not a panacea that can solve all problems. There are some services that need to be managed on a permanent, day-to-day basis, by the population.
Aren’t there likely to be conflicts between these popular councils and the participatory budget process?
Not really. The transport council can demand a new bus route for a neighbourhood that’s not properly served. But it can’t demand that the road to that neighbourhood be asphalted. That’s a question of investment and has to go through the Participatory Budget.
So the members of the transport council are likely to take that demand into their PB assembly, and the two things cross over. But in the mean time the buses on the new route will have to make do with the dirt track that exists at the moment.
It’s the same with a programme we have developed to bring the local government closer to the people. We call it "the town hall in the neighbourhoods".
Every week all the local government departments – health, education, transport, environment and so on – move into a particular neighbourhood, and attend to the public there on the spot, so people don’t feel they have to come into the city centre to be dealt with.
Obviously in the process people come up with many demands for particular investments – we need such and such built – and we have to explain, budget matters have to be taken to your Participatory Budget assembly.
So with the co-operatives I mentioned before as well, we were looking for ways of building a structure of alternative power within the existing society, and we had big theoretical debates, amongst our PT members and supporters, about what would be the basic principles of a socialist society. We wanted to create the conditions for workers to be able to organise themselves, to break with the subordination of their labour, and show that it is possible for civil society to CONTROL the state. And this alternative power-structure is a way for us to begin to democratise the state.
So our approach to the Participatory Budget fitted into this. Because there’s been a lot of debate within the PT – and beyond the PT it’s been even worse – and we decided the Participatory Budget should have decision-making powers over 100% of the municipal investment budget.
So what is the debate?
Because in many PT municipalities it’s not 100% of the investments. In others it doesn’t have decision-making powers, it’s merely consultative. In other words it simply expresses an opinion about where the town hall should spend its money, but in the end the local government decides. And there are other, mixed variants. But we went for 100% of the budget from the very first year.
Our model was based on that applied in Caixias do Sul (the second city in Rio Grande do Sul state, where the mayor is also from the DS tendency), but we’ve changed some things. It’s not that are big differences with Porto Alegre – that’s obviously a model for the whole country. But we studied the experience in Caixias do Sul because it’s more similar to our situation, in terms of size, social makeup and so on.
Do you have the same list of priorities for people to choose from – education, health, roads, saintation, etc. – as they do in Porto Alegre?
No we don’t provide a list, people come up with their own. In that sense ours is more open than in Porto Alegre. If people decide landscape gardening is the priority, then we’ll do what they say.
So then the administration has to come before the assembly and argue its own case. And we were defeated in several regional assemblies last year. For example, we would come forward with all the technical arguments to explain why the priority had to be education, but no, people voted for health.
We’ve made some changes too this year, because the PB is a process which is still under construction. Before, for example, once the assemblies in the regions and sub-regions had decided their priorities, it was the delegates, elected by those assemblies, who went away and decided in their Delegate Council how the resources should be split between the different regions and their priorities, and which schools, health centres, roads or whatever should be built where.
But we discovered that people on the ground were complaining they never found out exactly how the money was spent. We saw there was a real danger of the PB delegates losing touch with the people who’d elected them.
So now the delegates will decide on how the resources should be split up, but it’ll go back to the regional assemblies to decide exactly which pipes, paving stones or football pitches should be put in where, using those resources. In this way we’re strengthening still further the element of direct democracy.
The Council of Delegates then still has the important task of supervising the financing and execution of those works.
Some of the other local administrations where other versions of the participatory budget have been applied argue that people are too prone to vote only in function of their own immediate neighbourhood’s interests, and that the broader projects, which are of interest or need to the wider community, don’t get a look in.
My position is that the town hall has to go into those regional assemblies and argue the case for the works of more general interest. You cannot start from the assumption that people have corporativist instincts, that they will only perceive the immediate interests of their own neighbourhood. If that happens it’s because we aren’t sufficiently politicizing the debate.
What we are finding is that it may be necessary to set up some additional thematic assemblies to discuss particular areas which it’s difficult to address adequately in the ordinary regional assemblies. So this year we’re introducing assemblies dealing specifically with the needs of women, black people, the disabled, youth, the elderly.
And we’re looking at the possibility of one devoted specifically to urban development, which would be able to deal more adequately with environmental questions for example. And the Council of Delegates has already decided that 20% of the budget will be set aside for the priorities decided by these new thematic assemblies – the other 80% going to the regional assemblies.
It’s a process and we’re learning. But the fact our model of PB has decision-making powers means we’re expanding the democratic space. When we said that from the first year we would open 100% of our investments to a PB with decision-making powers, and that we’d leave it to the assemblies to come up with their own lists of priorities to choose from, we were heavily criticised by some other administrations.
People said we were mad, they asked how we expected to fulfil our election promises. I said, well we’ll have to go into those plenary sessions and defend our proposals, as a local government we mustn’t be afraid of direct democracy. And of course we often lost last year, and we’re often losing again this year.
I went just the other day to one of the assemblies – we KNOW the region needs a creche, I went with all the figures, but the assembly voted in favour of tarmacking the road ! So they won’t get their creche. Will the mothers complain ? Yes they certainly will. What can we say ? Only that it’s the PB that decides, and you’ll have go back into that assembly next year and argue for it. It’s an educational process too.
I got it in the neck in one neighbourhood. The majority of the population only took part in some of their local assembly. So it was a particular minority that got to decide which streets would be the priority. The others went to the press and accused me of being responsible.
So what could I say? Simple. Next year you make sure YOU take part and decide. That’s the way people learn. In fact they were right. The other streets were much more of a priority, that’s where the asphalting should have begun. But they didn’t go to the plenaries, and they didn’t argue their case.
If I back down, accept their argument, over-ride the PB, even in the case of one single street, then I undermine the entire participatory budget. So it’s a permanent political dispute.
Are there clear differences between a revolutionary way of implementing the participatory budget and a reformist way?
There certainly are. If you want to apply it in a reformist way, with a social democratic approach, then the participatory budget is in fact easier to apply in that way than in a revolutionary way.
How is this?
If you have consultative assemblies, if you create mechanisms for indirect representation, hold discussions of this and that in forums, then you ARE mobilizing the population; but you’re not actually building a structure of power. Because when the PB is revolutionary that’s what it’s doing.
It’s beginning to build a power structure – an autonomous power structure within the society. From a theoretical point of view what you’re doing is building structures of control within the state apparatus, whereby civil society begins to exert control over the state.
It demystifies the notion that the budget is something technical, fixed in stone, out of reach, and shows it to be something very basic that can be controlled and supervised by the population, month after month.
So the model of which Participatory Budget you choose is absolutely fundamental.
So are you saying that a participatory budget with decision-making powers is incompatible with a reformist approach?
Yes, it is incompatible. A budget is the expression of a government’s priorities. It’s the expression of the economic class that dominates the state apparatus. That’s the same whether it’s the state at municipal, state or national level.
As soon as you create the space for the majority of society to control this instrument, it becomes incompatible with any rightwing project, because the working classes and other sectors that are excluded from power will begin to express their class interests and not those of the capitalist class.
So when the World Bank and the UN praise the participatory budget as an example of transparent, efficient local administration … ?
They don’t understand. Not that they’re being ingenuous, but they don’t understand that when the model is a decision-making one, and when the state structures stimulate the popular classes to exercise that power, they don’t grasp the significance of that.
The World Bank can praise you when you organise forums and debates, invite civil society to spend two days discussing housing, two days discussing health and education, hear what they have to say.
But the difference is if you create a structure of power, where people discuss the income, discuss the expenditure and decide the investments. That is incompatible.