This is a CTP of initiative: Participatory Budgeting Porto Alegre (Brazil)
This CTP relates to a shift in the political party that assumed command of the city hall. In 2004 a centrist party won the election, taking over the city office in 2005.
According to the interviewee, until then the PB was a process concerned with social justice: “The idea was not concerned with making the poorest more economically productive towards capital accumulation, but rather the PB had a social justice idea in mind, that aimed to promote a popular economy. In other words, they wanted the popular sector to get stronger by networking”.
The change in the political party impacted on the logic of the whole PB process. Before 2005, the interviewee says that the logic was to bring power and welfare to the people; after 2005, he thinks that the logic moved to poverty management. By poverty management he means to make poor people profitable and economically active but to not change the structure of poverty itself, therefore, managing to keep people poor, but gaining something from their economic activities ( a kind of “evangelization”). The leftist parties were ruling the city for over a decade and ended up losing to the centrist parties’ coalition in the 2004 election. There were people defending both sides. There was a discussion in the election period about the PB and if it would continue and how would it be if the centrist coalition assumed the city hall.
Even after the government was elected saying that they would continue the PB process, they were not so sure about it, as stated: “They hired external consultants who suggested that they should end the participatory budget because the idea of governance was bigger than that”. The government did not end the PB because it would be “political suicide”. Instead, they changed it so much that it lost its initial meaning: “The rules that had previously protected the majority of opinions had now backfired. Since 2005, the people who are part of the COP (PB’s Council) are mostly related to the government, so the minorities are not being listened to or represented and the rules that were made to protect the PB process now protect the government’s interests”.
The government, according the interviewee, were concerned about the idea of governance, but they “actually transformed the governance into a screen. The PB would continue, but in parallel they built a governance scheme where the government invited people to participate, however it was not open to all. They selected who should be part of this governance space and then they even started decreasing the amount of money available to the PB process”.
The main actor of this production was the new political party that took office in the city hall, along with the mayor. A consulting firm was called and produced the necessary "justification" for limit the participation. According to the interviewee: “The organization that the government claimed it had brought to the PB process through this new way of governing had actually hindered the process. They were safe in all the walls that they had built. They limited participation, did not respect the priority demands and only invested in what they thought they should”.
According to the interviewee, the PB process was being altered before the election of 2004, but after the centrist party assumed the city hall, they started to make structural changes to the process.
2004 – Political context polarized - The emerging Workers’ Party’s escalation in municipal power (since 1989) resulted in a reaction from the opposition parties against the Workers' Party hegemony. From this scenario Porto Alegre had a polarized process of political disputes between the Workers' Party and the anti-Workers' Parties.
2005 – Ending of housing program - Housing was always a central point in the PB discussion and the municipality used to have a program that mediated the official appropriation of land and houses by people that were using that land or house for a period. Right after the new mayor assumed office, the program ended.
2005 - Dismantlement of the PB process as a unique budgeting program - Before 2005 there were two matrices considering the city’s budgeting. There were the demands from the secretaries and the demands from the PB. “After 2005, there were multiple ways of arranging the budget, rather than just two as we had seen before... People did not need to go into the PB process anymore. The politicians even said `There are different ways to approach the city hall regarding the budget, you can come into my office and we can talk and make things happen”’.
The interviewee recognizes that it was a confusing time for people, because even in the period prior to the elections, the population did not know how the PB would continue and what it would be like. After 2005 the government institutionalized some changes but it did not affect most of the population because the government had a cohesive discourse. The direct elections taking place in the regions could be a way for people to contest the things that the government was doing. The interviewee said:
“There has been much dispute to elect councilors in the regions. The government saw this as an extra round of voting to elect the councilors who supported them. To date, the government is harshly organized to overcome disputes within regions that have allies within the COP (PB’s Council). For example, if a region has people critical of the government on the eve of the assembly, the government will visit the sectors that are in opposition to those people and does not visit those who are critical of the government. All choices are strategically-made to perpetuate this logic”.
It can be interpreted that the change in the political parties was recognizable as a change in the whole political scenery of the city, including the PB process. “People realized that things were changing. But in a certain way, the government did not demolish the process, it just rearranged the process. In my point of view, they dismissed the main pillars that guaranteed popular participation in the process. Now every organized social movement that has demands must register them with the PB and in several others organs. It is a more secure system for the government”.
From the present point of view, after this CTP, the interviewee said: “People are noticing that even with all the positive things that the participatory budgeting had, it did not fail to represent a guardianship over the population, to the extent that when the government changed, it all changed. All it took was the political orientation of the government to change and everything fell into pieces. The process became a dependency game”.
The social learning had more to do with the lack of results that the BP has brought to people than something positive. “What counts today is that people need to do everything. People need to sign things at PB, need to mobilize, to go on strikes, to take demands to the state agency, to the federal agency.... PB is no longer reliable in itself. I think that the main learning is that people need to be in every place and be protected by every organ”.
For the interviewee, the learning is that “The government will do everything to survive, to perpetuate itself in power. People need to become independent of it… In any democratic movement that followed the dictatorship, people hoped to regain a social system where you have political control, one in which you can propose public policies to improve the lives of people. Now everything has turned out to be very provisional. Everything can be removed; there is no security at all.
He said he has hope in autonomous movements. “There is a new ongoing process. This autonomy is felt in the organization of movements that transcend location. People are writing in blogs, making national and international reports and asking for help. From the movements of recent years (WorldCup work expenses, increased transport rate, etc), we can see this mobilization increasing. In community sectors there will always be some sort of dependence on the town hall services, but what they have learned is that going through PB does not always work. You have to have other contacts, other ways of solving the problem. The only hope that I still have is in the movement of an autonomous population”.
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