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4. Promising aspects of the participative budget
There are many aspects of the
Participative Budget which can turn its methodology into a factor of change,
able to improve the process of collective choice and, maybe, the theory of
public choice. The most expressive aspects are commented upon below.
4.1 Participative Budget and
Local Power
The reasons why the leftists defend the people's participation have a
predominantly political background, while the neo-liberals' reasons are mainly
of economic nature. When the left proposes that the civil society may exercise
greater control on the State, it is concerned with democracy, with the
separation of powers (therefore with politics). In the strategy of the leftist
majority segment which abandoned the thesis of taking over power by force and
adopted the institutional via, out of respect for the representative democracy,
a confrontation takes place daily for the hegemony of ideas occurring at the
same time in social movements, institutions and State bodies. The agents in this
struggle, on the leftist side, should develop actions in strict contact with
social movements, with a view to transform popular hopes into claims backed by a
strong movement in the streets and the formal spaces of power. The
confrontation, both of ideas and of methods which characterize the various
groups in conflict, would generate an atmosphere of healthy politicization of
those agents, the mass being the largest beneficiary, both of the resulting
politicization (which lends it better weapons) and of immediate benefits
obtained with public money. It is not difficult to perceive where the
Participative Budget proposal fits within that strategy. It is a unique
opportunity to bring the contradictions of a class society into the neuralgic
centers of capitalist State, even when this has to be done by means of the least
empowered unit of federalist regimes: the municipality.
The idea that the left attempts
to turn hegemonic through this proposal for civil society's intervention is
that of a State which favors the majority, of a distributionist State, at
the expense of a State clearly biased towards the immediate interests sustained
by businessmen, real estate speculators, oligarchies, etc. Thus, the
Participative Budget is defined as a tool for deprivatization of the public
sector, a much respected idea with great appeal in a country where, like
Brazil, the politician's public life is mixed up with his private life,
as the saying goes.
In a text which became quite
popular among party militants, DANIEL
(1991), one of PT's ideologists, reveals
the above mentioned strategy. In accordance with DANIEL: a proposal of action
for democratic and popular administrations which will not become exhausted in
itself must point to a new model of society, allowing to view the contours of a
transforming strategy: a socialism which, denying at the same time a capitalist
option the Brazilian status quo, the neo-liberalism or social-democracyand
the statism of real socialism may assert the path for the construction of
a radically democratic society where democracy can assume a strategic value,
a means and an end to be achieved. (
) In this dispute which as it is
established presupposes a breakdown with economic powerthe fundamental issue
is to assume the fight against the values which sustain the conservative
hegemony at local level, denying those values by asserting the terms of a new
political culture. (p. 5-6)
The space of local power appears
as the most appropriate to gradually set up this type of strategy. Therefore,
the municipal budget drawn up with the people's participation is an instrument
adopted with great emphasis by the so-called popular administrations: it puts
under discussion the city's financial resources, which are always insufficient
to face all demands. Doing this, not only the exercise of local power becomes an
asset of a larger conglomerate of individuals and groups, but it also becomes
more important to enlarge it (thus reducing the weight of state and federal
power on decisions affecting the local level).
The reasons why local power
enjoys, in many areas of action and intervention, higher qualities than those
inherent to the power at higher levels of government are many and duly
identified in extensive historical, sociological and even economic literature.
