RES/RSE
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Português
Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre: Toward a Redistributive Democracy
Boaventura de Sousa Santos - Portugal

The hegemonic processes of globalization are bringing about the intensification of social exclusion and marginalization of large bodies of population all over the world. Such processes are being met with resistances, grassroots initiatives, community innovations, and popular movements that try to counteract social exclusion, opening up spaces for democratic participation, for community building, for alternatives to dominant forms of development and knowledge - in sum, for social inclusion. They are, in general, very little known because they do not speak the language of hegemonic globalization and oftentimes present themselves as promoting the case against globalization. They are of very different kinds or else their diversity has become more apparent after the collapse of the models of grand-scale social transformation. Today's forms of counter-hegemonic globalization occur in rural as well as urban settings, involve common citizens or especially vulnerable groups, and deal with issues as diverse as land rights, urban infrastructure, drinking water, labor rights, sexual equality, self-determination, biodiversity, environment, community justice, and so on. Finally, they may entertain a wide variety of relations with the state, from no relation at all to complementarity or confrontation.

In this chapter I analyze one urban experiment aimed at redistributing city resources in favor of the more vulnerable social groups by means of participatory democracy: the participatory budget adopted in the city of Porto Alegre since 1989. In the first part, I briefly describe the recent history of Porto Alegre and its government in the context of the Brazilian political system and provide some basic information about the city. In the second part I describe the main features of the institutions and processes of the participatory budget: institutions and processes of participation as well as criteria and methodology for the distribution of resources. In the third part I analyze the evolution of this institutional innovation since its creation until today. Finally, in the fourth part, I analyze the participatory budgeting process along the following vectors: redistributive efficiency, accountability and quality of representation in a participatory democracy, autonomy of the participatory budgeting vis-à-vis the executive government on the city, from technobureaucracy to technodemocracy, dual power and competing legitimacies, and the relations between the participatory budget and the legislative body vested with the formal legal prerogative of budget approval.

 
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Centro de Estudos Sociais MacArthur Foundation
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian