State-Civic Relations in Porto Alegre

Discussion

Rebecca Abers:

“The quality of life in impoverished urban areas—both in the “First” and “Third” Worlds—depends on the capacity of local residents to form social networks and civic organizations.

Much recent work argues that such capacity will only develop with the retreat of the state, which has historically worked against the capacity of communities to help themselves by paternalistically providing services and welfare directly to individuals and, in some cases (especially in the Third World), by repressing civic groups outright. Some recent studies, however, have shown that state actors can actually promote the empowerment rather than the weakening of civic organizations. This article looks at one particularly impressive example of such state-fostered civic organizing. Since 1989, the local government of Porto Alegre, a city of 1.3 million people in southern Brazil, has implemented what it calls the “participatory budget.” One of the central goals of this policy is to hand over decisions about the distribution of municipal funds for basic capital improvements-paved streets, drainage and sewer investments, school construction, and so on-to neighborhood-based forums. The policy has fostered a dramatic increase in neighborhood activism in the poorest neighborhoods of the city, with over 14,000 people participating each year in budget assemblies. Innumerable new neighborhood organizations have appeared in response to the policy, often in areas that were previously dominated by closed, ineffective associations that served as little more than tools of clientelist party politics. The Porto Alegre policy has combined a substantial amount of government investment in social programs with a successful state-sponsored effort at capacitating civic groups to control that investment and, in doing so, to dramatically improve their quality of life. This article will examine how this process of civic empowerment occurred.

The next section will consider the role that state actors can play in helping those with little previous experience to begin to organize collectively. I then go on to briefly examine the history of neighborhood associationalism in Porto Alegre and to describe the budget policy. The main body of the article looks at one district of the city that, prior to 1989, had virtually no experience with broad-based, participatory civic organizing, showing how the budget policy mobilized neighborhood groups, discouraged clientelist forms of neighborhood action, and promoted the emergence of participatory groups that not only struggled collectively to bring benefits to their neighborhoods but also learned to work in collaboration with other neighborhood groups in the pursuit of broader goals.”

Source: Rebecca Abers. 1998. “From Clientelism to Cooperation: Local Government, Participatory Policy, and Civic Organizing in Porto Alegre, Brazil,” Politics & Society 26(4): 511-537.