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By Andrea Cornwall
Brazil's Citizens' Constitution of 1988 created the legal basis for the development of some of the world's most progressive democratic institutions
In the two decades since military rule ended in Brazil, a remarkable flowering of new democratic practices and spaces for participation has taken place. Innovations such as Participatory Budgeting (Orçamento Participativo) have brought Brazil to the forefront of the debate on tackling democratic deficits through participatory governance. And Brazil's social movements, such as the land rights movement, the Movimento Sem Terra (MST), have become an almost legendary reference point for those beyond its borders engaged in struggles for rights and social justice.
Brazil is a country of extremes. Its GDP ranks in the top ten biggest in the world. Yet 22.5 million Brazilians live on less than a dollar a day, more than the entire populations of 42 of the 50 Least Developed Countries -- accounting for a major share of Latin America's poor. Despite improvements under the administration of Luiz Incio Lula da Silva's Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT), Brazil is still the world's fourth most unequal country. Regional differences within Brazil place the northeast at the very top of the list of the world's most unequal countries. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of a minority: the richest 20% receives 30 times more income than the poorest 20%. Many of this poorest 20% are black; the inequities of race are further evident in numerous health indices, such as the infant mortality rate for black children, which is two-thirds higher than that for white children.
Tackling the deep-rooted economic and social disadvantage that produces inequalities of this magnitude requires radical new approaches to governance and social policy. Brazil's Citizens' Constitution of 1988 created the legal basis for the development of some of the world's most progressive democratic institutions. Experiments in participatory governance, with their origins in the democratising vision that animated popular social movements in the period of the dictatorship that gripped Brazil from 1964 to 1985, have come to be institutionalised throughout the country. Innovative efforts to regenerate democracy in Brazil have attracted increasing international attention, as, slowly, these new democratic spaces are beginning to make a difference in the struggle against inequality and injustice, expanding notions of citizenship as they deepen the practice of democracy.
What can we learn from Brazil's democratic experiments? And what lessons might this offer for work on rights, citizenship, accountability and participation in other countries?
This briefing shares some of the insights that arise from a project entitled 'Olhar CrA-tico'. Funded by the Brazil country office of the UK government's Department for International Development (DFID), the project brought together activists, academics and practitioners to enquire, with a critical eye, into participation and citizenship in Brazil (for further details, see http://infochange.dreamhosters.com/www.actionaid.org.br).
New democratic spaces
In Brazil, the words democracia (democracy) and cidadania (citizenship) are not just abstract, academic concepts. Used to express expectations as well as frustrations in places where ordinary citizens gather, they have gained new meanings in the post-dictatorship era. Even as they come to be used to bemoan what is lacking as often as to celebrate the conquest of long-denied rights, these words also embrace the expansion of a new democratic imaginary beyond the formal political arena into everyday life. Encoding a sense of entitlement as citizens rather than as clients or beneficiaries, popular use of these words marks a radical shift from a culture of favours and the lack of voice experienced under decades of authoritarian rule.
Institutionalising Controle Social : The case of Cabo's conselho de saúde
A defining feature of the new democratic order in post-dictatorship Brazil, the 1988 Constitution -- tagged the 'Citizens' Constitution' for the new forms of citizenship it sought to define -- laid the ground for the institutionalisation of hybrid governance institutions at each tier of government. These embody the principle of C ontrole Social, 'Social Oversight', and give citizens a statutory role in policy deliberation and in monitoring planning and spending. The earliest and arguably the most radical of these new democratic spaces were established in the health sector, inspired by innovation in Brazil's largest metropolis, São Paulo, in the 1980s, and taken to scale by the influence the health reform movement (movimento sanitarista) had on the shaping of the new Constitution. Brazil's sectoral participatory policy councils and conferences have received less international attention than participatory budgeting, but for the hundreds of thousands of citizens who take part in deliberation over national, state and municipal health policy, they offer a significant space for democratising the governance of healthcare.
