Lula, the Workers' Party and the Governability Dilemma in Brazil by Hernán F. Gómez Bruera

Author:Hernán F. Gómez Bruera [Bruera, Hernán F. Gómez]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: National, Political Parties, Political Science, Political Process, American Government, General
ISBN: 9781135050085
Google: NiB3HfPpSBYC
Goodreads: 18014083
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

FROM THE PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING PROMISE TO THE PAC’S TECHNOCRATIC RATIONALE

The trajectory of the PT participatory agenda at the national level is paradoxical. Not only did the party fail to use participatory instruments in the planning and budgeting processes at the national level as promised, but it also adopted a technocratic rationale in which decisions on its most important infrastructure programme, the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC), were mostly made by experts and bureaucrats. In order to show this trajectory, I start with the promises made to include Participatory Budget (PB) at the national level, which were quickly left aside; and I then move on to explore how Lula’s inner circle failed to promote a meaningful debate on democratising the budgeting process once in office. Possibly as a palliative remedy, the administration organised a national consultation process to legitimise its plan, the Plano Plurianual: “Um Brasil para Todos” [“Pluriannual Plan: ‘One Brazil for All’”] 2004–2007. Although this process was regarded by civil society organisations as a first step towards democratising the planning process, it went no further after the Lula administration launched the PAC. Both the governability dilemma and electoral motivations shaped this trajectory, I will argue in this section, by forcing participation to take a back seat to what was perceived by Lula’s inner circle as a more pressing issue: economic and political governability. However, even when the economy and national politics stabilised, participation in the planning process was not introduced, as the administration concentrated on infrastructure projects, motivated by electoral concerns and the interests of dominant strategic actors.

Leaving the Participatory Budget Behind

When Lula assumed office, participatory budgeting mechanisms had already spread across several municipalities (see Chapter 4), with some particularly successful cases. At the state level, however, the experience was limited to one single case in which PB lasted for a whole government term—the Olívio Dutra administration in Rio Grande do Sul (1999–2002).27 From its Second National Congress in 1999 onwards, the PT envisaged scaling up participatory budgeting mechanisms from the local level to the national sphere.28 The idea of a federal PB was revisited by the party in its Third National Congress in 2001,29 and was incorporated into the first pages of Lula’s electoral manifesto in 2002.30

Given the enormous size of the Brazilian territory and its population, a federal PB was obviously not an easy promise to deliver. Yet the intention was never to automatically implement this instrument at the national sphere, but to adapt it to the Brazilian federal structure, as it was made explicit in the 2001 and 2002 documents.31 In any case, this was rather complicated because a wide range of actors influenced the deliberation of the public budget at the federal level. Whereas in the municipal sphere, a mayor may only face opposition from one institutional actor, namely the legislative assembly, national presidents face various intermediate levels, such as mayors and state governments. Some PT officials claim that a federal PB could only work with the support of city mayors and state governors (Alves 03/12/08),

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