Thirty years have passed since Olívio Dutra, the newly elected mayor of the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, worked with community groups to introduce an innovation in the city’s budget process: allowing citizens to directly propose and vote on local investment projects to be funded by the municipality. Participatory budgeting – often referred to as PB – was born. Many other Brazilian cities were quick to follow suit. Since then, PB has spread across the globe, winning various innovation awards and being lauded by international organizations as a “best practice” to be replicated. The recently published “Participatory Budgeting World Atlas” claims that more than 11,000 cases of participatory budgeting exist throughout the world!
But how is PB faring in its own birthplace, Brazil? Unfortunately, not so well; however, few seem to notice despite overall enthusiasm for PB’s global growth and recognition. It is important to look at what is happening and why, as the situation in Brazil may hold important lessons for other PB programs as well as for democratic innovations more generally.
First, we need to get a clear handle on the data, as there are lots of conflicting figures out there. The World Atlas, despite recognizing that PB in Brazil is in “huge crisis”, still gives a figure of 436 existing cases in Brazil (see page 21). In 2016, the Brazilian Network for Participatory Budgeting cited in a presentation that 482 cities in Brazil had PB processes in place. These figures, however, likely overstate the number of well-functioning PB processes, possibly using a very broad definition of what counts as a PB process, or being based on self-reported rather than independently-checked cases.
The only attempt at consistently following the growth (and decline) in PB in Brazil since its inception has been carried out over the years by a group of scholars including some of the authors of this blog. The figures below have been produced using a consistent survey instrument that documents PB processes in Brazilian cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants. Most importantly, the survey methodology requires that PB programs run for at least 2 consecutive budget cycles, which allows us to differentiate between ongoing processes and one-off participatory exercises.
1989-92 | 1993-96 | 1997-00 | 2001-04 | 2005-08 | 2009-12 | 2013-16 | |
No. of cities with PB processes | 11 | 33 | 66 | 133 | 124 | 101 | 58 |
Source: Paolo Spada (updated dataset not yet released. Previous version with 1989-2012 data available here).
What the data show is a steep increase until about 2004-05 and a subsequent substantial decline, which saw the number of cities with a functioning PB process fall by more than half in about a decade. Even in the city of Porto Alegre, where PB has survived for the longest period, its future seems to be uncertain.
What could lie behind such decline? In our view, three sets of possible factors are worth mentioning, related to political, fiscal and technical issues:
- From its inception, PB was perceived in Brazil as an invention of Lula’s Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores or PT) and as representing the PT’s approach to local governance (“o modo petista de governar”, or the PT way of governing). PT mayors promoted it across the country while the party was in the opposition at the federal level. But when Lula finally won the presidential elections in 2002, the PT shifted its focus to more powerful policy instruments it could use to address big issues like poverty and inequality, and to national-level participatory channels like policy councils and national conferences, which grew a lot after Lula came to power. Thus, PB grew as the PT gained in electoral strength, but the close association between PB and PT meant that centrist and center-right parties were less likely to adopt it.
- During the 1990s, municipalities in Brazil had access to more flexible funding that could be used to finance PB projects. From 2000 onwards, fiscal policy was re-centralized and transfers to municipalities gradually became more rigid, limiting the flexibility that local governments had to allocate resources to PB projects.
- By their very nature, PB processes suffer from important technical and institutional limitations. They work best in the initial years, when scale is still limited and citizens are galvanized by its novel approach. Over the longer term, expectations may exceed what PB can actually deliver, and ‘participation fatigue’ may set in. Over the longer term, successful PB processes engage more people that propose more ideas that require more resources, eventually hitting a sort of ‘glass ceiling’, a situation in which ideas processing slows down, more and more proposals are not implemented, and the positive reinforcing feedback loop typical of the first years of a PB process breaks down. This has been seen repeatedly, with many cities unable to keep PB processes alive for more than a few years.
Based on this assessment, what are some of the lessons that proponents and supporters of PB around the world should keep in mind?