Health councils (conselhos de sade) have a statutory mandate to audit health plans, budgets and expenditure; transfers from federal health budgets depend on the conselho approving accounts and spending plans. Over 5,000 conselhos de sade now exist across the country, engaging thousands of Brazilian citizens on behalf of a multitude of civil society actors, from neighbourhood associations to new and established social movements. User representatives constitute 50% of each council's members. The remaining 50% of the seats are split between health workers and representatives of government, including private sector institutions delivering contracted out services.
What do citizens who participate in these new democratic spaces make of them? What do they see as their prospects for enhancing accountability and responsiveness? And what wider lessons do their experiences offer? Silvia Cordeiro, of the feminist organisation Centro das Mulheres do Cabo became one of the first user representatives to chair a health council. She worked with Rio-based academic-practitioner Nelson Giordano Delgado and IDS researcher Andrea Cornwall to reflect on her experience and seek answers to these questions from Cabo de Santo Agostinho's health councillors.
Struggles for accountability in Cabo de Santo Agostinho
Cabo de Santo Agostinho is a medium-sized municipality, located in the semi-urban periphery of Brazil's fifth largest city, Recife, in Pernambuco. Cabo's Municipal Health Council has a reputation as one of the most successful in the region. It was established in 1994, but remained a rubber-stamping device for its first few years
A popular front that brought together a spectrum of civic organisations mobilised to press the municipal government to fulfil its constitutional obligations. The council only gained institutional vitality, however, with the election, in 1997, of a leftist municipal government committed to popular participation. Subsequent democratising reforms of the governance of health services strengthened the council's democratic potential. These include a chair elected by the council rather than assumed by the health secretariat, and rules for selecting representatives that seek to secure broad-based participation from among Cabo's diverse civil society organisations.
Cabo's conselho, now in its fourth term with a user representative chair, is a lively arena for health user involvement in the governance of health in the municipality. Health user and health worker representatives (conselheiros) meet every month with senior officials from the municipal administration to actively question and challenge those responsible for providing health services and engage in animated debate about issues of priority setting and probity. Sub-committees of councillors take the council's work further, visiting facilities and analysing accounts. While the municipal government has provided basic infrastructure for a secretariat, limited resources make it difficult for the conselheiros to carry out their work; and bureaucratic pressures create bottlenecks and consultation short-cuts that act as a further brake on the council's effectiveness.
Diverse as those who represent their communities and organisations on the council are, hierarchies of expertise, education, class, status, race and gender continue to present barriers to their substantive participation. Dependencies on contracts and subsidies from the municipal government affect the autonomy of health user representatives; and party political affiliations give rise to complex dynamics, connecting and dividing health service users, providers and managers along party lines. This complex web of affinities and allegiances complicates efforts to hold the government to account over public expenditure and health plans. Yet, despite these challenges, conselheiros talk with pride of what they have achieved. Slowly, the democratising potential of the council is beginning to be realised.
Source: : Struggles for Participation, Struggles for Accountability: The Case of the Municipal Health Council of Cabo de Santo Agostinho, Silvia Cordeiro, Andrea Cornwall and Nelson Giordano Delgado
Set against a backdrop of strong social movement activism and progressive politics, and engaging amongst its architects -- doctors whose passionate commitment to public health services took shape as student activists in the public health reform movement -- Cabo's health council enjoys most of the basic ingredients for 'success'. That the council has achieved some institutional durability in the years after its founders have moved on is testament to the importance of institutional design in ensuring the viability of democratic participation. Yet this case also reveals that a purely instrumental view of these institutions, as 'mechanisms' for 'good governance' obscures a vital factor: their inherently political nature.
