Expanding Accountability Through Participatory Institutions: Mayors, Citizens, and Budgeting in Three Brazilian Municipalities

Citizens and civil society organizations (CSOs) play a more prominent role in Latin America's new democratic regimes than under previous democratic experiences. Efforts to promote transparency, accountability, and participation have led citizens, community organizations, social movements, and nongovernmental organizations to demand a more expansive role in clecisionmaking venues. Brazil, Latin America's most populous and most decentralized democracy, has witnessed the proliferation of participatory institutions at the municipal level, granting citizens access to clecisionmaking venues as well as the right to engage in oversight activities. Participatory institutions, such as participatory budgeting (PB), represent an effort to devolve and broaden decisionmaking venues with the potential to place a check on the prerogatives of mayors.

The functioning of and outcomes from participatory institutions appear to be intimately related to the breadth and intensity of support extended by mayoral administrations. Mayors must be willing to delegate authority to citizens. Likewise, citizens and CSOs interested in the expansion of participatory institutions must work closely with mayoral administrations to ensure that the rules are followed and public policy projects are implemented. The delegation of authority to citizens has the potential to expand accountability at the local level as citizens contribute to policymaking decisions and work on third-party oversight committees. Yet there is also the risk that the insertion of CSOs into participatory policymaking venues based on their close political connections to elected mayors may subvert the development of "checks and balances." This article analyzes the opportunities created by participatory institutions to expand accountability and the concurrent intertwining sets of interests among the relevant actors that may actually limit that expansion.

In Brazil, participatory institutions have been implemented at the behest of political strategies promoted by "participatory" or leftist sectors of Brazil's political and civil societies. These institutions are designed to overcome numerous social and political problems, such as low levels of accountability, inefficiencies in social service provisions, and corruption, all of which hamper efforts to improve the quality of democratic governance. Brazilian democracy is plagued by a "private" state, where most mayors continue to treat their municipal administrations as personal fiefdoms (Garcia Canclini 1995; Leal 1997; Diniz 1982). In many municipalities, the policymaking process is undertaken far from the prying eyes of politicians and civil society organizations. Participatory institutions, their advocates often argue, will make a dent in Brazil's social and political inequalities by allowing citizens to deliberate in public, negotiate over the distribution of public resources, and hold government officials accountable (Wampler and Avritzer forthcoming).

This article considers Brazil's best-known participatory experience, participatory budgeting (PB, orcamento participativo), in the municipalities of Sao Paulo, Recife, and Porto Alegre. This innovative institutional format incorporates citizens and municipal administrative officials into a policymaking process in which citizens directly negoti...

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