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4
Inclusion Without Power?
Limits of Participatory Institutions
Benjamin Goldfrank
In the early twenty-first century, to different degrees across countries,
Latin America became a center for experiments with participatory insti-
tutions. Political parties and leaders on the Left called for deepening
democracy by adopting new venues for citizen participation beyond
traditional representative institutions. More centrist or conservative tech-
nocratic incumbents advocated for participatory institutions as a means
to improve government efficiency and reduce corruption. International
development organizations offered encouragement and funding for gov-
ernments of varied ideological hues to implement participatory institu-
tions, especially at the local level. By one count, 1,889 “participatory
innovations”appeared in sixteen Latin American countries between
1990 and 2015, making it the world’s leading laboratory for creating
deliberative councils, popular consultations, citizen oversight commis-
sions, participatory budgeting (PB), and policy conferences, among other
institutions (Pogrebinschi 2017a). While many observers applauded the
growth of possibilities for popular sector participation, a recent wave of
skeptical scholarship highlights the profound differences across such
experiments and cautions against overly sanguine evaluations of the
degree of popular sector inclusion.
Indeed, as the introductory chapter notes, although inclusionary
reforms have spread across Latin America on paper, questions remain
about their application in practice. Heterogeneity in design and imple-
mentation of participatory institutions over time, across countries, and
across levels of government makes macro-comparative analysis and
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identification of patterns difficult. Explaining why participatory institu-
tions are adopted, why they vary, and what limits their ability to foster
meaningful citizenship is a formidable research agenda, one that this
chapter only begins to address with three sets of arguments.
The first set of arguments complements and complicates the introduc-
tory chapter’s claim that Latin America’s inclusionary turn can be traced
to the enduring democracy-persistent inequalities nexus. The notion that
regular elections encouraged political parties to compete for voters
demanding more recognition, access, and resources in unequal societies
is not wrong, but is incomplete as an account of the rise of participatory
institutions. It misses that many participatory institutions were drafted
during periods of political uncertainty or instability –transitions (Brazil,
Peru), civil war (Colombia), party system collapse (Bolivia, Ecuador,
Venezuela) –or, in some cases, simply readopted after dictatorships ended
(Brazil, Uruguay). It also misses the important role of leftist activists
inspired by the ideas of participatory democracy to try new forms of
political access. Without the Left’s ideological transformation
(Goldfrank 2011a), it is unlikely that a participatory inclusionary turn
would have occurred. Perhaps most significantly, this account misses how
international actors encouraged adoption of participatory institutions. In
aid-reliant poor countries, donors pushed for participation mechanisms
alongside decentralization since the 1980s as a means to achieve efficient
government and poverty reduction. These international pressures affected
much of the region around the same time that left parties began winning
city governments in newly democratized or decentralized countries. One
of their autochthonous innovations in the 1990s–PB –gained acclaim in
the 2000s, becoming a policy instrument promoted by the leftist activists
who invented it and by international development organizations.
Participatory budgeting has now been adopted by thousands of cities rich
and poor, democratic and authoritarian, governed by mayors left and
right. As Hunter (this volume) stresses for conditional cash transfer (CCT)
programs, and as the section below on PB illustrates, to account for the
adoption of inclusionary institutions in Latin America, one must acknow-
ledge the role of international actors and policy diffusion. Unlike Hunter’s
account of CCTs, this chapter also emphasizes the importance of the Left.
Second, despite the widespread experimentation with new or revived
forms of participation and a tangible increase in access for popular
sectors, the degree of meaningful inclusion remains limited, even in coun-
tries where participatory institutions are most prevalent. The limitations
differ. As suggested in the introductory chapter, a parchment–practice
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gap exists in several countries, where participatory reforms written into
laws and constitutions are rarely if ever implemented. This gap is import-
ant, but there is a long history of laws being written in Latin America
“just for the English to see”(só para inglês ver), as Brazilians say. More
interesting are the facts that many countries actually implemented dozens
of participatory institutions involving millions of citizens and that, none-
theless, their inclusionary impact in practice has been “partial and tenta-
tive”(Roberts, this volume). Their limitations vary. In some cases, the
number of participants is small or mostly not from the popular sector. In
other cases, the number of participants is relatively large and lower-
income, but they either have minimal consultative roles or they decide
over a restricted range of microlevel or narrowly focused issues involving
minimal resources. A further, cross-cutting limitation in some cases is that
effective participation is conditioned by partisan loyalty, rendering inclu-
sion for some and exclusion for others. For participatory institutions to
foster meaningful inclusion, they would need not only to increase access
for popular sectors but also to offer some degree of decision-making
power over significant resources and policies without reinforcing cliente-
lism (see Kapiszewski, Levitsky and Yashar, this volume). While partici-
patory institutions have generated meaningful inclusion in certain locales
or for specific sectors at times, in no country except for perhaps Uruguay
has inclusion been sustained nationwide. Instead, the reach of participa-
tory institutions remains limited. This underscores the editors’point in the
introductory chapter that establishing participatory institutions does not
necessarily or automatically translate into effective practice of citizenship.
Third, this chapter lays out one set of hypotheses to explain why some
countries have implemented broad-based participatory institutions more
than others, and another set to explain why, even in those countries that
most use such institutions, they vary so much and their impact remains
limited. In brief, the section below on the participatory boom suggests
that the varying degree of implementation of participatory institutions is
related to the strength and ideological preferences of the Left, the stability
of the political system, international influence, and country-specific his-
torical legacies. The section on the limits and legacies of participation
offers reasons behind the varying design and impact of participatory
institutions, including the ideological preferences, social bases, and con-
tinuity of governing coalitions and the strength of conservative oppos-
ition. A more general hypothesis, applicable to all cases, is that
participatory institutions are constrained because incumbents of all
stripes fear genuine power-sharing mechanisms, especially with the
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popular sector. Not surprisingly, incumbents prefer to retain decision-
making authority over the lion’s share of resources and important policies
to help them stay in power. Electoral competition may spur efforts at
inclusion, particularly social policy expansion (Garay, this volume), but it
also may limit the scope of participatory institutions as incumbents seek
to maintain control over which constituents gain recognition, access, and
resources. As political parties ascend from local to national government,
the stakes increase. The need to retain authority to make compromises,
cement alliances, and appease powerful interests increases as well, which
heightens incumbents’fear of unconstrained popular participation. Yet
politicians address the risk that newly included groups gain too much
power (Cameron, this volume) in different ways, some by restricting
participatory institutions and others by conditioning inclusion on parti-
san loyalty.
To account for the varying trajectories and limitations of participatory
institutions, this chapter proceeds in three sections. The next section
reviews the main theoretical approaches employed to understand the
new participatory institutions. The chapter then looks for meaningful
inclusion in the most likely cases, starting with a sketch of the diffusion
of a single institution, PB, the most heralded of Latin America’s recent
experiments in participatory democracy. This section argues that while
PB began as part of an inclusionary project of the Left, as PB spread to
new locales it tended to lose its inclusionary potential. The last section
examines the countries that arguably advanced furthest in bringing a
panoply of participatory institutions from parchment to practice at mul-
tiple levels of government –Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, and Uruguay –where
one might expect to see the greatest degree of inclusion. Nonetheless,
participatory institutions remain limited in Peru, have been rolled back in
Brazil, and have been converted into blatant clientelism in Venezuela.
Uruguay’s array of participatory institutions is limited in some ways as
well, but, all combined, offers more access to decision-making over
important policies for the popular sector than other countries in this
group and the wider region.
The academic literature on Latin America’s institutionalized citizen par-
ticipation beyond elections is rich in detail and brimming with insights
drawn mostly from local-level case studies. Systematic macro-
comparative analysis remains rare, especially across multiple countries,
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types of institutions, and levels of government.
1
This gap reflects not only
the intrinsic difficulty of such analyses, but the established notion in
political science scholarship that scaling up participation to the national
level is essentially impossible (see, Dahl 1998; Przeworski 2010;
Mainwaring 2012) as well as the attention and resources provided to
the local level by international development organizations; the World
Bank alone allotted roughly $85 billion to “local participatory develop-
ment”in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Mansuri and Rao
2013,1). This section focuses on the more prominent approaches to
understanding the region’s participatory boom, highlighting contrasts
and points of near consensus.
