Brainstorming across continents: mentor in Brazil helps mentee in Scotland rethink participatory democracy

Through a collaboration with the Open Government Partnership, People Powered recently offered expert mentors to members of the OGP Local program. Through the program, local government and civil society representatives from around the world were connected with experienced practitioners who worked with them to improve or launch new participation programs. Here is an edited interview by our communications director, Pam Bailey, with one mentor-mentee pair participating in the OGP Local program: Tarson Núñez, a mentor and researcher from the Department of Economics and Statistics for the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and Alan Speirs, corporate policy officer in the Chief Executive Department for the city of Glasgow, Scotland.

Pam Bailey talks to Alan Speirs (top left) and Tarson Núñez (bottom)

Why did you sign up for a People Powered mentor, Alan? 

In Glasgow, we’re looking to further our understanding and practice of participatory democracy, how to make meaningful connections with the communities we serve.

This year, our annual household survey, one of the tools that helps us know what Glaswegians think about a number of issues, documented our need to continue to try to deepen relationships with the people we serve. As we recover from the pandemic, people need to feel connected, listened to and able to participate.

One area we know we need to focus on is how to best engage communities who don't usually tend to get involved. This is complex, since Glasgow is a very diverse city. We know that one approach will not work across all the groups in the city.

Tarson, you were one of the managers of participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the “birthplace” of PB. And you’ve accrued so much experience since then. What advice do you offer others on ensuring inclusiveness? 

In Porto Alegre in the 1990s, we had strong social movements and community and neighborhood associations that mobilized lots of people, so we had broad and significant participation that came quite spontaneously from below. Even so, there was always an effort to make it even stronger. What I think really helps is this: 

• Accessibility: Meetings must be held close to where people live. In Porto Alegre, we divided the city into 16 regions, with events in each. In other cities, like Belo Horizonte, the process was even more decentralized. So, most of the meetings were easy to access. And sometimes, for the poorest of the poor, we provided transportation to those who lived in more distant places or to those who didn't have the resources to go by bus or other mode.

• Communication: Every step of the process must be heavily publicized through mass media, posters on buses, outdoors, etc. For every cycle of the participation process, there was a dedicated media campaign, with an emphasis on the fact that everyone was welcome. This is not a trivial issue: Marginalized communities often feel their participation is not welcomed. 

• Partnership with movements: Democracy is built with the active participation of civil society. It is  very important for local governments to engage partners and stakeholders who  have roots in the communities. Don't expect that people will naturally participate in your process. It is very important to map, identify and involve the organizations and groups most deeply engaged with these kinds of publics. 

• Focused experiences: It may also be useful to specifically tailor participatory processes to these particular communities, in parallel with the overall PB program. In many places there is school-based PB. In Edinburg, Scotland, there’s a project that supports people experiencing homelessness that includes participatory practices.  Experiences like that can be a kind of a laboratory.

• Team skills: It’s critical to allocate dedicated human resources and recruit a team of people with experience in working with participatory methodologies. It is especially important when you deal  with specific social groups.  It is key to be able to address them in their own language and respect their cultural identities and characteristics.

• Meeting dynamics: Maximize opportunities for everyone to speak. In Portugal, they sometimes break a meeting into groups, to allow more people to talk. Also try to make the meeting a pleasant experience. In Porto Alegre, we used to reserve some time for cultural activities, like music or theatrical sketches. And in one town in Germany, they turned the voting day into a kind of cultural party/fair,  so the people who attended participated in the debate and voted but also enjoyed it.

Young people at a Glasgow PB event.

Alan, you say Glasgow wants to deepen local citizen engagement. What has that looked like so far? 

Unlike Brazil, Scotland traditionally has had a fairly centralized system. However there is a commitment to developing stronger and more fruitful participatory democracy across all levels of government, devolving more decisions down to where they are best made. So, the challenge for local governments is to look at how we best do this.

A couple of years ago, Glasgow piloted PB, and there was a lot of buy-in. But, like everywhere, plans were disrupted due to COVID and that happened very quickly. For us, we need to consider how PB develops in light of the circumstances we now find ourselves in.

Many sponsors of PB struggle with small pots of money. Tarson, to what extent have you found the amount of money at play to be important to the success of PB?

There are lots of studies in Brazil that associate the decline of participatory experiences at the local level to the shortage of money. And in Caracas, Venezuela, in the beginning of the ‘90s, there was a participation project that died because the decisions weren’t implemented due to the lack of funds. 

In our case, the period when we had the most interesting processes was just after the new constitution was adopted in 1989, when there was a huge decentralization of resources. So the municipalities had lots of money to deploy. But later, there was a re-centralization of resources again. As a result, after about eight or 10 years, the municipalities started to have a real shortage of money. And this is one of the reasons why the experiment declined. Because if you don't have enough money to do what was decided through participatory budgeting, people don't have the incentives to participate. 

Success depends largely on the political will of the different levels of government.

