New Public Spheres in Brazil: Local Democracy and Deliberative Politics

Abstract

Brazilian cities have been the sites of significant experiments in participatory and deliberative governance. Participatory budgeting has to be singled out as one of the most important of these. After the landmark experience in Porto Alegre, participatory budgeting has been expanded to 170 Brazilian cities. Is the expansion of participatory budgeting equivalent to the expansion of the deliberative and distributive characteristics of the Porto Alegre experience? This article argues that the conditions that account for the emergence of participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre are unique to that city's social or political characteristics. It focuses on the role of existing civil society associations in the emergence of participatory budgeting, as well as in its institutional format. It also shows that the presence of civic associations is linked to the deliberative and distributive results of participatory budgeting and that these conditions may not be present in other participatory budgeting experiences. Copyright (c) 2006 The Author. Journal Compilation (c) 2006 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd..

The Role of Deliberative Collaborative Governance in Achieving Sustainable Cities

“…Collaborative governance is interpreted and practiced in a variety of ways [3][4][5][6][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. As Emerson et al note, despite the increasing use of the term 'collaborative governance' in public administration literature, its definition remains 'amorphous and its use inconsistent' ( [4], p. 1).…”

Transferability of urban freight transport measures: A case study of Cariacica (Brazil)

“…Firstly, there is a history of cooperation between the local authority and stakeholders: for example the TURBLOG_WW assessment workshop was an example of such cooperation. A more significant example of cooperation is the on-going implementation of 'participatory budgeting', orçamento participativo (Souza, 2001, Baiocchi, 2001, Menegat, 2002, Koonings, 2004, Avritzer, 2006, Wampler, 2012, by which residents agree (on an annual basis) as to how local authority budgets are to be used in their neighbourhoods. The context provided by such cooperation would be expected to facilitate the introduction of consensus-based urban freight regulation measures.…”

Peru’s Participatory Budgeting: Configurations of Power, Opportunities for Change

“…This selection of priorities is based on the principle of "one-man-one-vote". Secondly, the number of delegates the forum can deputise is determined, according to the formula "one delegate per 10 participants in the forum", 14 and these delegates are elected. Lastly, from this group of delegates the "PB-councillors" that represent this forum in the PB Council are elected.…”

“…The PMDB mayor defeated the PT candidate in most recent local elections (2008), and has recently started his second term in office. 14 To avoid that large neighbourhoods would have a disproportionate advantage over smaller neighbourhoods a sliding scale was developed: for 10-100 participants, 1 delegate per 10 participants; for 101-250 one additional delegate per 20 participants, for 250-400 delegates an additional delegate per 30 participants etc [18]. investment proposals for next year's budget.…”

“…We should explicitly distinguish PB from other budget-related participatory processes such as participatory expenditure tracking, independent budget analysis, or the vaguer "public participation in budget-making". Although these practices might be valuable in their own right, the actual decision- Although academic analyses of PB abound, most analyses concentrate on the case of Porto Alegre [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] orto a lesser extent -on other Brazilian cases, most notably Belo Horizonte, Recife and Santo André as successful cases [13][14][15][16][17][18]. Both case-studies and comparative analyses of PBexperiments from outside Brazil are sorely lacking 1 .…”