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Presents a broad review of an experience in Participatory Budgeting introduced by the Workers Party (PT) in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, as part of their agenda of deepening democracy through “popular administration” of government. Having won several municipal elections in 1989, including Sao Paulo with over 10 million people, the PT began a creative experiment of engaging a wide spectrum of people to formulate city budgets. The Porto Alegre case has, in particular, having been nominated by the 1996 UN Summit on Human Settlements in Istanbul as an exemplary ‘urban innovation’, stood out for demonstrating an efficient practice of democratic resource management.

The study focuses on the practicalities of linking the municipal political and legislative structures with consultation and decision-making processes involving several communities in the city. It highlights the formation of intra-community assemblies to review investment plans of the previous year, discuss proposals for the next year, and to elect people a Fora of Delegates for subsequent deliberations. These assemblies then collected a series of demands from discussions on themes such as:

• transportation,
• education, leisure and culture,
• health and social welfare,
• economic development and taxation,
• city organisation and urban development.

These demands were subsequently mapped to different city regions and assessed by the municipal Executive administration in terms of need - measured by how much of access a region has had to a particular service, and population size.

Some concerns over the balance between participation and the quality of representation are still hovering over this participatory budgeting exercise introduced in Porto Alegre. The municipality’s Executive administration has asked for a narrower representative base, for example, while citizens have continued to demand more representatives on the Council. Some other problems arise with the lack of constitutional recognition for this mayoral initiative, with the municipality sometimes encountering frictions or being unable to set the agenda, timing and debates. A point that has also been raised is that as participation gets socially institutionalised, common citizens may be replaced by specialised ‘participatory citizens’ to take part in the process.

However, the city has experienced some impressive results that have made many to praise the initiative. Between 1989 and 1996, the number of households with access to water services rose from 80% to 98%; percentage of the population served by the municipal sewage system rose from 46% to 85%; number of children enrolled in public schools doubled; in the poorer neighbourhoods, 30 kilometres of roads were paved annually since 1989; and because of transparency affecting motivation to pay taxes, revenue increased by nearly 50% (budget resources for investment only went up from US$ 54m in 1992 to US$ 70m in 1996).

The Porto Alegre experiment also presents a strong example of democratic accountability, equity, and re-distributive justice, with the participation part guaranteeing legitimacy to decisions, and objective budgeting ensuring fairness in an otherwise arbitrary process of translating political decisions into distributed resource. A notable change in attitudes of technical staff, well-versed in matters of budgeting and engineering, has also been observed as a result of their increasing interface with lay citizens. Called a jump from ‘techno-bureaucracy to techno-democracy’, the technical staff have changed the way they communicate with the communities and have tried to make themselves understood in simple language. Overall, from a protest-based culture of the 80s, these participatory budget exercises have fostered a more ‘civil’ and less disruptive form of conflict resolution through dialogue and negotiations.

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