Radically simplifying, one way to divide comparative studies of Latin
America’s participatory experiments is into “political projects”and
“democratic innovations”approaches. These approaches correspond
roughly to the debate in this volume’s introductory chapter between,
respectively, what the editors call a demand-side account of the “second
incorporation”and their own account stressing democratic endurance
and persistent inequality. The two approaches focus on the same gamut
of institutions –those that involve citizens, individually or in groups, in
public decision-making processes, project implementation, or government
oversight –and share some basic assumptions. Most scholars include PB;
public policy and planning councils, conferences, forums, dialogs, and
roundtables; oversight commissions and public audits; communal coun-
cils; and direct democracy mechanisms like recall referendums, prior
consultations, citizen initiatives, and policy referendums. Some include
corporatist institutions like wage commissions or indigenous self-
governance institutions. While scholars following either kind of approach
recognize tensions between participatory and representative institutions,
most implicitly or explicitly view them as at least potentially comple-
mentary and recognize that many participatory institutions themselves
involve some degree of representation.
The political projects approach views participatory experiments as
continuations of counter-hegemonic struggles from below against
authoritarian rule and against neoliberalism (Santos and Avritzer 2002;
Dagnino et al. 2006; Cannon and Kirby 2012). Originally, the main
1
Scholars focusing on “mechanisms of direct democracy”alone, especially referendums,
plebiscites, and consultations, have produced interesting national-level comparative ana-
lyses, but usually separately from those studying other participatory mechanisms or other
levels of government; see Altman (2011) and Ruth et al. (2017).
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project was creating an alternative participatory model in order to deepen
democracy. Evelina Dagnino, Alberto Olvera, and Aldo Panfichi (2006),
for example, describe Latin America in the 2000s as a confrontation
between three political projects –authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and
participatory democracy. Participatory democracy does not mean
rejecting representative institutions. Rather, it involves the “amplification
of the concept of politics through citizen participation and deliberation in
public spaces,”where democracy is conceived “as an articulated system
of processes of citizen intervention in the decisions that concern them and
in vigilance over the exercise of government”(Dagnino et al. 2006,17).
This kind of participation is considered to be “an instrument for building
greater equality, insofar as it would contribute to the formulation of
public policies oriented toward that goal”and “would contribute to a
deprivatization of the State, which would become more permeable to the
public interest formulated through societal participation, and, therefore,
less subordinated to the private appropriation of its resources”(Dagnino
et al. 2006,48). Though they recognize challenges of participatory insti-
tutions, scholars within the political projects approach tend to display a
normative preference for participatory democracy, identify participatory
democracy with the Left, and have high expectations, using the language
of emancipation, empowerment, and transformation. Like the demand-
side account described by Kapiszewski, Levitsky, and Yashar (this
volume), this approach emphasizes the role of social movement activists
in demanding greater participation, in inventing participatory mechan-
isms, or in implementing them alongside or within governments.
The democratic innovations approaches differ in several ways. With
regards to the origins of the participatory boom, rather than grand
projects demanded and pursued by subaltern actors, the democratic
innovations scholars –like the editors’chapter (this volume) –tend to
emphasize politicians in general responding creatively to constituent
demands that emanate at least partly from persistent inequality.
However, the democratic innovations approach is also broader than that
of the editors. They view the creation of new institutions as responding
not only to citizen discontent with unequal societies but to increasingly
fragmented societies with multiple social cleavages and new interests
(Lissidini et al. 2014,1–5), and to dissatisfaction with representative
institutions (Cameron and Sharpe 2012,321; Pogrebinschi 2017a, 57).
As Zaremberg et al. (2017,2) put it: “In the last few decades, classic
channels of representation centered on political parties and unions have
been profoundly transformed, to the point where some have emphasized
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the existence of a generalized crisis of political representation.”In these
accounts, the role of the Left or social movements is usually noted, but not
stressed, normative preferences are downplayed, and expectations of
participation are tempered. For Cameron and Sharpe (2012,321,330):
“New participatory practices have the potential to improve the perform-
ance and legitimacy of democracy, increase accountability and respon-
siveness, and foster more active and engaged citizenship,”but at the same
time, “innovations in one area of democratic governance may damage the
performance of democracy in another.”Instead of viewing democratic
innovations as collectively pointing to a single larger goal of building
participatory democracy, scholars in this vein see multiple, distinct goals:
fixing deficiencies of traditional representative institutions, redressing
inequality, and enhancing political inclusion (Pogrebinschi 2016,3,14,
17); restoring trust in democracy (Lissidini et al. 2014,5); or providing
new forms of political intermediation (Zaremberg et al. 2017,4).
Both approaches help illuminate the proliferation of participatory
institutions and complement each other well. Arguably, the political
projects approach, with its emphasis on actors and ideas, better explains
the origins of the participatory turn while the democratic innovations
approaches, with their emphasis on regular competition over how to
address structural and institutional mismatches, better explain its con-
tinuation. Notably absent from either, however, is the role of diffusion.
Regardless of approach, scholars of both single- and multi-country stud-
ies reach several nearly consensual conclusions. These start with the
notions that Latin America is a global leader in creating participatory
institutions and that these institutions face limitations and differ in
important ways across countries.
The most frequently cited and documented limitation is the “extracti-
vist”development model operating throughout most of the region irre-
spective of ideological orientation. Devotion to extractivism has made
participatory institutions related to natural resources, like prior consult-
ations (consultas previas) and tripartite roundtables, toothless at best.
While prior consultation is “probably the single most important tool that
local communities currently possess to legally resist extractive projects in
their habitats,”this tool is ineffective, as it typically either remains only
on paper or is manipulated or ignored by business or government con-
veners (Schilling-Vacaflor and Vollrath 2012,127; see also Cannon and
Kirby 2012,190,192; Arsel et al. 2016; Federación 2018,55). Whether
in Brazil (Castro and Motta 2015), Colombia (McNeish 2017), Ecuador
(Lalander 2014), Peru (Flemmer and Schilling-Vacaflor 2016), Venezuela
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(Lander 2016), or even Bolivia,
2
governments consistently fail to imple-
ment, respect, or enforce consultation rights regarding potentially
destructive development projects. Instead, Latin America has become
the world’s“most dangerous”region for environmental activists, “with
indigenous groups being the most vulnerable for violations ranging from
threats, attacks and torture to disappearances and killings”as states
prosecute environmentalists and indigenous groups or fail to defend them
(Arsel et al. 2016,886). Absence of effective participatory institutions in
the critical extractive sector is telling. It reinforces the key point that
incumbents avoid sharing decision-making power over the most import-
ant policies. It also shows how different dimensions of inclusion –access
and resources –can be in tension. After all, for governments relying on
revenues from extraction in order to increase social spending, creating
meaningful participatory institutions could undermine a crucial pillar for
maintaining popularity.
While Latin America has a uniformly weak record of effective partici-
pation regarding the environment, scholars consistently conclude that the
type and scope of other participatory institutions differ significantly
across the region, even in countries often grouped together. Despite the
parallels in their constitutions (Elkins, this volume) and in their reliance
on the commodity boom (Mazzuca, this volume), among other similar-
ities, diverse scholars agree that the Bolivarian countries of Bolivia,
Ecuador, and Venezuela vary considerably in designing and implementing
participatory institutions aimed at the popular sector (Cannon and Kirby
2012; Balderacchi 2017; De la Torre 2017; Silva 2017). Though leaders
in each country direct democracy mechanisms like referendums more
than most other countries in the region, Venezuelan President Hugo
Chávez went further than Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa and
Bolivian President Evo Morales in promoting local-level institutions
nationwide that allowed for ongoing mass participation. Under
2
The Bolivian case is disputed. While Falleti and Riofrancos (2018) present the use of prior
consultations there as exemplifying a strong participatory institution, pointing out how
frequently it is employed there compared to elsewhere, others emphasize the fact that the
consultations in Bolivia always end with allowing mining operations to go forward
(Zaremberg and Torres Wong 2018). Many scholars stress how the Morales government
prioritized extraction over participation rights and undermined indigenous activists while
empowering transnational mining firms (Lalander 2016; Andreucci and Radhuber 2017;
see also Farthing 2019). The Ibero-American Federation of Ombudsmen (Federación
2018,55) lists Bolivia alongside six other South American states in which mining harms
indigenous peoples’rights and where “States omit or poorly implement consultation
processes.”