4.2 Participative Budget and
Citizenship
The rescue of citizenship, as a value in itself, and the use of the
condition of citizen, as an instrument to transform the relations between State
and society, are banners which are raised at present by various social and
political sectors throughout Latin America. Nations just breaking away from
military dictatorships, which established terror, squashed any type of
opposition and seeded myopic nationalisms (making use of, among other means,
educational systems which adulterated history and politics, and conniving media)
have become, with the recent democratization processes, the scenery of a
political fight which has on one side opposition leaderships constructed in the
struggle against dictatorship, and on the other side, governing agents favorable
to a slow, gradual opening, observed at a distance by large dispossessed and
discontented masses, pushed into cities and vulnerable to the action of
caudillos and all kind of opportunists. Is it possible to think in terms of
citizenship in such a context? In the best of cases, citizenship must be
rescued, reestablished. In the worst, it should be built from scratch, since in
its very beginning it was forcefully buried. The polis should be constructed at
the same time as its operators are built: nor the citizens' mind nor the
institutions which lend life to citizenship are ready. The manner to answer this
challenge is to just do it, to learn by doing. Participative Budget is an
opportunity to practice, since it allows the individual to rescue an idea that
he is a subject, that he is dignified enough to be respected by the public
power, that he is part of a social whole governed by rules and not by higher
individual or group wills, that public space also belongs to him, that there are
no enlightened beings who are able to bestow better days onto him, that his
destiny is partially in his own hands and partially in a collective
being's hands whose will cannot be entirely left to interests which are
alien to his. Participative Budget is, therefore, an opportunity to become aware
of the soaring wings of citizenship, and to exorcise a populism which has
injured and is injuring citizenship so badly.
4.3 Participative Budget and
Corruption
Corruption pervading the inner structure of public bodies is an evil which
seems to grow larger every day, everywhere. A Latin American minister falls, a
Japanese Prime Minister must apologize to the Nation, Italy is shaken by the
clean hands operation which carries with it a great number of high ranking
public officers. In Brazil, it is of recent and sad memory the Collor/PC Farias
affair, and new cases crop up every day (Mafia of Regional Administrations in São
Paulo, corruption at the Regional Labor Courts). These are examples of large,
big-sized corruption. Underneath, far less visible, maybe of lesser financial
dimension, but certainly as damaging as the former, lies small corruption: food
for school lunches deviated, invoicing of medical services not rendered, bribes
for the granting of official documents, deviation of resources, collection of
tolls, creation of difficulties to sell facilities, etc. It is said that
the lack of surveillance and impunity are the factors which allow for such a
large proliferation of illegal procedures. But probably it is not as simple as
that. Every corrupt officer comes with a corrupter. In other words, corruption
is part of a whole with a strong cultural component. The search for taking
advantage of everything (Gerson's law) is a fact of reality, which
strongly pervades the relationship of a great number of Brazilian citizens with
public power: to become a public officer is (still) an object of desire for
many, since it means little work, easy money and stability in employment;
elective positions became a manner of getting advantages from the management or
vicinity of power; to be a mayor's or a member of the city council's friend
or relative usually favors the achievement of certain claims
Public space is
seen, finally, as nobody's land, awaiting to be taken, a plunder by the
smarter. There is no notion of the value of a public side of life, turned to the
guarantee of equality of rights, of public peace, of contracts, of the offer of
public goods and the promotion of the collective well-being.
Participative Budget is a space,
a moment, a channel, a political-institutional manner which offers one
(certainly not the only or sufficient) opportunity to reverse this damaging
culture. A debate on revenue (how much it should amount to and who must pay it)
and on expenditure (who should be benefited and by how much) in a scenery
plagued with scarcity and division of power, gives rise with time to a
perception of the limits and potentialities of the city government to promote
the common well-being. At the same time it is clear that the scarcity can get
worse for the majority if a privileged minority close to the traditional power
is left to decide the destination of resources, in less than transparent
manners, without any concern for the people's surveillance, completely free to
act as they choose.
In a scenario such as the one
existing in the core of the Brazilian public bureaucracy, even the most
incorruptible of governments is unable to secure that its administration will be
immune to the attacks and fits of Gerson's battalion. The people's
surveillance, the request for transparency, the permanent rendering of accounts,
the dialogue between interested agents: these are the ingredients which
Participative Budget can contribute and which are better allies in the fight
against corruption than any group of auditors, any city manager, any
well-meaning mayor, any guardian of morality.
4.4 Participative Budget and
Planning
The Program Budget is (or at least it should be) a short-term planning
instrument which, coupled with other longer-term planning instruments, such as
the Master Plan, the Pluri-annual Plan, the Government Plan, etc. helps to place
the Municipality in the route of sustained development and social welfare (as
far as it is possible, in a wider context of regional economy and politics, at
state and national level). Planning, so much talked about and so little
practiced, is not a guarantee of economic success and social peace, but the
absence thereof almost certainly means loss of opportunities, greater risks,
higher costs and more uncertainties, with psychological and psychosocial
anxieties associated thereto.
