Brasilia

After a long and sweaty night I arrived in Brasilia somewhat dishevelled. My apparent inability to converse with anybody in coherent Portuguese meant that I spent over an hour trying to establish where I needed to be. I had read in guide books that Brasilia is not quite like any other city and it really did feel like waking up in a parallel universe. It was built quickly in the late 50s as part of a grand master plan to create a new capital for the country. The immediacy of the motor car, vast lawns and imposing tower blocks created the image of a city similar to that of computer games I used to play on my Sega Master System in the early 90s. The nerve centre of the country's federal government and where better to probe further the origin and spread of PB than the University of Brasilia's Political Science Department and Professor Rebecca Abers, who has spent much of her career devoted to issues of participatory democracy in Brazil.

Rebecca was able to provide both a thorough and insightful account of the Brazilian context. Rebecca mentioned that whilst PB is one of the tools used as part of this process it is not obligatory, although successive PT administrations across cities and states have used PT because they feel they ought to (owing to the original success of Porto Alegre). Infact it appears that federal laws demand forms of participation in order to release funds to local municipalities. There are literally thousands of community councils throughout cities across Brazil. Participation is now engrained in the national psyche as a way of "getting things done", opposed to previous "backroom"  negotiations associated with the clientelism and corruption of the past. A community leader knows that if she/he wants to instigate change they need to mobilise others to attend public forums. For Rebecca, PB has been successful because it's tangible and can deliver immediate outcomes. Rebecca has spent the past 10 years looking at the plight of rural communities around the North-East's water basins in terms of participatory democracy. The high levels of participation are not quite so evident in these examples because
a) the forums for participation created do not match the social communities participants live in,
and
b) the strategic and policy decisions debated are complex and not immediate. They therefore lack the tangibility that PB provides.

The meeting with Rebecca was both insightful and enlightening. Rebecca was reserved about the applicability of PB in a British setting, given the specific political circumstances in Brazil and certainly rejected the notion that PB should be something undertaken at an "ATM machine" - the essence of participatory democracy is about collaboration and deliberation. Rebecca also invited me to an inaugral PB meeting happening in her neighbourhood (the PT have just taken control of Brasilia).

As this fellowship is progressing I am really learning that the Porto Alegre example is one which is heavily branded and publicised internationally because of it's success in terms of turnout and delivery. But it's success was not about opening up a public budget for public decision, it was about a far wider set of political processes pertinent to that city and that moment in time. Therefore  it would be naive to expect the Porto Alegre model of PB to work in any global setting (or indeed any Brazilian setting as the varying levels of success at implementing PB across the country have shown). What seems to be important is the "culture of participation" and the "development of governance practice" which enable citizens to have far more control over the decisions taken by the state which affect them, if PB is part of this wider process it seems to be far more successful.

Perhaps I'm already getting too philosophical... right, time to attempt to cross the 6 lane side road and get some food.
Ate amanha Brasilia!