For a Popular
Sovereignty Network
This is an information and dialogue space with other experiences of participative democracy, especially in the participatory budgeting field. Based on the propositions that came about during the seminar “The future of participative democracy” we are planning to build a Popular
Sovereignty Network, an ongoing articulation with the objective of strengthen the popular power sources as a strategy to give effectiveness to the participation offers open by governmental institutions.
Material that has been produced by CIDADE available here, such as the Seminar Report, texts, pictures and videos, can be copied and published according to the needs of the readers, but the authors must be quoted. Those who are interested in publishing news or evaluations about participative processes in their cities on our website can send the material by email to cidade@ongcidade.org to be evaluated. We intend to create a digital magazine about participative democracy in the near future and also, with the maturing of the network proposition, to enable masters in every city to post directly any content of their interest and to suggest other formats for the dialog among the participants and experiences. Links and important documents about participative democracy already available on the internet will also be part of this new page in construction.
WSF and PB turned Porto Alegre into a global city. For more than 10 years we have been receiving almost every week activists, government representatives and researchers from all parts of the world. There is an estimative of more than 600 cities with PB in all continents today. We have been worried for a while now about the lack of a more effective dialogue among all these participative experiences, most of all by their own protagonists. Most part of the international meetings tends to concentrate only government and NGO members. If – as we believe – participative democracy only makes sense as popular sovereignty and, therefore, strengthening of the popular power sources, the natural thing would be to find popular communities even more democratic in their internal organization and stronger in their relations with their respective governments. Unfortunately this is not what we usually see. This seemingly contradictory situation
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made us, in 2005, in the last edition of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, to suggest the creation of a network movement in advocacy of the effectively participative budgeting, which means: (a) based on direct participation open to everyone and on revocability of the delegates and council members mandates, with binding deliberation power; (b) in self-regulation based on public parameters of social justice (political, tributary and distributive); (c) in opening the whole public budget to be discussed; and (d) in the control of the budget execution by the participating people. In the beginning of 2007, this movement received support in the Forum of Local Authorities for Social Inclusion (Rede FAL – Fórum de Autoridade Locais pela Inclusão Social) that happened in Malaga. There, they also included in the principles above the emphasis in participative democracy as a counterpoint to institutional deterioration provoked by neoliberalism, based on the mobilization of citizenship in local planning and social transformation.
Although the number of people worried about the banalization of the Participatory Budgeting and about the transformation of this tool in an instrument of control and amortization of social conflicts, mostly after being adopted by multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, the actual reactions are still extremely fragile. This happens for many reasons, most of all because of the survival difficulty of the popular mobilization networks in face of increasing poverty, unemployment and their precarious situation. Social compensatory programs are gradually turning into a survival resource for an increasing part of the population, putting these people in a client condition. The reinforcement of the archaic ties of personal dependency created by this global tendency of turning poverty into a philanthropic issue not only makes a curt circuit in the politization of inequality and the affirmation possibility of active citizenship but also tries to establish a legal border between human rights and social movements. In this way a kind of bare citizenship is established, in which the rights can only be exerted in exchange of passivity, and in promoting, as a consequence, public campaigns socially fascist in favor of criminalizing the social movements.
We hope this space can contribute in some way for us to face proactively this situation.
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