Civil Society, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

BRAZIL: Citizen Participation Requires More than Just Forums

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 9 2005 (IPS) - In the space of just seven days, Brasilia is hosting three national conferences, the culmination of numerous local and state meetings that mobilised hundreds of thousands of people all around Brazil. But in and of itself, that does not make a participatory government, say activists.

“The government encourages the public to speak out, but then it does not listen,” said Cándido Grzybowski, director of the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analyses (IBASE), a non-governmental organisation that focuses on public policies and democratic participation.

“Granting people a voice is not the same thing as recognising them as interlocutors,” he told IPS.

The public debate process promoted by the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the leftist ruling Workers Party (PT), however, is impressive in terms of its sheer scope and breadth.

Saturday marks the start of the second national conference on the environment, which will run through Tuesday, when the first national conference on culture will begin. Both of these will overlap with the sixth national conference on the rights of children and youth, which will take place next Monday through Thursday.

In the run-up to the four-day national conferences, which draw a minimum of 1,200 participants, a number of preparatory meetings were held by city governments in all 27 Brazilian states.

This week, the fifth national conference on social assistance brought together 2,000 participants in Brasilia, the capital, from Monday to Thursday.

Most of those who took part were delegates elected in 4,704 local and state meetings held in the past six months, which approved recommendations for a new government social assistance policy for the next ten years.

Last week, the second national conference on cities focused on “Urban Reform: a City for Everyone”, with the participation of 3,000 representatives of city governments, trade unions, local communities, popular movements and non-governmental organisations.

In previous months or years, conferences have been held on racial equality, policies for women, food security, health, and science and technology.

But such a high degree of participation “means nothing” if the proposals that are approved fail to produce “real results,” said Grzybowski, who cited the case of transgenic crops, which were staunchly opposed at the first national conference on the environment in 2003 but later given free rein by the government.

This experience frustrates the expectations created by local PT governments, whose popular consultations have indeed given rise to effective results, he said.

The participatory budget is perhaps the best-known example, in which community assemblies organised by city governments gather to decide how public funds should best be invested.

The alliances formed by the PT with conservative political and economic sectors to win the 2002 elections have led the Lula administration to abandon the participatory approach to doing politics, according to a report prepared as part of a project known as MAPAS (Active Monitoring of Society Participation), undertaken by IBASE with the support of other non-governmental organisations.

The national conferences are “far from ideal, but they are a good attempt, a first step towards strengthening participation and the power of society to influence public policies,” said Valeria Pinheiro from the Centre for Research, Coordination and Reference on Human Settlements in the northeastern state of Ceará.

This bottom-up format of discussions beginning at the local grassroots level and moving on up to the national level is “interesting,” although “sometimes it seems like a theatre piece in which we pretend to be participating and the government pretends to listen to our proposals,” commented Pinheiro, who participated in the national conference on cities last week.

What is lacking is the “determination on the part of the national government” to ensure that the recommendations approved at this meetings are actually implemented by the local authorities at the municipal level, where policies are made concrete, she told IPS.

But in any event, the process is valuable because through these debates, “society learns to participate, to think more broadly and propose more mature measures,” added Pinheiro, a law school graduate.

A similar assessement was made by Rosa Moura of Public Policy Watch, a network of non-governmental organisations, popular movements and universities in the southern state of Paraná.

“Not everything approved at the conferences becomes government policy, but debate has opened up significantly through the incorporation of sectors that used to be silent,” she remarked to IPS.

In addition, there are groups that realise that they need to become better informed to have an influence on the discussion of issues, she noted.

At the first national conference on cities, “the main conquest was the creation of the Cities Councils,” bodies established to allow for ongoing pubic participation, explained Moura. At last week’s second conference, the call was made for these councils to be extended to every state in the country and the most highly populated municipalities, she added.

In Moura’s view, the best way to strengthen participation in public policy decisions is through “the in-depth training of local authorities, community representatives and leaders, and above all, the general public in every segment of society.”

The environmental conference beginning Saturday is likely to have greater repercussions than the others, because it will address more controversial issues, such as deforestation in the Amazon, the diversion of the Sao Francisco River to bring water to the semi-arid northeast, and transgenic crops, a matter of particular concern once again given recent reports of genetically modified corn seeds being smuggled into southern Brazil.