This is a CTP of initiative: Participatory Budgeting Fortaleza (Brazil)
This CTP refers to a change of vision about social participation in municipal decisions and an attempt to change the local culture in this regard concerning the external public, citizens, the internal public and city hall employees. This happened with the alternation of power of the political parties that managed the city. In the new management there is expertise in the planning culture and this is the new vision.
The new city hall is experimenting with new ways of doing, a new way of organizing the demands of the population, but they are still dealing with the old culture, which they try to change.
This government was preceded by two mandates of the PT - Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party) government administration. The PT always had popular participation in decision-making as part of its government plan and is a party that has always been linked to social movements at its roots.
From the interviewee’s point of view, when the new government took over the city hall it was perceivable that there had not been a culture of planning in the previous administration. The justification for this perception is that as a result of the PB during the previous administration, there was a list of specific demands from the population (including: to fill a hole in the street, Constructing a health center, a day care centre e.t.c) without any connection to planning. In this sense, this list of demands without answers establishes a chaos in the public administration with which the new government had to deal.
What this government said was that the budget is a way to achieve planning and not an end in itself: "The established culture is a timely demand. I want to tarmac my street, I want a health center. It is lacking culture, a greater vision".
And it is precisely this new vision that is more focused on planning and not on the budget that the new municipal government is trying to implement. For the current government, the planning culture was non-existent in the city. Today it is still developing but it has already made advances.
Thus, from this point of view, the previous municipal government mobilized popular participation to form a "list" of demands without any relation to the city’s planning goals, nor with any relation to the funds available to solve the issues identified by the population through PB: "what saddens me as a professional planner is that the budget was treated as an end, however the budget is a way to something (...) I am not against PB, it is not possible to be against participation, but I believe that there are different levels of participation and moments for participation to occur ". Thus, this CTP constitutes of the attempt by the municipal government to change this culture, to form a social capital in the population and for employees to be made aware that making a list of disconnected demands for city planning does not make sense.
The focus of cultural change, therefore, is the city's planning and not the budget or the demands. Consequently, from the point of view of this government, planning and budget are complementary and interdependent: "by wanting to rescue the planning structure the new mayor created the “Instituto do Planejamento” (Planning Institute) with strategic vision; he (the mayor) set in motion a time scale to encourage greater participation in projects, to create a popular design for the city’s planning, to institutionalize participation in a consistent way (...) The idea is to make a nexus structure so that social participation would also be structured. We are entering the fourth year of government so it is a very short time to say if it has worked or not, but we left the short term demands (the hole in the street, the health center...). We are working on a process. And this structure allows us to have a discussion beyond the hole in your street (...) it even allows us to discuss with government about the culture of the demands”.
For the interviewee, the big change of this CTP was that the emphasis was taken out of the PB and placed on Participatory Democracy, i.e. the population participating in all of the city's decision-making and not just its budget, and doing it in partnership with the various departments of the municipality.
The leadership role overseeing this process of governmental change was assigned to the mayor and not to a technician from his team. The current mayor is a Doctor of Environmental Health and an expert in evaluation of public policies with extensive experience in public planning. Thus, according to the interviews conducted for this research, the mayor himself built the change plan and is able to talk confidently regarding the details of this plan.
But, of course, the mayor governs with a team in collaboration with the population. Thus, the co-production of this CTP has the following actors: (1) the mayor (according to the interviews the mayor is the main actor) who is responsible for changing the governments strategic vision and for taking the necessary steps to implement a new vision and planning culture; (2) specifically with regard to PB, all of its officers, highlighting the Secretaria Municipal de Planejamento, Orçamento e Monitoramento (Municipal Planning, Budget and Monitoring Secretariat) where the team that is responsible for the PB works (3) community leaders. According to the point of view of the current municipal government, community leaders were very unhappy. They were called to participate in the PB of the previous government, however there was no record provided for the current government of a significant list of demands that was produced during the assemblies. In addition, due to a lack of planning most of these demands had not been met. Also, according to the current government, nowadays the population better understands the demands that are part of project planning on a larger scale, which means there is a better understanding of the cultural change that they intend to deploy.
According to the interviewee, when she arrived at the city hall (as part of the team of the Planning, Budget and Monitoring Secretariat), the PB was focused internally, i.e., the employees spoke about it and knew it, but did not know it very well. The efforts of this government are concentrated in undertaking this new culture in order to answer the question: "What is the participation model that we want?" Thus, this new government sought but did not find any record of the PB from the previous government. Only two employees of the previous government (who were public employees) remained in the secretariat. The rest were hired and left with the old government. Thus, the new municipal government changed the process, working without the proper records from the previous process. For the interviewee, this CTP created a new milestone for participatory budgeting with a focus on planning and not on the budget.
The events related to this CTP are:
January 2013 – Starting a new administration- The new administration took office in the City Hall of Fortaleza.
February 2013 – Questioning demands of the previous Multi-Annual Plan - They received the Plano Plurianual – PPA (Multi-Annual Plan) from the previous government and questioned the list of demands that had no relation to planning, "they are just demands".
In Brazil, the Multi-Annual Plan is regulated by the Brazilian Constitution to determine the duties of municipal, state and federal governments. It is held every 4 years (period of one government between elections) and it is carried out over the first year of the new government, covering the first year of the next government. It is also approved by law, i.e. it is the elected candidate's responsibility to accomplish it. The plan includes all actions and also the budget. In order not to affect the guidelines contained within it, it is only possible to make investments in strategic programs that are referred to in the wording of the PPA for the current period.
March 2013 – Lack of information on previous PB. The secretary searched for the records from the previous PB and could not find them.