In order that serious and
congruent planning practices may be actually carried out, it is necessary that
those benefited by this practice exert pressure to achieve this goal. As it is
evident that governmental decisions are taken through a series of filters
(including the interests of politicians, technicians, public officers pressure
groups and the population at large), it becomes clear that agents which are
organized in defense of their interests and of the adoption of the means they
consider more efficient to achieve them will have an advantage. From the point
of view of the population at large, Participative Budget is an extremely
adequate means to enforce their wills in municipal planning. Besides, it is
also:
- a pressure instrument for the
implementation of long-term planning
- the entrance gate to participative planning at municipal level (and this is
important, because planning itself is not enough; it is better when it is
participative).
3.5 Participative Budget and
Reinventing Government
Since the middle to the end of the seventies, developed countries began to
face serious difficulties to sustain the model, until then dominant, of
expenditure with social policies. There began the outset of the welfare state.
In a situation where the fiscal crisis was added to a growing unemployment, the
initial answer at the practical level was to cut off social policies, under the
banner of neoliberalism1, which reached its peak with
Reagan's administrations in the States and Thatcher's in England. In the
theoretical field, the answer was given through an avalanche of questioning to
the interventionist theory of Keynesian origin, practiced by the majority of
countries since the post WWII period.
The entire decade of the 80's
was marked by intense debate on the government's role on economy, with clear
advantage for anti-interventionist theories, favored not only by the welfare
state crisis, but also by the collapse of socialist experiences and by the
strengthening of supply side economics or Reaganomics. Once the euphoria of the
apparent end of history (Francis Fukuyama) was over, in the 90's there
reappears the discussion of the role of government in economy and society, now
under the impact of not-so-positive assessments in respect of the performance of
the American and English social policy reduction experiences. It is in this
context that a discussion on reinventing government appears, with a well
systematized meaning in the world best seller Reinventing Government, by
David Osborne & Ted Gaebler, American authors who simply compiled in a sole
volume a series of concepts on what public opinion considers good government in
a good society, but did so summing up this vision correctly.
According to them, the reinvented
government is ready to provide answers to a world undergoing quick
transformation2, quickly turned into an experimentation bench as regards the
act of governing. Rules became imprecise over the last 20 years; a crisis of
paradigms in the art of governing was established. This crisis traces its
origins to the rapid obsolescence of traditional, bureaucratic governments, as a
consequence of the rapid development of new technologies which are permitting,
all over the world and in all activities, an unusual increase in productivity,
changing the business world and institutions in general, as well as the very way
that institutions act.
The reinvented government is, to
sum up, that which changes its manner of working, doing away with faults which
made it inefficient (the inefficiency being focused on its means and not on its
ends). It is the entrepreneur, innovative government, a maximizer of
productivity and efficiency, a creator of opportunities, setting boundaries to
risks, promoting competition (internal and external). It is the government which
uses the following principles in an integrated manner, in all its working areas:
- reduces the efforts placed on
service rendering activities (in general it turns to outsourcing or
non-traditional management techniques) and focuses on regulatory and catalytic
activities;
- it faces problems jointly
with the community, and not by the creation of professional assistance
structures;
- it introduces
competition in service rendering, fighting monopolistic practices in all
areas, including public bodies;
- it operates in search of its missions, and is not limited to obey rigid
standards and rules;
- it assesses the results of policies, awarding prizes to results instead of
providing resources randomly;
- it is oriented to the client's needs, and not to the bureaucracy's;
- it undertakes, in many cases turning expenditure sources into income sources
and thus escaping the traditional dilemma presented by fiscal crisis: to
increase taxing or not to do so;
- it plans and acts in order to avoid or to be prepared to control the
appearance of problems, thus taking preventive and not remedial actions;
- it decentralizes, does not operate with rigid hierarchies, and encourages
participation and the setting up of teams;
- it practices regulation by structuring the market, instead of adopting
programs which suspend the market.