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Morales, in fact, the municipal monitoring committees (comités de vigi-
lancia) established in the 1990s were abolished (Zuazo 2017,100)ashe
focused more on informal channels for social movement allies than on
institutionalized public participation. Correa neither promoted the consti-
tution’s new participatory institutions nor established informal alliances
with social movements; instead, technocrats dominated policymaking and
citizen participation was primarily electoral. Balderacchi (2017), de la
Torre (2017), and Silva (2017) use similar, though not identical, explan-
ations for these differences, stressing the comparative weakness of
Ecuadorian social movements, the dispersed nature of Venezuelan social
movements, and the reliance by Chávez and Morales on popular sector
allies to mobilize against strong opposition reactions.
Though the comparative case study literature emphasizes diversity, one
pioneering scholar of participatory institutions, Pogrebinschi (2016,4;
2017a, 58) underscores the commonality of highly institutionalized delib-
erative forms of citizen participation across the region. Pogrebinschi’s
(2017b) impressive dataset of Latin American innovations for democracy
(LATINNO) includes over 2,400 examples in eighteen countries from
1990 to 2016, coded according to forty-three indicators. One reason for
differences between the comparative case studies and Pogrebinschi’s
broad quantitative analysis may be that thus far she has used individual
innovations as the unit of analysis. When Pogrebinschi compares coun-
tries, she adds together each individual innovation, regardless of how long
it lasted, how many citizens participated, at what level of government it
took place (local, provincial, national), and whether or not it had an
impact on policy outcomes.
3
When the nationwide system encompassing
thousands of communal councils in Venezuela, which has lasted over a
decade, influenced millions of dollars in local spending, and engaged
roughly a third of the country’s adult population, takes the same value
as a three-day “Smart Cities Hackathon”involving seventy people in
Caracas in 2015, the relative importance and meaning of different “par-
ticipatory”innovations disappear.
4
3
The counting rules have other complications. If an institution exists in every city –such as
Brazil’s municipal health councils –it counts in the dataset only once, while each of Brazil’s
national policy conferences count separately if they are on different topics. Furthermore,
data is missing or inaccurate for some of the forty-three indicators, including, crucially,
number of participants.
4
See the descriptions of these innovations on the LATINNO data project website here:
www.latinno.net/en/case/19001/ and here: www.latinno.net/en/case/19091/
126 Benjamin Goldfrank
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Recognizing the difficulties of macro-comparison of participatory insti-
tutions, this chapter triangulates between the counting efforts in
LATINNO and in this volume (see Figure 1.3, showing legal adoption
of access reforms), and the qualitative evaluations of participatory insti-
tutions in case study literature to assess the extent to which broad-based
participatory institutions have been implemented in practice across
sectors and levels of government. Focusing on formal participatory insti-
tutions that offer access to citizens generally (including the popular
sector), not those aimed at professionals or technocrats, and including
direct democracy mechanisms, major countries in the region divide into
three groups. The highly participatory group is comprised of Brazil,
Venezuela, Peru, and Uruguay. As detailed in the section below on limits
and legacies of participation, each of these countries has created multiple
venues for popular sector participation at different levels of government
involving millions of citizens. Until recently, Brazil and Venezuela had
often been held up –by separate scholars –as examples for the region (cf.
Cameron and Sharpe 2012,244; Webber and Carr 2013,6,22), while
Peru is the world’s leading user of recall referendums and Uruguay is
Latin America’s most prolific user of citizen-initiated popular consult-
ations. At the lower end of the participatory spectrum are Chile,
Mexico, and Argentina. While citizen participation is often prominent
in the discourse of Chilean and Mexican politicians, who have imple-
mented advisory councils with fanfare, in practice policymaking at all
levels generally remains elite-driven.
5
In Argentina, participatory dis-
course has remained limited and “elected officials neglected to adopt
sweeping participatory reforms”(Risley 2015,128), even under the
Kirchner administrations, when the emphasis lay on rebuilding corporat-
ism (Wylde 2012,46) and partisan social organizations (Ostiguy and
Schneider 2018). The middle group is comprised of Bolivia and Ecuador
(described above), as well as Colombia. Like their Northern Andean
counterparts in this group, Colombian leaders advanced new participa-
tory institutions like recall referendums and local policy councils
when they revised the constitution in the 1990s, and have written
several new laws on paper since then to promote citizen participation,
but have similarly failed to institutionalize widespread popular sector
5
For Chile, see Jara Reyes (2012), Cameron and Sharpe (2012), and Delamaza (2015) ; for
Mexico, see, Cabrero and Díaz Aldret (2012), Cameron and Sharpe (2012), and Olvera
(2015).
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participation in practice (Rampf and Chavarro 2014; Vargas Reina 2014;
Mayka 2019).
How can one explain this variation in the implementation of broad-
based participatory institutions? As exploratory hypotheses, two factors
in combination seem especially pertinent. First, the role of a strong left
party or movement with a historical ideological commitment to partici-
patory democracy helps distinguish Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela from
the other countries. The Workers’Party and the Broad Front had experi-
ence implementing participatory experiments at the local level in Brazil
and Uruguay, respectively, in the 1990s before winning national power in
the 2000s, and many of their social movement allies espoused participa-
tory ideals as well. The coalition supporting Hugo Chávez in Venezuela
also included parties that had advocated and practiced participatory
democracy in the past. Even in Peru, where the Left was debilitated, the
remnants of the United Left held participatory ideals and experience. Left
and center-left parties in the other countries were weaker and/or excluded
from power (Colombia, Mexico), not ideologically committed to partici-
patory democracy (Argentina, Chile, Ecuador), or focused on indigenous
rights to communal autonomy (Bolivia). Second, countries in the medium
to high range (except Brazil and Uruguay) experienced marked political
instability in the 1990s or early 2000s, in the form of party system
collapse or civil war, while those in the low range did not (even
Argentina’s severe economic crisis in 2001 only led to a brief presidential
shuffling, after which the same party continued to dominate). Instability
often led to constitutional assemblies, opening the way for social move-
ments and parties to place new participatory ideas on the agenda. In
Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, by contrast, party system stability
remained intact (at least until 2015) and policymaking was gradual, even
throughout Mexico’s transition away from one-party rule. More tenta-
tively, international influences may have been stronger in several of the
medium to high cases, especially in aid recipient countries such as Peru
(see section on limits and legacies of participation). An additional trait
that Brazil and Uruguay share is their prior history of greater use of
participatory institutions, a corporatist tradition that preceded the inclu-
sionary turn by decades and likely facilitated it (for Brazil, see Mayka and
Rich, this volume).
This chapter adopts the perspective that the rise of participatory insti-
tutions in Latin America stems both from ideologically motivated political
projects and from the continual attempts by politicians at all levels of
government to innovate in order to respond to constituents, which
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democratic competition allows and encourages, and which international
organizations often promote. Understanding what these institutions mean
for inclusion in practice requires more than an accumulation of snapshots
from a bird’s-eye view. More contextualized, longitudinal analyses of
participatory institutions are needed to illuminate their origins, evolution,
and limitations. The next two empirical sections try to provide this kind
of analysis in different ways, first by following the trajectory of one of the
most widely implemented new institutions in the region –PB –and then
by examining the multiple and varied participatory institutions imple-
mented in Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Each section demon-
strates the importance of both leftist political projects and international
actors in the creation, diffusion, and implementation of participatory
institutions. Both sections also emphasize that, even when participatory
institutions make the leap from parchment to practice, and even when
they seem ideally suited to maximize inclusion, how they are designed and
implemented by those fearful of losing power can inhibit the effective
practice of citizenship.
When leftist mayors began implementing PB in the early 1990s in Porto
Alegre and other cities where it had other names, including Ciudad
Guayana, Caracas, and Montevideo, inclusion was a principal goal of
their project of developing local-level participatory democracy
(Goldfrank 2011a). By allowing all residents to voluntarily and regularly
contribute to decision-making over a significant part of the municipal
budget in repeated interactions with government authorities, PB granted
recognition to previously excluded groups (those living in informal or
peripheral neighborhoods) and provided them access to a new institution
that influenced local resources. Participants disproportionately drew from
the popular sectors and government spending through PB-favored popu-
lar sector neighborhoods. By the 2010s, PB had spread to thousands of
cities in Latin America and throughout the world. However, the form and
importance of PB differ considerably across locations, and examples of PB
generating meaningful citizenship are now rare in Latin America and
beyond (Peck and Theodore 2015; Goldfrank 2017; Baiocchi and
Ganuza 2017). How and why did PB globalize and, eventually, lose its
more inclusionary attributes in most cases?