In the case of Glasgow, it’s also a question of how the city government is organized. It has different sources of money and each is allocated through different processes. The ideal is to unify all the sources of money and allocate all of the funds in a participatory way. This was the case we had in Porto Alegre. It was a much more ambitious project than most of the PB experiences in the world today, which just designate a certain amount of money to be allocated through citizen participation. 

Alan, what other forms of participatory democracy are you considering?

Opening plenary of COP26 (photo credit: UNFCCC)

How to represent and listen to the full flavor of what exists in the life of a city – citizens, charities, not-for-profit organizations, commerce – is ever evolving. There is a big interest in what citizens’ panels can offer in terms of participation by the people. Glasgow used the hosting of the United Nations Climate Conference, COP26, last November as an opportunity to run a citizens assembly on the climate emergency. It was very successful and gave us the chance to look at what purpose this kind of forum could serve and how it can sit alongside other forms of engagement.

We used one of the main polling companies in the UK to carry out this exercise and to assess the participants’ experience. (Read about the assembly’s findings and recommendations.)

Do you have experience with citizens assemblies and panels, Tarson? Were they tried in Brazil?

We’ve had some complicated experiences with citizens assemblies here in Brazil. When participatory trends were high, there were all kinds of ways to give voice to citizens on public policies, including assemblies. And we were very optimistic about this kind of practice in the beginning. But sometimes you can face problematic dynamics. 

Let me give you an example. Every city in Brazil has a master plan that must be revised every 10 years with participation by citizens, via public assemblies. In one of those processes, the association of real estate enterprises co-opted the construction workers union that was mobilizing its base, telling them that if there was more regulation of the size of buildings, they would all lose their jobs. So, when we had the citizens’ assembly to discuss the building regulations, civil society organizations, NGOs and environmentalists faced the resistance of a strong constituency that was fighting based on false information. The lesson: The economic power of private interest groups can also play a role in participatory processes. 

How can this risk be minimized or managed?

Tarson: One way to minimize [external manipulation] is to have a huge communication effort to mobilize all citizens to be there. In our case, we had tiny environmental NGOs and local groups of neighbors with very scarce resources that were weak; they didn't have sufficient economic and political resources to mobilize lots of people. In contrast, the real estate owners had a lot of money and a lot of political and economic influence. One way to prevent that is to boost citizen participation by actively mobilizing them to be there. 

It wasn't a problem when we did participatory budgeting to get people to come because people had lots of needs and learned that PB was a way to achieve their goals. So it was quite easy to get the people to come. But meaningful participation demands a permanent effort to keep people motivated. And we ended up learning that people aren’t necessarily willing to engage in every kind of participatory activity. 

Alan: When given the opportunity, citizens are keen to share what they see as their priorities. When Glasgow hosted COP26, it made the issues of sustainability and the environment very visible and stimulated a discussion on what individually, and as a city, we need to do to make the changes needed.

The challenge is to make sure we follow through on peoples’ expectations, ensuring that participants feel they have had a chance to make a difference.

For example, the findings from the citizens’ assembly on climate were incorporated into the government’s work to tackle the climate emergency, challenging us to deliver what the people said they want to see happen.

How has your mentorship relationship benefitted each of you?

Alan: We started working together toward the end of last year, and have had about five sessions. In many ways, Glasgow and Porto Alegre represent two very different experiences. Tarson talks about a population that was very responsive to participatory budgeting and the idea of getting involved. They saw a dramatic and immediate impact. In Glasgow, we haven’t had a big bang moment where we could say, "Things changed on that day and we moved forward."

The other big difference is that here, the Scottish or Westminster governments also have an input into local operations; that seems very different from the Brazilian way. It also requires a different, more partnership-based approach, since the best interests and concerns of all those involved must be balanced and taken forward. 

Nevertheless, it’s been useful to listen to experiences from somewhere completely different from Glasgow; it gets me thinking: Would that work here? Have we even thought about that? And if we haven't, why not? The other benefit is affirmation that the way we’re thinking of tackling our challenges seems reasonable. It’s reassuring to hear that “it seems logical that you’d face that challenge and to mitigate it in that way. You’ll get past it.”  It’s good to know you're doing something that makes sense to someone who has been through the process and has an idea of what the map looks like.

Tarson: So far, I’ve had three mentees who have each been very different. It has been a really wonderful experience, because I learned a lot, even though I'm the one who provides information. Like Paulo Freire said, teaching is a learning process as well. What I learned from the experience with Alan is that the local context is very decisive; you cannot have a one-size-fits-all methodology for participatory budgeting. I'm used to PB in a context in which the municipalities had a lot of financial autonomy and resources. But in Scotland, the municipalities rely on national funds that come with strict rules. 

My other mentees have been from the Philippines and Armenia, and they had very different challenges and perspectives. And now I will start next week with an experiment in Chile. Although each is a very different context, I think my experience, what we did in Porto Alegre, has been useful when thinking about the internal dimensions of participatory budgeting, how government should organize to do the process,  how to engage city officials, how to deal with different constituencies, etc.  So they learn, and I learn. It’s win-win.

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