As Cabo's conselheiros grapple with the challenge of realising the promise of C ontrole Social , a paradox becomes evident. To be effective in holding the government to account, citizen representatives need sufficient autonomy from the state to be able to press for probity. The distance that is required, and the defensiveness this can create as demands for accountability are vocalised, can undermine the trust and mutual respect needed for effective collaboration in improving service delivery. The ideals of deliberative democracy that underpin the institutional designs of Brazil's participatory policy councils privilege consensus over conflict. Yet, at times, it is precisely through contestation and critique that the practice of democracy becomes meaningful, and that accountability can be realised. Lessons from Cabo suggest that democratisation needs to be seen as a two-way street, not simply as expanding the space for 'civil society' to press their demands on a reluctant state. Champions of change within the state may have as important a role in 'civilising' civil society, as activists outside the state have in holding the state to account.
Power to the people?
Inspired by the remarkable successes of Porto Alegre in redistributing municipal resources, with real gains for poor communities, Participatory Budgeting (Orçamento Participativo) has become institutionalised in many municipalities throughout the country. While the sectoral management councils described earlier embody normative principles of deliberative democracy, Participatory Budgeting offers a more direct democratic space to negotiate priorities. People have the right to participate as individuals, without necessarily being nominated as representatives of specific organisations, and delegates are drawn directly from the neighbourhoods in which they live. In their thousands, they debate the gains to be had from investing in actions that can make a difference to their communities.
Even though much of the municipal budget continues to be consumed by recurrent costs, the involvement of citizens in deciding how a proportion of investment funds are spent and in auditing this expenditure -- what the Brazilians call fiscalização -- has had positive effects in reducing corruption within local government. Participatory Budgeting appears at first sight to offer a solution to a whole range of dilemmas of democratic deficit, and has become the subject of considerable international interest as a result. Yet the path to the realisation of its promise is more complex than the mythologisation of Porto Alegre's experiences would have us believe, as the Olhar Crítico study of Participatory Budgeting in Recife, Evanildo Barbosa da Silva and Ana Claudia Chaves Teixeira shows.
Producing 'Civil Society' through Participatory Budgeting in Recife
Recife's participatory budget opens a space for representatives of civil society organisations and citizens, elected as delegates in equal measure, to decide how a proportion of investment funds from the municipal budget should be spent. Introduced in 1993, and building on earlier experiments with democratic city governance, Participatory Budgeting has continued through three changes of government, including a period of three years of conservative administration.
Maintained as much by the strength of civil society organisations as by political will, it has given rise to a diversity of new local collectivities that have come to constitute themselves as political actors through the opportunities the budget process has presented for collective action and democratic engagement.
Between 2001 and 2004, the first years of the tenure of a radical democratic Workers' Party (PT) government in the city, the number of people taking part in the participatory budget increased by over 50%, to 69,500. The number of local organisations registered to participate doubled as inclusion criteria were broadened. According to the Recife municipal government, some 26% of the groups that participated in 2001-02 had been formed as a result of the opportunity to participate in the budgeting process. New identities as collective actors have emerged as a result. There are dangers, however. Housing rights activist Reverend Marcos Cosmo da Silva notes that people are abandoning traditional community organisations to form their own, without any clear idea of aims beyond gaining access to the budget process and a voice for their immediate needs. This, in turn, da Silva argues, weakens the prospects for defining policies for the city and for strengthening social movements fighting for people's rights.
Nevertheless, gains have been significant. The survival of OP through a period of conservative rule, during which it was threatened by city councillors who saw it as undermining their power and attempts by the central administration to close it down, is in itself an achievement for democracy.
Source: : Participatory Budgeting in Recife: Popular Participation in the Struggle for Rights, Evanildo Barbosa da Silva and Ana Claudia Chaves Teixeira
The Recife case shows how the sites of the participatory budget need to be understood as political spaces steeped in the political culture of the city, in the histories of different administrations and in citizens' encounters with government. They reveal how far old political practices have resurfaced in these new arenas, which do not remain free of clientelism, party politics or any of the distinguishing features of residual political culture. Yet, by producing new civil society actors as people come together with friends, neighbours and those with whom they have common interests to gain access to the budget process, Participatory Budgeting has also extended the possibilities of citizenship. In the process, ordinary people who may never before have been involved in politics or governance are coming to see themselves as political subjects and exercising their right to participate.