To answer these questions, this section offers an account of the facili-
tated diffusion of PB. The globalization of PB follows many traits
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highlighted by Hunter’s (this volume) explanation of the diffusion of
CCTs. The main difference between the two is that PB was adopted both
by local governments on their own in an uncoordinated but interdepend-
ent fashion and by local governments either mandated to do so by
national governments or, in Brazil in the 1990s, strongly encouraged to
do so by the Workers’Party. This makes the globalization of PB a hybrid
of uncoordinated interdependence and coordination from above, unlike
the spread of CCTs, which shows “interdependence without coordin-
ation”(Hunter, this volume). Nonetheless, as with CCTs, the spread of
PB bears all the hallmarks of diffusion –geographical clustering, adoption
by highly disparate cities and countries in short time periods following a
forward-leaning “S”wavelike pattern, dense networks of experts and
politicians, a simple and bold core idea that appeals to multiple actors
across ideological lines, and research and financial support from inter-
national organizations.
6
This section briefly describes the original Porto
Alegre model of PB, explains how and why it attracted international
attention and began to spread, and analyzes how translations of it else-
where differ such that its original citizenship-enhancing traits are
often lost.
In the early years, when the Workers’Party launched it, PB in Porto
Alegre generally worked as follows (Goldfrank 2017). At the start of each
annual cycle, citizens met in open public assemblies at the local level to
evaluate government performance, discussed their most pressing needs,
and established investment priorities for their neighborhoods, districts,
and city. Participants voted on which social policies and infrastructure
projects should be prioritized and elected district-level (or thematic) dele-
gates, as well as councilors for the city-wide budget council. The delegates
and councilors met throughout the year to negotiate technical details of
projects and the final budget with city officials, monitor implementation
of the prior year’s plan, and deliberate over potential rule changes. City
officials aggregated the priorities to develop an investment and service
plan, typically representing 5–15 percent of the budget. Allocation of
projects across districts corresponded to a formula including population
size, lack of infrastructure or services, and the selected priorities. Once the
final budget was passed by the municipal legislature, the investment and
service plan was distributed to PB participants as the cycle renewed so
6
This section draws on Goldfrank (2012) and three books on the diffusion of PB (Baiocchi
and Ganuza 2017; Oliveira 2017) or what they prefer to call “translation”of PB and
CCTs (Peck and Theodore 2015).
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that they could monitor government performance. In the 1990s, Porto
Alegre allocated between US$30 million and US$120 million annually
through PB, roughly equivalent to US$20 to US$80 per inhabitant per
year, and participation levels grew from several hundred to fifteen thou-
sand residents (Goldfrank 2011a, 210–211).
This model of PB became a modular template that spread in wavelike
patterns first in Brazil, then throughout Latin America, and ultimately the
rest of the world. Participatory budgeting gained notice within the
Workers’Party because Porto Alegre was one of the few cities in which
the party continually won reelection, governing from 1989 to 2004. The
Workers’Party mandated its mayors of large cities to implement PB,
which partially explains its rise from a handful of cases in the early
1990s to adoption by over 100 Brazilian municipalities over the decade.
Widespread diffusion beyond Brazil occurred after Porto Alegre’sPB
earned a UN-Habitat award in 1996 and the subsequent publication of
several influential books and articles that highlighted PB as a sort of magic
bullet to help solve numerous democratic and development deficits. The
simple idea of giving citizens direct input over how to spend government
resources appealed to diverse activists and policymakers. PB was touted
(or at least perceived) as a way to give voice to the excluded, encourage
the growth of civil society organizations (CSOs), make infrastructure and
service delivery more equitable, and enhance transparency while reducing
corruption. Key publications promoting PB included, Orçamento partici-
pativo: A experiência de Porto Alegre (Genro and de Souza 1997),
co-authored by a former mayor and implementer of PB, an article in Le
Monde Diplomatique (Cassen 1998), the World Bank’s annual World
Development Reports starting in 1997 (World Bank 1997,122), and a PB
guidebook from UN-Habitat (2004).
The article in Le Monde Diplomatique –written by its director,
Bernard Cassen, president of ATTAC in France –helped Porto Alegre
secure its place as host of the first World Social Forum (WSF), the
gathering of anti-neoliberal globalization activists. The prominence of
PB at the WSF in turn aided the creation of a left-leaning channel for PB
diffusion. Overlapping networks of politicians and experts –starting with
the original “ambassadors of participation”(Oliveira 2017,6) from
Porto Alegre’s City Hall and aided by international organizations –pro-
moted PB through workshops, site visits, conferences, research reports,
and, in some cases, financial support to start pilot projects. The most
important organizations supporting PB’s expansion include the United
Nations, the European Union through its URB-AL program, United States
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Agency for International Development (USAID), and the World Bank,
which provided roughly $280 million in loans or grants to support PB in
fifteen countries from 2002 to 2012.
7
Horizontal networks such as the
International Observatory on Participatory Democracy, United Cities and
Local Governments, and the World Bank- and UN-supported Cities
Alliance also advocated for PB, as have national networks of cities with
PB in Latin American countries, including Argentina, Brazil, and
Colombia.
As a result of these diffusion efforts, by 2013 conservative estimates
indicated that PB had spread to well over 2,000 locales in more than forty
countries, including rural towns and major cities in all world regions,
from Mexico, New York, Paris, and Gdansk to Maputo, Chengdu, Seoul,
and Melbourne (Sintomer et al. 2014,30; Cabannes and Lipietz 2017;
Oliveira 2017). More recent studies point to over 7,000 local, provincial,
or regional governments using PB, with over 2,500 in Latin America
alone (Dias and Júlio 2018,19–20), suggesting that the upward slope of
the global “S”curve has not yet peaked. There is clear evidence of diver-
sity of adopters and of at least initial geographical clustering. Local
governments in Latin America were early adopters, mostly but not only
of their own volition. National governments passed laws mandating local
governments to adopt PB in Peru in 2003, the Dominican Republic in
2007, and Colombia in 2015.
The hybrid form of diffusion, with some cities learning from and
emulating Porto Alegre while others were cajoled by international actors
or mandated from above to implement PB, may help explain PB’s hetero-
geneous and frequently disappointing outcomes as it spreads and evolves.
In many cases, what was once a leftist project to deepen democracy
became a technocratic and sometimes empty tool of “good governance.”
In part this is because the left-leaning channel of PB diffusion, with its
ideological commitments to participatory democracy and redistribution,
lost clout to the better resourced international donor channels, where
motives were mixed (Peck and Theodore 2015,214,231; Goldfrank
2012). The Workers’Party’s loss to a center-right coalition in Porto
Alegre in 2004 not only led to the hollowing out (and in 2017, suspen-
sion) of PB there, but to the weakening of the left diffusion channel. In
addition, whether or not later implementers of PB did so of their own
accord or were mandated, they faced the dilemma of power sharing, and
7
This amount represented less than one-tenth of 1% of IBRD loans (see Goldfrank 2012,
3,8).
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many opted to share as little as possible. As PB traveled the globe,
adopters often kept its format for allowing regular expression of popular
demands but ignored the crucial accompanying administrative reforms
that allowed decision-making power over important public resources and
policies (Baiocchi and Ganuza 2017,142–152). The simple core idea of
PB became detached from the broader leftist political project that
initiated it.
By contrast with CCTs, which because of their targeted nature and low
resource burden already make for “easy”adoption (Holland and
Schneider 2017; Hunter, this volume), the diffusion of PB ultimately
entailed the watering down of PB’s inclusionary potential through tech-
nocratic hijacking and power-holder pushback. Later adopters tended to
modify the Porto Alegre model in ways that inhibited the effective practice
of citizenship by limiting access and/or resources. As cities in Latin
America and beyond began implementing PB, frequent changes included
restricting participation to CSOs or to specific neighborhoods rather than
opening to all, adding government or partisan budget councilors, restrict-
ing citizen input to infrastructure projects only, failing to include an
allocation formula to benefit poorly served or low-income communities,
and forgoing city-wide citizen budget councils and district oversight
bodies. Peru’s PB law, for example, adopts all of the restrictions above
except for the last one. Many cities, including Mexico City, New York,
and Paris, settled on a modified version of PB that operates like an
election. Montevideo’s renewed PB process starting in 2006 offers a good
example of this version. At the start of the cycle, the city government sets
a specific amount of funding for PB, allocating an equal amount to each
district and specifying a maximum for individual public infrastructure
and service projects that citizens or civic associations may propose in
person or via the internet. Local government officials review the proposals
and place technically viable ones on a ballot for a general election. The
government commits to implement those projects winning the most votes,
up to the established limit, over the course of the subsequent two years. In
2016, the government of Montevideo allocated roughly US$600,000
through PB to each of its eight municipal districts, with a maximum of
US$100,000 per project, to be implemented in 2017 and 2018; at concur-
rent exchange rates, this would come out to about US$1.80 per inhabitant
per year decided on through PB (see Goldfrank 2017,116).
