Changing Patterns of Participation in Porto Alegre*

Changing Patterns of Participation in Porto Alegre* Bernhard Leubolt, Andreas Novy, Joachim Becker Submitted Version of the article published in: International Social Science Journal 59 (No. 193-194), pp. 435-448 © 2008 UNESCO and Blackwell Publishing Please always refer to the original version of ISSJ Abstract This article aims at understanding local capabilities for empowerment, dealing with the potential for progressive political movements at the local level. Applying an analytical path-, context-, and scale-sensitive approach to urban governance, this article will discuss participatory governance in Porto Alegre, the capital city of Rio Grande do Sul, the most southern state of Brazil. Porto Alegre’s Participatory Budget represents an international best practice model of urban governance. In recent years it has been referred to as a role model concerning pro-poor participatory governance and adopted by many other cities and international organizations. In this article we give special emphasis to recent transformations which we characterize as a change from a radical project of democratization towards a model of consensual governance. The former conception – linked to the administration of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (1989-2004) – tended towards a project of social transformation where conflicts were dealt with openly and democratically and the local level was treated as a space of experimentation for political projects of up-scaling. Its implementation led to remarkable social progress. The latter conception – implemented by the new mayor after 2005 – has stronger links to mainstream “good governance” concepts, focusing on consensual arrangements and Private–Public Partnerships. 1 Decades of research on grassroots and local state politics call for an evaluation of the achievements of local politics. It is urgent to understand local capabilities for empowerment. This article will deal with the potential for progressive political movements at the local level. Historically, the city was a privileged site of social struggle in specific conjunctures. The 1920s, for example, were the heyday of alternative local state projects in Europe. But it was only with the onset of the next crisis in the 1980s that alternative local development "from below" was discussed again (Novy et al. forthcoming). The municipal government of Porto Alegre, the capital city of Rio Grande do Sul, the most southern state of Brazil will serve as a starting point for our critical appraisal of local power as it represents a well-known international best practice model of urban governance. Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting (PB) was one of the best practices presented at the UN-HABITAT conference in Istanbul in 1996 (www.bestpractices.org). In recent years it has been referred to as a role model for “empowered participatory democracy” (Fung and Wright 2001), “participatory publics” (Avritzer 2002), “redistributive democracy” (Santos 2002), “participatory democracy” (Roussopoulos and Benello 2005), or “social innovation” (Moulaert et al. 2005) in academic circles. It has also been recognized by other international organizations as an important best practice model of local governance. The European Union has also recognized this innovative model, which is best displayed by the choice of Porto Alegre as the host city of the EU–Latin America cooperation programme, URB-AL No.9 on “municipal finance and participatory budgeting” (Porto Alegre 2004). The practice of PB also led the organizers of the World Social Forum to choose Porto Alegre as the first venue of the forum. This in turn resulted in a considerable international diffusion of PB, now implemented in about 170 Brazilian municipalities (Wampler and Avritzer 2005), as well as in a growing number of cities in Latin America (Goldfrank 2006), Europe (Sintomer et al. 2005), and other parts of the world. These practices are very diverse, whereby the case of Porto Alegre stands out as being (1) one of the first experiences, which (2) has been in practice uninterruptedly since 1989, and (3) representing the most radical participatory experience (cf. Wampler and Avritzer 2005; Avritzer 2006; Goldfrank 2006). This article will discuss participatory governance in Porto Alegre and its recent transformations, referring to an approach to urban governance, which is scale-, path- and context-sensitive (Brenner 2004, Leubolt et al.2007). Participation is among the often ambiguous concepts of local governance, included in the broader, often normative concept of “good governance” (for discussion cf.: Weiss 2000; Swyngedouw 2005; Leubolt 2007). It has 2 been denounced as “the new tyranny” of development politics (Cooke and Kothari 2001). This notion refers to practices of participation being used as a tool to prevent actors from criticizing government via consultation in the decision-making process without having the possibilities of intervention. The case of Porto Alegre has been particularly important for the development of notions of “participation as transformation” (Hickey and Mohan 2004) which are supposed to foster processes of social emancipation. Originally, the participatory budget was conceived as a conscious attempt to change the form of the local state. The local leadership of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) understood that it had to change the strategic selectivity of the state in order to envisage transformatory changes at the policy level. In accordance with Jessop (2002, p. 40), “(b)y strategic selectivity, (we) understand the ways in which the state understood as a social ensemble has a specific differential impact on the ability of the various political forces to pursue particular interests and strategies in specific spatio-temporal contexts through their access to and/or control over given state capacities – capacities that always depend for their effectiveness on links to forces and powers that exist and operate beyond the state’s formal boundaries.” New participatory state structures around PB were created while it demoted existing branches of the state like the local parliament which had been a main locus of clientelist practices. 1. Historical Background PB has evolved within a particular state tradition. Rio Grande do Sul was different from the rest of Brazil. It bears the imprint of a border region. Up to the 19th century, this imprint was rather military. Both the Portuguese empire and later the Brazilian state sought to secure the Southern border against the Spanish-language colonies or states. In order to achieve this, they attracted settlers who first originated from the Açores, and later from Germany and Italy. Family farmers were given small lots of land. They were regarded as eventually well- motivated defenders of the land. In the 19th century, Emperatrice Dona Leopoldina viewed the small settlers as a possible counterweight to the latifundistas – the big landlords of Rio Grande do Sul’s extreme south. This desire did not materialise on a national scale, but only in Brazil’s southernmost state and this type of agriculture and the ensuing social structure remained exceptional in Brazil (and Latin America in general; Targa 1996b, p.28 ff.; 1996a, p.91). Porto Alegre turned into the commercial centre of the prosperous agricultural zone in the northern part of Rio Grande do Sul as it was geographically well positioned in the river network which was the backbone of transport for much of the 19th century. The economic 3 development of the city was favoured by the Rio-Grandense state government of the Partido Republicano Rio-Grandense (PRR). This party represented a social bloc of the urban middle class, a minority of cattle raisers and representatives of the settlers, merchants and industrialists. The PRR strived for a new form of the regional state based on broad alliance to foment economic diversification. Their developmental and republican vision of order and progress was based on the positivism of Auguste Comte (Cowen and Shenton 1996). They wanted to conciliate economic progress and the preservation of the social order (Pesavento 1997, p.67), clashing with the interests of latifundistas of Rio Grande do Sul’s extreme south. With the end of slavery (1888, in Rio Grande do Sul already 1884) and the Brazilian monarchy (1889), the conflict between the two power blocs exacerbated. In a regional civil war between 1893 and 1895, the PRR prevailed as it had the sympathies of the local military. The PRR established a “positivist dictatorship” in Rio Grande do Sul which lasted for more than three decades and led the foundations of the Brazilian developmental state (Bosi 1999) . Power was concentrated in the hands of the governor whereas the parliament had little influence. A hundred years later, the municipal governance of Porto Alegre was restructured in a similar direction (Carneiro/Penna 1992, p. 59). In the conception of the PRR, the state was committed to the “common good” which resulted in rather progressive fiscal policies, an expansion of infrastructure in cooperation with foreign capital, a promotion of peasant agriculture and, at least indirectly, manufacturing and attempts of conciliation between capital and labour (Pesavento 1993; Targa 1996a). The local government “municipalised” some of the infrastructure in this period (Almeida 1996, p.101). The economic development of Porto Alegre benefited considerably from these policies (Carneiro/Penna 1992, p. 80). This type of a regional state was unique in the economically heterogeneous and politically decentralized Brazilian República

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