Putting democracy to rights
In Brazil, participation in popular movements draws on the language of rights and struggle, framing 'conquests' in terms of the pursuit of democracy and citizenship. These conquests are often symbolised by legal provisions enshrined in the Constitution and other statutes as a result of previous mobilisations. Debates in the new democratic spaces described earlier may come to turn on interpretations and counter-interpretations of pieces of legislation. Activists roll statute numbers off their tongues as they describe the rights they have and define the rights they now want. The gulf between the elegance and comprehensiveness of Brazil's many laws and the realities of access to justice is stark. Poor people have scant recourse to the legal arena, and laws described as things of beauty fail to find any real expression in everyday life. Yet for social movements, the law and the rights it defines have a symbolic and a practical value as a form of defence against the old Brazil and dependency on powerful patrons as part of a culture of favours.
Families in the far northern states of Brazil have long depended on their customary usufruct rights to babaçu -- a variety of coconut used by women to make oil, soap and charcoal. Gaining an entitlement in law to guarantee these customary rights became critical to their survival. Local women's groups created by the Catholic Church became vehicles for women to organise themselves over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, as access to babaçu became more difficult and dangerous by the often violent process of land enclosure which accompanied the expansion of cattle-ranching into the Amazon frontier. In the struggle for their rights, the women defined themselves as a new collective actor, the quebradeiras de côco . Their fight for a law that enshrined their customary rights in the statute books has become legendary in Brazil .
In their Olhar Crítico study of the origins of the movement, anthropologist Maristela de Paula Andrade and activist Luciene Dias Figueiredo show that participation was crucial for the quebradeiras de côco but in ways that went beyond the kind of "invited participation" orchestrated by the state and development organisations.
Participatory practices and rights struggles in rural Maranho
For peasant families in the rural areas of one of Brazil's poorest states, Maranho, babaçu is a vital source of livelihood. Faced with the increasing difficulties and dangers of exercising traditional usufruct rights, poor women and men in rural Maranho began to mobilise to secure continued access to babaçu. Adapting a traditional peasant institution, mutiro -- a form of collective communal labour - groups got together and broke into large landholdings, taking as much babaçu as they could carry.
Women and men developed different strategies in the struggle for their rights. In empates (literally "blockades"), groups of women came together to exercise their usufruct rights and sought to negotiate the protection of babaçu stands threatened with deforestation using non-violent means; in greves (literally "strikes") men's struggles for rights drew on more conventional tools of mobilisation and resistance.
Struggles for babaçu turned into struggles for access to land, as women and men came to see themselves as citizens and as social and political actors. A new identity was born: the quebradeiras de cAco babaçu. Soon a movement had sprung up, and one of its members became the first quebradeira to be elected as a municipal councillor -- and, once in office, helped get a law on the statute books that turned customary usufruct rights into a legal right, later amended to make cutting down or damaging babaçu trees in any way illegal. The battleground has now shifted to implementation: the struggle to ensure that the law is translated into practice is just beginning.
Source: : By Law and By Force: The Struggle for Free Access to Babaçu is, Maristela de Paula Andrade and Luciene Dias Figueiredo
As the case of the quebradeiras suggests, participation is about more than responding to invitations from the state or other development organisations. It is also about forms of mobilisation and collective action. These have long histories in popular struggles for self-realisation and survival in Brazil. From the quilombos established by runaway slaves seeking to create a new society free of the rules and norms of their colonial masters, to the MST's land invasions, to the mutirões , empates and greves of those involved in the struggle for free babaçu, these forms of participation are not only forms of resistance. They are practices that help create new dimensions of citizenship, an awareness of the right to have rights, and a sense of political agency. They give shape to ideals of a way of organising society that breaks with old constraints and overcomes the oppression that is still so much part of the everyday lives of Brazilians living in poverty, from the slums of its metropoli to those occupying the large landholdings of the interior.