In the heyday of PB in Porto Alegre in the 1990s, spending through PB
was up to forty times higher than in Montevideo’s PB now. Many if not
most Latin American PB processes outside of Brazil suffer from
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insufficient funding, whether because local finances are woeful or because
city officials choose –on paper or in practice –to dedicate a small
percentage of revenues to PB. In addition to the design modifications of
PB described above, the varying amount of spending through PB means
that the extent to which PB provides access and influence over resources
to the popular sector is highly heterogeneous. Moreover, in some Andean
and Central American cases where participation was restricted to specific
groups, PB served to reinforce clientelism rather than enhance effective
citizenship (Goldfrank 2017,120–121). Even in cases where politicians’
intentions are worthy, negative results may occur. In Medellín, for
example, criminal armed groups intruded into PB, threatening civic asso-
ciations in attempts to capture resources and increase their power
(Moncada 2016,241–242). Finally, in countries where PB is not federally
mandated, it is frequently abandoned after a mayoral term or two
(Goldfrank 2017,122). This variation in PB outcomes as it diffused
underscores the importance of paying attention to local context and of
not assuming democratizing or inclusionary effects of participatory insti-
tutions. Scholars should be particularly wary as PB spreads to subnational
governments in authoritarian countries such as China and Russia, but
even in some Latin American countries the local or national contexts
feature high levels of violence or autocratic tendencies that change the
meaning of participation, whether through PB or other mechanisms.
, ,
,
Analyzing this unlikely grouping of these four countries with the most
widespread implementation and regular use of participatory institutions
echoes lessons similar to those from the preceding look at the diffusion of
PB. First, leftist political projects have been crucial to the ideation and
implementation of participatory institutions. The Left’s role, in the form
of the Workers’Party (PT), the Broad Front (FA), and Hugo Chávez and
his allied political parties, was more important to the spread of participa-
tory institutions in Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela than it was in Peru,
where international organizations played key roles. Second, more than a
parchment-to-practice gap, examination of these four countries with the
most extensive implementation of participatory institutions reveals con-
siderable variation in their design such that meaningful popular sector
inclusion is not guaranteed. Democratic (non-clientelistic) popular sector
inclusion through participatory institutions advanced most in Uruguay
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and Brazil, though more fleetingly in the latter. Inclusion remained com-
paratively limited in Peru, while initially democratic participatory insti-
tutions in Venezuela devolved into clientelistic vehicles for maintaining
increasingly authoritarian control.
While the rest of this section focuses on narrating the origins and
evolution of participatory institutions in these four countries, on describ-
ing the access they provide to policymaking, and on evaluating their
inclusionary impact, it begins with hypotheses to explain the variation
in the general outcomes. First, the greater impact of participatory insti-
tutions in Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela compared to Peru is partially
due to the long periods of left-led government in the former countries. The
PT, FA, and Chavismo, respectively, each stayed in national office for
over a dozen years in the 2000s, while in Peru the Left has never won the
presidency and no political party –regardless of ideology –has been
reelected even once since democratization in 1980. Continuity granted
the Left the opportunity to design participatory experiments that could
provide decision-making power (rather than consultation) to the popular
sector over important local, sectoral, and national policies. Second, the
higher degree of partisan bias within Peruvian and especially Venezuelan
participatory institutions relates back to the nature of the governing
coalitions, which were broader and steadier in Brazil and Uruguay than
in Peru, where they constantly changed amid hyper-competition, and
Venezuela, where one party dominated. Finally, the varying strength of
conservative opposition forces helps explain the evolution of participa-
tory institutions in all cases. Opposition parties had more congressional
seats in Brazil, Peru, and Uruguay than in Venezuela, which they often
used to delay, water down, sabotage, or block the most far-reaching
participatory institutions, and which governing coalitions took into
account when they designed or revived such institutions, limiting their
scope, decision-making power, or types of participants (individuals,
CSOs, government officials). The weaker opposition in Venezuela des-
troyed its democratic credibility and its ability to influence Chavista
participatory institutions by engaging in civil–military coups d’etat and
electoral boycotts that left it without congressional representation during
key periods.
Peru
The origins of Peru’s highly regulated, nationwide, multilevel set of par-
ticipatory institutions –including but not limited to PB –are complicated.
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Multiple actors were involved, including politicians from across the ideo-
logical spectrum, the Catholic Church, and international aid organiza-
tions. The genesis of today’s institutions date back to the experiments in
local-level participation by a few United Left (IU) mayors after military
rule ended in 1980, and to the autocratic period following Alberto
Fujimori’sauto-golpe in 1992, when former IU members joined NGOs
and other CSOs in creating initiatives for public dialog, including the first
“concertation roundtables”(mesas de concertación), often with the sup-
port of Catholic or Evangelical religious groups (Panfichi and Dammert
2006,232–239). After the coup, the Organization of American States
pressured the Fujimori regime to return to democracy, and international
financial institutions, led by the World Bank, called for policies to reduce
poverty and inequality with support from civil society (Panfichi and
Dammert 2006,236–239). This combination of pressures is likely related
to the inclusion in the 1993 constitution of two key participation provi-
sions: the recall referendum for local elections (Welp 2016a, 1165) and
the right of citizen participation in administration of public resources. As
Panfichi and Dammert (2006,236) argue: “citizen participation during
fujimorismo was added in the framework of a process of negotiations
with external actors.”The pressure continued when donor organizations
pushed Fujimori to create a working group on fighting poverty that
gathered representatives of the government, business, civil society, and
international organizations (Panfichi and Dammert 2006,238–239).
When Fujimori was forced out in 2000, Caritas-Peru presented the multi-
party transition government with a proposal to build on the local con-
certation roundtables experience to create a national system of dialog on
social policies and development plans to reduce poverty (Panfichi and
Dammert 2006,241; Meltzer 2013,278). Thus was born the Mesa de
Concertación para la Lucha Contra Pobreza (Roundtable for the Fight
Against Poverty; MCLCP) in January 2001.
The MCLCP consists of representatives from government, CSOs, busi-
ness, labor, and religious groups, and is now present at each level of
government, including all twenty-six regions, most of the 195 provinces,
and most of the 1,838 municipal districts. At the national level, the
MCLCP includes representatives from international aid organizations as
well.
8
The MCLCP also sends representatives to the National Accord
Forum (Foro del Acuerdo Nacional), another state–society organ created
8
See www.mesadeconcertacion.org.pe/directorio-nacional (accessed Feb 13,2018) for a list
of organizations represented.
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during the post-Fujimori transition to strengthen democracy and reduce
poverty by, among other things, promoting citizen participation and
developing state policies on a consensual basis.
9
The head of the
MCLCP’s executive committee is designated by Peru’s president; the first
was a Catholic priest who had been the pastoral advisor to Caritas
(Panfichi and Dammert 2006,242). Supported from the start by inter-
national aid organizations, including the United Kingdom’s Department
for International Development (DfID) and the World Bank (Meltzer
2013,278), one of the MCLCP’s main goals has been to:
“Institutionalize citizen participation in the design, decision making,
and oversight of the State’s social policies.”
10
During Alejandro
Toledo’s administration starting in 2001, the MCLCP began working
with the Ministry of Finance (MEF) to create PB throughout Peru to
provide continuity to local development plans. Again, international
organizations, including the World Bank, UN agencies, and especially
USAID, played a pivotal role. USAID provided training to municipal
governments (Baiocchi 2015,123) and co-sponsored an international
conference on PB in Peru’s Congress, with presentations by former IU
mayors who had previously implemented PB and by representatives from
Workers’Party governments in Porto Alegre and Santo André (Oliveira
2017,180–181).