April 2013 - Creation of a new strategic agenda - The mayor and his team built a (new) strategic agenda that had a high emphasis on participatory planning. Included in this plan (which did not exist in the previous municipal government according to the mayor and his team) was the monitoring of the results: "What we are doing is participatory democracy and not participatory budgeting (...), in other words is it broader; the mayor himself dominates the agenda like no other, he picks up the agenda and says 'I do not agree with this indicator here, wasn’t it better before?' (suggesting a change). It makes a difference".
April 2013 - In order to increase the participation of the population and its various segments they created the Digital Multi-Annual Plan. However before electronic participation was established, there was a cycle of in-person meetings where all matters that were going to be voted on electronic voting machines were discussed with an emphasis on changing the local culture and directing it to planning. The vote is held on the Internet as determined by the elected mayor’s government plan. The plan prioritized: "mobility, health, education and security in a strategic vision". Digital participation was not significant, as only 1.385 people participated.
June - 2014 - Development of Digital PB - In Brazil the PB is known to be a participatory process for the poor, in which the middle class does not participate in neither the meetings cycle nor votes. The creation of the digital PB is part of a larger strategy of participation from all sections of the population and participation not only in PB, but in all the municipal government’s major decisions. According to the interviewee, "before, in the assemblies there were 4 to 5 thousand people participating per PB cycle. PB only saw an expansion in participation with the electronic voting. There were 18,335 votes”. For the electronic vote, Electronic stations were placed in shopping malls throughout the city, on the waterfront and also in communities, in addition on the internet.
June - 2014 - Changes in the architecture of participation - Officially it was no longer called PB, it was named Ciclo de Planejamento Participativo (Participatory Planning Cycle) and the Coordenadoria de Paticipação (Coordination of Participation) was created, consolidating the ideas already discussed, that is, extending popular participation beyond the specific demands that were traditionally practiced since its implementation in 2005.
The local leaders were called to participate in the planning and not only to set the demands for the budget. This planning was within a larger project called "Fortaleza 2040”, whose expected result is a planned and participative Fortaleza. This strategic plan for Fortaleza involving society, market, business and government, seeks to implement a culture of planning in the short, medium and long term within all levels of society.
March 2015 - Throughout the meeting cycle held during this government, the interviewee states that "the city hall had a development project for the city and that the participants were understanding". That is, they started to realize that the population was more involved with the new way of working that the interviewee calls a "building of social capital. The population was educated to participate and not only to ask for things. You can already see the changes. In the long-term this society will never be the same".
Since the beginning of this government the most common contestation came from their own community leaders, due to the immediatism way of thinking behind the demands, i.e., the culture, "the work is slow, it is pedagogical... but at least we can already discuss what will advance (...) there were years and years with the same line. At first we just heard at meetings with leaders 'our demands were never met' as if there was a list of pending demands at City Hall. And in fact we had to show them that it is not demand A or B, we have to show them the differences, for example I'm working on sanitation and when I choose (for investment) a more deprived area than theirs...'Are you already aware that here is a health center nearby?' So... this view is pedagogical, it is educational, that's what we discuss with the Participation Coordination”.
There are, in some situations, partisan political objections to the "author" of met demands. That is, some community leaders (pointed out in the interview as a common situation) want to know to whom the responsibility will be assigned to meet the demand. If it will be the government, or some councilor (elected by that community, or opposition of some members of that community) "for example, when we state in the program that we have the budget, the interest and have taken actions that allowed a certain demand to be met, for example the demand for concrete on a particular street has been met, I hear questions like: 'Oh, but if the demand is met and there is a councilor who has also made this demand, who’s name will appear?' ... I heard that... they were seen like this (referring to the previous government)... the disagreements today are very shortsighted, if the square I asked was answered ... this whole discussion is historical and we are moving forward ... from the perspective of planning, when a demand appears that is not in the planning, we can already say and explain why it will not be answered because it is unreasonable in relation to the master plan. This is big a step forward (...) our main issue in the participatory budget and in participatory planning is to maintain people informed and to have transparency. In the future we want departments and secretariats to participate in the planning cycle to explain, for example, that you cannot pave the road because it is an environmental planning area".
The expectation for this cultural change was that the population and employees of the city hall would adopt the planning culture, and the interviewee believes that this is happening. What they wanted as a result of this process was the creation and recognition of social capital in dialogue with the real possibility of implementing demands: "We want a different city."
The biggest surprise at the time was that although they expected resistance from employees, over time, they saw that the employees "came out of their shells" in the many secretariats that interacted with the PB and that they were willing to discuss, reflect and exchange with other secretariats in order to change their ways of acting, even if it meant more work: "It is much more comfortable to do it by myself, within my department ... but you need to bring people to you, to assimilate, to Adopt new ideas... this thing goes from government to government, the memory of the advances goes from one to the other. That is, there were negative expectations, and it surprised me that even with all the barriers - there is more work for us - there is an embryo of an internal mobilization of "what we want to do".
The main lesson relates to confirmation of its anticipation, that is, the main learning process was that both the community and the employees of the city hall realized that you cannot point out demands without planning. It is the maturation of the participation process: "the community is able to understand more than we think; that there is much more than just getting a yes or a no. The greatest lesson is to understand why yes or why no. I think that with that your expectations of people´s knowledge expands. There was also an internal lesson learnt, at the same time that there was this dialogue with the external factors, when I put the two interests together, society and the government... It is not helpful to have this speech externally while not understanding what´s happening internally. It is a difficult lesson. It was not easy, it is not easy, but people can learn".
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