First, the “politicization” of PB has both negative and positive aspects. Having strong political backing can strengthen commitment and ensure adequate resources, but it also creates critical vulnerabilities that can affect long-term sustainability. Finding the right balance between these contradictory aspects might just be a key success factor for PB processes everywhere. Budgets are both political and technical documents, which is why political support from both governments and community organizations is so important for PB’s success. In increasingly polarized political environments, this requires creativity and political skills.
Second, local governments need to have access to flexible, “additional” resources to fund PB projects, otherwise the PB process might lose significance and impact, or subtract resources from other priority areas. Part of PB’s appeal is that citizen participation will lead to direct action by governments, through the implementation of projects proposed and chosen by citizens themselves. If governments lack the necessary resources, PB becomes more of a consultative and information-sharing process, without empowering communities and therefore undermining one of its main objectives.
And third, it is important to carefully manage expectations to ensure that PB processes don’t grow beyond an acceptable and sustainable scale. Or other, complementary mechanisms need to be designed to allow participation to break through PB’s ‘glass ceiling’.
As PB continues to grow and expand to new places across the world, it is important to look back and learn from what is happening in the country that invented it first. The real extent of PB’s crisis in Brazil may not yet be completely apparent. The PT had a dismal performance in the 2016 municipal elections, losing about 60% of the 630 municipalities that it governed in the aftermath of the Car Wash scandals and of Dilma’s impeachment. Recent years have seen a clear decline in popular participation as a government priority or as a governance mode. Interestingly, policy councils and conferences are suffering a similar fate as PB.
In 2020, we are planning a follow-up PB census, and we will then be able to write the next chapter of this story, in the hope that by looking at the fragilities of some of the most important democratic innovations of our time, we may be able to design even better ones for the years to come.
Just a quick comment. Another aspect that must be considered is the transformations occurred in civil society from the very beginnings of PB and now. In the late 80’s we were on a moment of democratization, with strong social movements and a political environment that benefited democratic ideals. As a consequence, PB was also a result of pressures that in terms of society came from the bottom up, and in political terms came from outside into the state. PB wasn’t only a result from political will of the elected officials, but participation was a demand that came from society. During the 90’s and the 2000’s, the neoliberal agenda (privatizations, deregulation, austerity) led to the growth of inequality, precarization, and the dismantling of the social security network. Even during Lula’s government this process was slowed, but not totally stopped. As a result we now have a much more fragmented, bureaucratized, fragile civil society and the pressure for participation also got weaker. Today, the capacity of the social movements to change this dynamic is scarce. It is far easier for the political leadership to reduce the power of the participatory processes without any significant resistance.
Very interesting view especially on the decline of community demand for participation. It is worth getting to understand more about the causes and factors that eroded demand and the ability of movements to resist against closing spaces. What was the motivation then? What happened to that motivation? What could revive that motivation?
These are just a few strategic questions that could get us closer to attaining a better sense to the situation and to inform efforts to reinvigorate change movements.
This is particularly a refreshing review on this groundbreaking innovation and the analysis quite resonates in so many ways for countries that may have adopted the approach fully or partially within the last decade .
One good interesting talking point is around the institutional limitation and providing attendant resources to finance both the process and the actual intervention while managing expectations. There is the expectation that such priorities may displace some spending proposals but it is quite not easy or practical. In kenya, where there is devolved structures of governance alongside the national tier of governance , it is mandatory to involve the public at both levels before spending proposals are finalised and approved. The experience so far points to a number of breakthroughs such as enhanced transparency (though not as envisaged) and largely the realisation that the public priorities , despite resources limitation , can substantially alter spending proposals.
Further, the emerging limitation is mostly pronounced in-terms of lack of enabling legislation especially where there is no guiding legal framework on limits and type of interventions and the institutional structure to follow through to ensure sustainability of the various interventions proposed through public engagement.
Your next review may consider what options are available to countries under one form of participatory budgeting but lack clear timelines and planning framework to ensure streamlining and implementation of such priorities coming through the public participatory approach as well as inadequate mechanisms for follow-up and feedback mechanisms to the proponents (public , that is primarily making the budget responsive