The unlikely alliance (of locally-based CSOs, Church representatives,
international agencies, the MEF, and Toledo government officials with
roots in the IU) faced resistance from opposition parties in the legislature
when the former pushed to mandate PB in all regional, provincial, and
municipal governments in 2003. Traditional parties, especially the
Aprista Party (formerly APRA), claimed that citizen planning and budget
councils undermined representative democracy. Eventually, a comprom-
ise, hybrid bill passed. It restricted involvement to official “participating
agents”–those representing legally registered organizations (public or
private) –who developed PB proposals, and it gave authority to approve
those proposals to coordination councils with 60 percent of the seats
reserved for local government officials. Over the next few years, virtually
all subnational governments began creating local MCLCPs and coordin-
ation councils and began implementing PB, and, after stops and starts,
9
For details, see Meltzer (2013), Iguíñiz (2015), and http://acuerdonacional.pe/ (accessed
Feb 13,2018).
10
See www.mesadeconcertacion.org.pe/objetivos-y-funciones (accessed Feb 13 2018).
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both the national MCLCP and the National Accord Forum had created
working groups and were holding regular meetings.
By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, CSOs
throughout Peru had access to policy and budget decision-making pro-
cesses, at least through representatives, at all levels of government. About
150,000 Peruvians were involved in PB every year by the late 2000s, or
roughly 1percent of the adult population (Goldfrank 2017,121), and
thousands more participated in the MCLCPs, coordination councils, and
several other policy councils and committees. In addition, individual
citizens had the right to recall elected authorities (mayors and city coun-
cilors) at the municipal and provincial levels and the rights to several
mechanisms of direct democracy at the national level, including citizen
legislative initiatives. As in other Andean countries, the latter have been
used only sporadically, including successfully by an oil workers’union to
prevent the privatization of PetroPeru and unsuccessfully by the feder-
ation of water workers opposing privatization of water companies
(Lissidini 2015; Welp 2008,124–125). Local recall referendums, how-
ever, have been attempted more than 20,000 times, activated over 5,000
times, and successful over 1,500 times since 1993, making Peru “the most
intense user of recall referendums worldwide”(Welp 2016a, 1164,1162).
Whether or not Peru “has more institutionalized mechanisms for citizen
participation than anywhere else in Latin America”(Meltzer 2013,20), it
certainly stands out.
Nonetheless, the degree to which Peru’s participatory institutions pro-
vide meaningful popular sector inclusion is questionable. Other than the
direct democracy mechanisms, the main participatory institutions require
membership in officially registered CSOs, which excludes those who are
not already (legally) organized, and they often give an equal or greater
number of seats to government officials, who may drown out citizen
voices. Furthermore, many CSOs involved are not from the popular
sector. On the MCLCP’s national directorate, for example, civil society
is represented not only by the labor confederation (CGTP) and a women’s
movement (CONAMOVIDI), but by Caritas, two business federations
(CONFIEP and SNI), UNICEF and the UNDP, and the Coordinator of
Foreign Entities of International Aid (COEECI). The civil society groups
playing the most important roles on the coordination councils and in PB
are not membership-based grassroots social organizations but profes-
sional NGOs; and women and women’sorganizations are underrepre-
sented in both the coordination councils and PB, leading McNulty (2013,
82)to“suspect that other less empowered constituencies are not
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attending these meetings either.”The main participatory institutions also
allow only limited influence over policy and resources. The National
Accord Forum and the MCLCPs operate by consensus, leading to broad
nonbinding policy guidelines whose impact is difficult to gage (Panfichi
and Dammert 2006,255; Iguíñiz 2015). And while by law PB should
affect the capital investment budget for subnational governments, in
practice funding dedicated to PB projects tends to be minimal. Only about
half the approved projects are implemented on average (McNulty 2019,
137). In the recent four-year term of Lima’s mayor, Susana Villarán, only
16 PB projects were completed, which was one-fifth the number of
technically viable projects, and about 2percent of all projects presented,
leading to widespread participant frustration (Desenzi 2017,130).
Finally, Welp’s(2016a, 1172–1173) exhaustive analysis of recall referen-
dums demonstrates that rather than promote inclusive citizenship, con-
stant activation of recalls resulted in “polarization of politics and a
growing lack of civility in the political arena.”
Brazil
The rise of participatory institutions in Brazil best exemplifies the political
projects approach described earlier, in which anti-authoritarian social
movements and political parties, in this case the PT especially, began
advocating for and experimenting locally with a more participatory form
of democracy while the country was under military rule. Their mobiliza-
tion efforts paid off during the writing of the 1988 constitution, which
enshrined the municipal autonomy and citizen participation rights that
allowed for further growth of participatory institutions once democracy
returned. Scholars typically tout the importance of urban social move-
ments and PT administrations in large cities in the development of the
participatory democracy project, but one should remember the roles of
Catholic activists influenced by liberation theology and of reformist polit-
icians from the Movement for Democracy (MDB, and later PMDB),
especially in the 1970s and 1980s (Tranjan 2016; Baiocchi 2017).
While Mayka and Rich (this volume) are correct that several participatory
initiatives advanced somewhat under centrist governments of the 1990s,
it is undeniable that the PT became the party most associated with the
advance of participatory institutions aimed at the popular sector. Not
only was the PT responsible for the spread of PB in the 1990s, during four
consecutive terms in the presidency starting in 2003, it revived, created, or
encouraged multiple participatory initiatives at all levels of government.
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Most importantly, the PT “reengineered”seventeen existing national
policy councils in order to include CSO representatives and established
twenty-two new national policy councils, stimulated the creation of tens
of thousands of municipal public policy management councils through
federal funding, and held dozens of multitiered national public policy
conferences involving millions of participants at the municipal, state,
and federal levels (Pogrebinschi and Tanscheit 2017; see also Avritzer
2012,7–8,12, and Wampler 2015,264). The PT’s commitment to
participatory democracy culminated in its (ultimately failed) attempt to
establish a National System of Social Participation in 2014 that would
have served to articulate the various participatory institutions with each
other and with the government.
By 2015, Brazil’s“vast participatory architecture”(Wampler 2015,
267) provided a wide array of opportunities for citizens to participate,
and relatively large numbers of them did so. In Brazil’s5,570 municipal-
ities there are altogether somewhere between 30,000 and 65,000 policy
councils with at least 300,000 members (cf. Wampler 2015,264,3;
Romão et al. 2017,35). Each of Brazil’s twenty-seven states has roughly
thirteen councils covering different policy sectors (Pires 2015,28). Some
7million Brazilians participated in at least one of the fifty-eight national
public policy conferences held between 2003 and 2011, representing
about 5percent of the adult population (Pogrebinschi and Samuels
2014,320–321). Survey research indicates that 3percent of Brazilians
have taken part in PB and 2percent in municipal or regional policy
councils (Avritzer 2012,11).
The extension of participatory institutions and their intensive use by
millions of Brazilians offer a strong case for their role in enhancing
democratic citizenship and inclusion (Cameron and Sharpe 2012;
Pogrebinschi and Samuels 2014; Wampler 2015; Avritzer 2017; Mayka
and Rich, this volume). However, this author and many others question
the importance of Brazil’s multilevel participatory institutions, pointing to
a range of limitations on their effectiveness and inclusiveness (Goldfrank
2011b; Dagnino and Teixeira 2014; Gómez Bruera 2015; Pires 2015;
Romão 2015; Baiocchi 2017). The core critiques are that participants
tend not to hail from the popular sectors but are frequently professionals
or CSO leaders who are steps removed from their movement bases, that
the institutions are consultative with limited decision-making power at
best, and that crucial policy issues –development projects, macroeco-
nomic policy, and budgetary decisions –remain unaffected. Baiocchi
(2017,42), for example, emphasizes that “time and again, conference
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resolutions that went directly against government policy or powerful
economic interests did not get adopted as policy”and that “the anticrisis
economic measures of 2008 did not go through participatory spaces and
ignored more progressive alternatives.”The PT’s most important social
program –Bolsa Família (see Hunter, this volume) –involves no partici-
patory mechanisms. This is despite Lula’s original intentions when he
invited a leading liberation theologian and a WSF leader to mobilize
support for the Zero Hunger committees, which were later discarded in
favor of the more technical Bolsa Família program (Bruera 2015,9,
10–12). Of note for comparison is that, once in the presidency, the PT
never scaled PB up to the national level nor attempted to mandate or
encourage it subnationally (2015; Goldfrank 2011b; Gómez Bruera
2015). The percentage of both all large municipalities (50,000 or more
inhabitants) and all large PT-governed municipalities implementing PB
declined after Lula was elected president. The number of Brazilian cities
using PB –perhaps 200 at one time –was never large, and in most cities it
only lasts one or two terms at best (Goldfrank 2012,2–3;2017,122;
Wampler 2015,262).