Negotiating citizenship
Brazil's Constitution provides the right to health. But what rights do people have if their definition of "health" lies outside that of biomedicine? How are different knowledges negotiated as health policy defined? And what happens when policies designed to implement the principle of universality that underpins the national health system contradicts the expressed needs of a particular group?
Olhar Crítico 's fourth case study, of the interface between the Brazilian health system and the system of medicine practised by indigenous traditional healers, pa jés , raises fundamental questions about citizenship and the paradoxes of inclusion.
For Brazil 's indigenous population, the relationship with the Brazilian state -- which for centuries has oscillated between genocide and paternalism -- has never been easy. For the Brazilian government, administering health services in regions, where access to biomedical care can involve several days' journey by canoe, is a challenge. The establishment of Special Indigenous Health Districts (DSEI) and district health councils bringing together indigenous people and representatives of the Brazilian state opened up opportunities for dialogue on how to improve health, wellbeing and access to services for indigenous peoples. The dynamics of interaction between representatives of the state and of indigenous people in these spaces throw the challenges of inclusive participation into sharp relief.
The principal concern of those who administer the DSEIs is with the delivery of biomedical health services. For indigenous people, however, a key concern is whether these services take account of their own system of preventive medicine and healing. The principle of universality embedded in the Brazilian national health services has been implemented by rolling out a series of standardised biomedical packages -- an approach that reaches its limits as it meets with indigenous peoples' desires for a medical system that respects their way of life.
Participation at the interface of knowledge systems in the Brazilian Amazon
For the indigenous peoples of the Brazilian Amazon, one of the principal sources of healthcare is their own indigenous medical system, of which different groups of traditional healers, collectively known as pajAcs, are the custodians. A complex system of ritual practice, indigenous medicine uses a variety of resources to ensure health and wellbeing, from protective incantations and preventive dietary taboos to curative herbs and shamanic interventions.
In 1993, the Second Conference on Indigenous People's Health produced a model for an indigenous health system which included the participation of indigenous people in planning and implementation at every level. This raised a number of challenges. Levels of organisation among indigenous people in different regions varied greatly; some groups had well-established movement organisations, while others lacked anything resembling the kinds of formalised institutions through which the Brazilian state was accustomed to engaging with citizens. Even in areas with strong indigenous organisations, such as the Rio Negro region of the Amazon, official spaces for participation such as the district health councils tend to be dominated by those with technical-bureaucratic concerns, leaving little space for discussion about how indigenous medicine might be incorporated into service delivery.
The pajAcs of the Rio Negro, who are beginning to press for official recognition of their traditional medical knowledge, after decades of repression by missionaries and the state, are finding that they must develop new skills and find new allies in order to influence both their own representatives and the non-indigenous professionals and bureaucrats who dominate the health service.
Source: : Traditional Knowledge and Indigenous Participation in Health Policy in the Rio Negro Region, Renato Athias, Alex Shankland and Raimundo Nonato
Given the obligations of the health districts to involve indigenous people in planning and implementation, how are they to respond to calls to include indigenous medicine in healthcare delivery? If the terms of inclusion -- such as, for example, administering herbs without the ritual that pajés see as vital in the healing process -- strip away the power of this form of medicine, how can indigenous practices be accommodated in biomedical hospitals and clinics? Can a health system that has pursued universalisation through expanded access to standarised services adjust to recognising the rights of indigenous people to demand special and different treatment that would place them apart from other citizens -- including those who may prefer acupuncture or homoeopathy to allopathic medicine?
These questions are complex and have implications for the inclusion of any marginalised group within spaces for participation that are shaped by the cultures and practices of the dominant majority. As this case shows, effective participation may depend on the ability to establish links with other spaces beyond the participatory sphere -- spaces where marginalised people can build their confidence, arguments and skills with which to participate. At the same time, it demonstrates how vital it is to recognise the diversity of styles and cultures of participation if participatory initiatives and institutions are to be genuinely inclusive.