In such a government, the
usefulness of Participative Budget is evident: it helps increase pressure
through efficiency, forcing transparency into administrative acts (and reducing
the risk of resource deviation), imposing a logic to governing officers, placing
public officers under stricter controls, forcing a planning which is more
oriented to the population's immediate interests, etc.
The participating citizen appears
in this view as a public sector client, aware of the destination of resources
which the public treasure gets from its own pockets, in the same way as he is
conscious of expenses on goods which are offered by companies, through the
market mechanism. The government, supposedly, is not only pressed to spend
better (applying better judgment) but also its size, reduced by pressures
imposed by market efficiency (which better carries out many of the activities
which the non-inspected government still carries out) and by collaboration of
community and non-governmental entities in the fight against social evils. The
client's reasons, here, have nothing to do with questions of power, but with
the various aspects of allocation efficiency, the optimum reference of which is
the exchange system practiced through the market, with prices mainly regulated
by supply and demand.
4.6 Participative Budget and
New Municipal Power
Combining the reasons of those who believe in reinventing the
government and the fundamentals of defenders of local power enlargement, and
taking into account the history of federalism in Brazil (which even today poses
the need for political articulations and social movements in defense of autonomy
and greater scope of municipal power) and the history of Brazilian public
administration (still in a professionalization stage at federal level, and quite
poor at all other levels in most cases), it is possible to consider the
Participative Budget proposal as an extremely promising occurrence, since it is
a methodology to handle one of the most important questions in any government
(the financial management), with strong potential to:
- relay the benefits of the
people's pressure and surveillance to the government in order to encourage
an improvement in rationality and democratization of the government machinery;
- strengthen, as from
the local power, the eternal hope for the construction of a fairer and more
efficient federalism, able to improve the public sector performance all over
the country;
- raise the quality of public management through innovation in the working
methods adopted by government teams and by public officers.
In this perspective,
Participative Budget appears as a central element (both as a means and as an end
in itself) for a renewed municipal power, of the kind the country needs at this
time: not an occasion municipal power, pushed by leaders who see it as a mere
tool for their projects and which is not made part of populist projects which
are restricted to co-opt popular leaderships to achieve their ends. It should be
a municipal power oriented to the building of a local power which is politically
democratic and micro-economically efficient, where these characteristics are
closely related, producing a potential for local administrations with political
will and technical proficiency to promote social and economic development.
1 Defined here as
a
body of coherent, self-conscious, militant doctrine purposely decided to
transform the world into its own image, in its structural ambition and its
international scope. (ANDERSON,
Perry. Balanco do neoliberalismo. In:
SADER, E. & GENTILI, P. (org.). Pós-neoliberalismo As políticas
sociais e o Estado democrático. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1996, p. 22).
2 Osborne & Gaebler state
(1993):
We live in an era of rapid
change; in a global market which imposes enormous competitive pressure on
our economic institutions. We live in an information society, in which
people have access to information almost as rapidly as their leaders. We
live in an economy based on knowledge, where well educated workers resist
orders and call for autonomy. We live in an era of market niches, with
consumers who are accustomed to high quality and plenty of offer. (p. 16)
Our parents stood in line
for hours to obtain the license plates for their car and did not complain.
Today, we would become furious if we had to queue in a similar line. Our
parents accepted public schools as something given, not subject to change.
Today, we organize committees, demand new curricula, obtain resources and
even volunteer to give lessons at experimental educational units. And if all
that is not enough, we send our children to private schools. (p. 183)
In an era when changes
occur with frightening velocity, blindness as regards the future is a mortal
failure. (p. 242)
In the contemporaneous
global village, events in Kuwait or in Japan can suddenly turn our world
upside down. (p. 243)
Fifty years ago,
centralized institutions were a must. Information technologies were
primitive, communications between localities were difficult, and available
workmanship was not very educated. There was no alternative but to put
together all health professionals at the same hospital, all public officers
in the same organization
There was plenty of time for information to
slowly go up through all the hierarchical chain and, then, go down through
the same steps under the form of decisions. (p. 274)
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