Strengthening the skeptical interpretation of Brazil’s participatory
institutions are the facts that many PT government officials questioned
their impact and that a wave of protests began in 2013 involving millions
of citizens that were the country’s largest since mobilizations for direct
elections thirty years earlier. Responding to civil society and internal
government doubts, the Lula administration’s Instituto de Pesquisa
Econômica Aplicada (IPEA) created a special unit in 2010 to evaluate
the effectiveness of participatory institutions and develop proposals to
improve them (Romão 2015,48–49). After the 2013 protests, in part in
response to them and in part building on the IPEA’s research and on a
segment of the PT’s long-standing interest in creating a participatory
system, President Dilma Rousseff (Lula’s successor) instituted the
National System of Social Participation by decree in May 2014. Yet the
PT could not convince its congressional coalition partners to make the
decree permanent, as many legislators and a good part of the press
(especially Veja) viewed Rousseff’s decree as a threat to representative
democracy, dubbing it “Bolivarian”and claiming it aimed at creating
“soviets.”The decree died in the Senate in 2015, a precursor to Rousseff’s
ousting the following year and to the rise of a pair of anti-participatory
conservative presidents, Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro. As even cham-
pions of Brazil’s participatory institutions recognize, Temer and
Bolsonaro dramatically weakened them, removing civil society members,
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cutting funding and staffing, and holding only the few national confer-
ences that are legally required (Pogrebinschi and Tanscheit 2017,4–5;
Lima 2020,25–26).
Venezuela
The origins of the first wave of participatory institutions under Hugo
Chávez in the early 2000s bear some resemblance to those in Brazil –a
leftist project for participatory democracy based in part on prior local-
level experiments and aided by a constituent assembly –but differ in that
this constituent assembly followed not a twenty-one-year military dicta-
torship but nearly four decades of democracy. Furthermore, Venezuela’s
constituent assembly in 1999 and subsequent governments were domin-
ated by Chávez and his allies, whereas the PT played a minor role in
Brazil’s constituent assembly and did not win the presidency until four-
teen years later, and then only in coalition with centrist parties. More
importantly, Venezuela’sfirst wave of participatory institutions was
short-lived and overtaken in 2006 by a second wave based not on the
ideas of the participatory democracy project described earlier but on
notions of popular power and twenty-first-century socialism (Goldfrank
2011b, 177–179; Silva 2017,109–110). While first-wave participatory
institutions like the Water Planning Boards (Mesas Técnicas de Água;
MTAs), Urban Land Committees (Comités de Tierra Urbana; CTUs), and
Local Public Planning Councils (Comités Locales de Planificación Pública;
CLPPs), generally resembled participatory institutions in the region,
second-wave institutions did not. To understand the significance of these
second-wave institutions –the Communal Councils (Consejos
Comunales; CCs), Communes (Comunas), and, later, Local Supply and
Production Committees (Comités Locales de Abastecimiento y
Producción; CLAPs) –one must take into account that they developed
under and contributed to an increasingly illiberal political context.
Accordingly, the key questions are: how do first- and second-wave par-
ticipatory institutions differ, why did Chavismo change models, and to
what degree are Venezuela’s participatory institutions inclusionary?
To be clear, distinctions between earlier and later participatory insti-
tutions are not absolute. And some institutions, such as occasional use of
referendums and PB in several cities, or the more widespread health
committees, spanned both periods. Nonetheless, there are significant
differences between the key first- and second-wave participatory insti-
tutions. The neighborhood-level MTAs and CTUs, which numbered in
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the thousands by the early 2000s, and the city-level CLPPs, which, as
mandated in the 1999 constitution, should have functioned in all of
Venezuela’s335 municipalities, operated with local government agencies
and within the framework of a pluralistic, representative democracy
(Goldfrank 2011b, 177–178). The CLPPs, for example, should include
the mayor, city councilors, and representatives of CSOs, the latter of
whom hold 50 percent of the seats plus one and are elected in public
assemblies. The CLPPs are intended to organize assemblies for direct
participation in municipal planning and budgeting as well. Second-wave
participatory institutions, by contrast, operate parallel to and in competi-
tion with local representative governments, and have become increasingly
linked to the national government and the ruling party (the Partido
Socialista Unido de Venezuela; PSUV) (Silva 2017,110). CCs can be
formed by between 150 and 400 families in cities and by smaller numbers
of families in rural and indigenous areas; their main purposes are propos-
ing, planning, implementing, and monitoring community projects.
Communes, which link CCs with one another and with, in some cases,
“productive units known as social property enterprises,”are explicitly
aimed at building a new communal state to replace the existing state and
facilitate a transition to socialism (Ciccariello-Maher 2016,20–21; see
also Azzellini 2016).
There are at least three main reasons why the Chávez administration
moved away from the first-wave participatory institutions like the CLPPs
and began focusing on the communal councils and eventually communes
instead. First, CLPPs faced severe challenges. Chavista and opposition
mayors often failed to create them or obstructed their functioning. Some
Chávez sympathizers argued that existing representative institutions and
bureaucracies were corrupt and inefficient and needed to be replaced
(Goldfrank 2011b, 179). Second, creating new institutions –the CCs –
offered Chávez an avenue that was potentially free of opposition interfer-
ence to build a clientelist network in preparation for the 2006 presidential
election and for the establishment of a new political party, the PSUV, in
2007 (Goldfrank 2011b, 179). Finally, the change to CCs and communes
coincided with the radicalization of Chavista ideology toward explicitly
proclaiming a socialist revolution (Silva 2017,109–110). This radicaliza-
tion followed the opposition’s repeated attempts to remove Chávez from
power: the failed coup d’etat in 2002, oil strike in 2003, and recall
referendum in 2004. After the opposition abstained from congressional
elections in 2005, Chavista legislators passed a law delinking the CCs
from CLPPs, and thus from municipal governments; instead, Chávez
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created a national-level commission to register CCs and provide funding
(Goldfrank 2011b, 179).
As Chávez used increased oil revenues to sponsor their projects, the
number of communal councils skyrocketed. By the late 2000s, the CCs
had received over four billion dollars, official figures indicated that
33,549 CCs had formed, involving more than 8million participants,
and independent surveys confirmed that roughly a third of Venezuelan
adults had participated in at least one CC meeting (Goldfrank 2011b,
177–178; Azzellini 2016,102–103). In 2010, the government passed the
Law of Communes, and 1,195 communes had registered by 2015
(Azzellini 2016,243–245). Later, as oil revenues plummeted and the
economy entered a deep recession, President Nicolás Maduro created
another “participatory”initiative in 2016, the Local Committees for
Supply and Production (CLAPs), which distribute subsidized food
baskets. By 2017,over29,000 CLAPs had formed, according to the
program’s director (CNN 2017). The CLAPs have their own webpage
on the vice-president’s site (www.vicepresidencia.gob.ve/index.php/
category/clap/) and a magazine suggestively titled, Todo el Poder para
los CLAP (All Power to the CLAPs), featuring Maduro on the
editorial board.
Opportunities for popular sector participation have been numerous in
Venezuela, and a higher percentage of the population has participated
regularly in the new institutions than anywhere else in Latin America, but
it is hard to sustain that this participation signifies meaningful citizenship.