Learning lessons from Brazil
What is it that has enabled thousands of ordinary people, many of them poor, unemployed and uneducated, to bring ideals of participatory governance to life and mobilise to press for change? Olhar Crítico's stories tell of the significance of building networks, of organisations that link and support and build the preconditions for democratic engagement at the grassroots. They tell of the role played by a diversity of civil society organisations working for social justice, from progressive churches to social movements and NGOs, in mobilising people to recognise the rights they have and the power that is theirs to use. And they also tell of the role of a progressive, enabling state and of committed bureaucrats within it, in supporting the realisation of these rights. Together, these stories testify to how enabling legal frameworks can connect with and amplify struggles to realise rights, creating new forms of citizenship and social action. In doing so, they offer a number of broader lessons that go beyond Brazil 's borders.
Insights from Olhar Crítico point to the need to extend our notions of 'participation' beyond creating structures such as committees and councils and introducing the technologies of 'invited participation'. Looking more closely at what poor people do when they meet to try and influence decisions that affect their lives brings other forms of 'popular participation', such as the strikes and protests of the quebradeiras de côco, into the picture. It underscores the importance of other spaces, such as those created by social movements beyond the participatory sphere, as sites in which citizens learn what it takes to engage with the state and begin to mobilise as collective actors. These other spaces have a critical part to play in lending state-created spaces viability.
Olhar Crítico case studies echo three factors identified by Brazilian and international scholars as critical to the success of innovations in democratic governance: a strong and well organised civil society; a supportive state (progressive politics, enabling legislative and policy frameworks, political commitment); and institutional designs that favour inclusive participation and deliberation. Yet they underscore the point that effective participatory governance is not just a matter of getting institutions right. It is also about the broader, more diffuse effects that the new meanings of citizenship, created as citizens and representatives of the state engage in these institutions, can have on people's consciousness of their own political agency and of the obligations of the state. Much depends on how far citizens can mobilise to make use of opportunities for engagement with the state and engage strategically -- in the courts or on the streets -- in struggles for rights and citizenship.
While the new democratic spaces created by the Brazilian state present new opportunities to dynamise democracy, they form part of an institutional landscape crowded with older institutional forms and textured with residual relations of power and cultures of politics. Such practices, and the expectations and dispositions associated with them, will not disappear overnight. Brazil 's new democratic spaces need, then, to be seen as spaces of power that are constantly under construction. They come to be reshaped as political spaces, as actors come and go, as municipal governments change, and as new political configurations appear and fade away. What gives them democratic vitality is not only the form that they take as institutions, but also the new culture of citizenship that social movements and leftist political parties have sought to create to transform the clientelism and authoritarianism of 'old Brazil'.
Inspiring as the innovative ways in which Brazilian social movements and progressive governments have sought to address the challenge of democratic renewal are, Olhar Critico reveals that these are no blueprints: there are no simple "best practice" recipes that can be extracted and exported. Context matters. And so does politics. It is no coincidence that the democratic experiments described here gain their inspiration and democratising potential precisely through their association with radical social movements and leftist political parties. Institutional designs are only part of a more complex equation, as creating the enabling institutional conditions for participation is only as effective in democratising governance as the citizens who enter new democratic spaces and make use of progressive legislation to press for their rights. Perhaps the most important lesson of all from Olhar Critico is the importance of getting to grips with the rhythm and texture of democratisation and understanding better the pre-conditions for effective citizen participation and how they can be stimulated, rather than assuming that a similar set of institutional recipes can have the same effects in different places. Development agencies ignore this lesson at their peril.
(This briefing was written by Andrea Cornwall, with Maristela de Paula Andrade, Renato Athias, Silvia Cordeiro, Nelson Giordano Delgado, Luciene Dias Figueiredo, Raimundo Nonato, Jorge Romano, Alex Shankland, Evanildo Barbosa da Silva and Ana Claudia Chaves Teixeira)
(Andrea Cornwall is a researcher based at the Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, where she works on democratic engagement, rights and the anthropology of development)
InfoChange News & Features, December 2006
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