Well before Venezuela’s economic collapse and the creation of the bla-
tantly clientelistic CLAPs, which tie popular sector food consumption to
official party membership in a context of severe shortages, scholars had
identified profound problems with the CCs. Even many observers sympa-
thetic to participatory ideals recognize that CCs suffer from corruption,
lack of transparency, co-optation and subordination of social movements,
exclusion of those not aligned with the PSUV, and electoral manipulation,
and that they often end up sowing or deepening distrust within commu-
nities and ultimately delegitimizing participation (Briceño 2014;Rhodes-
Purdy 2015; Silva 2017; García-Guadilla 2018; Hanson 2018). The
overlapping roles CCs play means that they mix society, the ruling party,
and the state in such a way that access to participation in decision-making
over public goods is conditioned by partisanship. Even if some CCs have
served to include the popular sector without political manipulation, the
CCs operate at the microlevel; opportunities for sector-based or state- and
national-level participation have been virtually nonexistent, as the
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constitutionally prescribed state- and national-level planning councils
never materialized (Silva 2017,111). The only major exceptions to the
lack of national participatory institutions were the recall referendums in
2004 and constitutional referendums in 2007 and 2009. Yet the 2007 ref-
erendums ultimately proved meaningless; when a majority rejected
dozens of constitutional changes that Chávez proposed, Congress passed
many of the same reforms anyway (Welp 2016b). And when Maduro’s
opponents tried to use the constitutionally-sanctioned path for a recall
referendum against him in 2017, the National Electoral Council rejected
it, and later prohibited major opposition parties from fielding candidates
in the 2018 presidential election. Such actions obviously inhibit citizen-
ship rights and make a mockery of Chavista claims that Venezuela
remains a democracy, participatory or otherwise.
Uruguay
Unlike the other countries examined here, and uniquely in Latin America,
Uruguay’s recent embrace of participatory institutions does not coincide
with the rewriting of constitutions nor with dissatisfaction with democ-
racy and representative institutions such as elections, parliaments, and
parties.
11
Instead, the Uruguayan case demonstrates a mix of the persist-
ence and revival of prior participatory institutions with a leftist participa-
tory democracy project promoted by the Broad Front (Frente Amplio, FA)
and its social movement allies. Well before the rest of Latin America
began amending constitutions to add participatory institutions, and par-
ticularly mechanisms of direct democracy, Uruguay had pioneered popu-
lar consultations, holding its first in 1917 and adding citizen-initiated
consultations to the constitution in 1967 (Lissidini 2015,161; Altman
2011,142). From then until the dictatorship of the 1970s, and again after
the 1985 transition to democracy, Uruguay has been “the most prodi-
gious user”of citizen-initiated mechanisms of direct democracy not only
in Latin America but in the global South (Altman 2011,140). It is the sole
country in the region to regularly use binding citizen-initiated popular
consultations not only to propose laws and constitutional amendments
11
Uruguayans have the highest rates of satisfaction with democracy (70%in2015), sense of
representation by congress (45%in2015), and party identification (72%in2015)in
Latin America; they vote at higher rates (an average of 95% turnout compared to the
67% regional average from 1995 to 2015) and believe their elections are clean at higher
rates than regional peers (82% versus the region’s47% average in 2015)
(Latinobarómetro 2015).
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but to overturn laws as well (Lissidini 2015,143–144). This combination
gives citizens power directly over critical issues and also indirectly by
affecting how parliaments and presidents consider potential bills before
they become law (Altman 2011,147,184–185). At the same time, since
democratization, FA-allied social movements have been the most frequent
and most successful users of citizen-initiated popular consultations. These
consultations addressed crucial economic issues, including votes to raise
and protect pensions in 1989 and 1994, and to revoke or prevent privat-
ization of state enterprises in 1992,2000, and 2004 (Bidegain and Tricot
2017,141,147–151). The FA, moreover, has been a consistent champion
of participatory democracy beyond the popular consultations. Since the
1980s, the FA regularly campaigned on deepening democracy by creating
citizen participation initiatives, launched important participatory reforms
while at the helm of Montevideo –the capital city where nearly half of
Uruguay’s population resides –starting in 1990, and introduced new or
revived old participatory institutions at the national level after ascending
to the presidency in 2005.
With this combination of long-standing direct democracy mechanisms
and new participatory institutions created by the FA at multiple levels of
government, Uruguay now offers broad access to policymaking processes
for the popular sectors. At the national level, in addition to popular
consultations, which continued occasionally during the FA’s three presi-
dential terms (Bidegain and Tricot 2017,151–152), the FA created
dozens of public policy councils, roundtables, and working groups that
bring together state officials and civil society representatives, held sectoral
dialogs or conferences with a wider public, and, distinctively, reintro-
duced and expanded corporatist wage councils (Goldfrank 2011b,
174–177; Vecinday 2017). The latter are tripartite salary bargaining
mechanisms originally introduced in 1943, abandoned during the dicta-
torship, briefly reintroduced after the transition, and then left dormant for
fifteen years until the FA’sfirst presidency. What makes the wage councils
notable is that the FA expanded them to include rural, domestic service,
and public service workers. At the provincial level, the FA continued its
decentralized participatory system and reorganized its PB process in
Montevideo and implemented PB in other provinces where it won elec-
tions as well. Finally, in 2010 the FA passed the Decentralization and
Citizen Participation Law, creating a new municipal level of government
with new representative bodies –city councils and mayors. By 2015,in
addition to its nineteen provincial governments, Uruguay had 112 muni-
cipal governments.
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The quality of participation and the degree of inclusion vary across
institutions, sectors, and locales. Overall, however, Uruguay’s participa-
tory institutions offer greater access to decision-making over more
important issues to a greater percentage of the population than elsewhere
in the region. The citizen-initiated popular consultations, for example,
offer the “real possibility of exercising direct influence on important
public policies”and give citizens incentives to organize to propose laws
that help them or to prevent policies that hurt them (Bidegain and Tricot
2017,143). The FA’s expanded wage councils present a clear case of
enhancing meaningful citizenship. They provide recognition to previously
excluded groups, rural workers and domestic servants (mostly women),
access to decision-making processes, and resources in the form of higher
wages. Scholars link the wage councils to rising unionization rates, declin-
ing labor informality rates, and consistent gains in real wages (Bidegain
and Tricot 2017,153; Vecinday 2017,248). By contrast, the policy
councils, roundtables, and national dialogs in various sectors (welfare,
rural development, security) receive many of the same critiques and show
many of the same limitations as similar institutions in Brazil and Peru. To
wit, while they provide some degree of access, they are mostly consulta-
tive, they fail to reach the popular sectors by focusing on existing CSOs,
and they often produce citizen frustration as a result (Noboa and Bisio
2016; Fuentes et al. 2016; Vecinday 2017). At the provincial level, PB
varies across cases and affects a relatively small percentage of the budget
but tends to involve a comparatively high percentage of the population
(between 5percent and 10 percent in Montevideo) and generates higher
participation rates in lower-income neighborhoods (Veneziano 2017).
With regard to the new municipalities, the picture is also mixed. Their
creation alone opened new channels of access, and nearly three-quarters
of the mayors implemented some type of participatory institution, includ-
ing PB and open assemblies, but their significance is limited because they
lack resources and responsibilities (Freigedo 2015,18,111–116). One
striking absence is any effort by the FA to scale up PB to the national level,
especially notable given Uruguay’s small population and the fact that its
two-term president, Tabaré Vázquez, introduced a version of PB as
Montevideo’s mayor thirty years ago.
This chapter has advanced several arguments. The first is double-sided.
The dramatic increase in the number of participatory institutions in Latin
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America can indeed be conceptualized as part of the inclusionary turn, as
this volume’s editors suggest, but a complete understanding of the initial
rise of participatory institutions and their subsequent diffusion requires
acknowledgment of the role of the Left and of international actors. At the
same time, certain participatory innovations born in Latin America have
contributed to the global rush to expand citizen participation, as diffusion
of PB illustrates. This chapter also explored the limits of participatory
institutions. Even when they made the leap from paper to practice, they
frequently provided inclusion without power. That is, they tended to offer
access through low-quality channels of participation entailing consult-
ation rather than effective decision-making (as seen in the various councils
and conferences in all countries), focused on issues or resources of lesser
magnitude (as was frequently the case with PB), or restricted involvement
to a limited public (not necessarily drawing from the popular sectors). In
some cases, participation did not signify enhancing citizenship but
reinforcing clientelism instead, particularly in Venezuela.
Finally, this chapter showed the futility of a simplified approach to
Latin America’s participatory turn. The development of participatory
institutions diverges considerably across the countries associated with
the Left turn, even within the conventional Bolivarian and social-
democratic categories. Ideology and ideas more broadly matter, but
country-specific historical legacies, system stability, the varying strength
of conservative threats, and the social bases of incumbent governments all
play a role in explaining variation in the types of participatory institutions
adopted and the degree of inclusion generated. Indeed, not all participa-
tory innovations have a positive impact on citizenship. As the case of
Uruguay shows, sometimes older participatory institutions offer greater
promise of meaningful inclusion.
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