A pororoca da participação autêntica: estudo de caso dos orçamentos participativos de Belém e Pasto

Abstract

The exercise of the Pasto's Participatory Budgeting (PB), the oldest in Colombia and which had the boldness to start in the rural part, started in 1995 and is still in force nowadays. While in the Brazilian city of Belém, this practice could only be carried out between 1997 and 2004, as it usually happens with participatory processes that, once implemented and developed for a government period, end up being dismantled, since its mandatary or political party comes out of the power. The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze the development and dynamics of PB processes in the cities of Belém and Pasto, in order to delve into some of the main limitations regarding the scope of continuous and consistent processes of PB in Latin America. This, by means of the auscultation of the reasons that made the process of participatory budgeting of Pasto reach its permanence over time, while this same exercise in the city of Bethlehem was discontinued. The objective is also to analyze the implications of conducting PB only in direct democracy, sensu stricto, through territorial decentralization or through delegation; and if, indeed, bodies like the PB councils and the district councils used in Belém, are participatory democracy, and if they are necessary. In addition, we intend to evaluate the degrees of popular participation achieved by the PB processes in the cities of Belém and Pasto. For this, in this case study, documentary and bibliographic researches were done on the object of study (as of its context of application), as well as the application of interviews to the main actors involved in the two cities. It is concluded that the secret of the continuity of the participative practice in Pasto comes due the good stocks of social capital, based on the ethnic and cultural substratum that survived the period of the Spanish conquest; as well as due the existence, in the last decades of the last century, of ambitious processes of social mobilization, especially promoted by the Nariño department's teachers, what generated a new political culture, which had the participation flag placed at the level of the goals to be achieved; and due to the realization of a direct democracy exercise, sensu stricto, that could help to understand what variables are necessary for the continuity of participatory processes to be accomplished, and how to stimulate their presence in citizen participation exercises. The fact that a process achieves its continuity, without being at all consistent and open to community participation, allows us to work on modifications and adjustment, so that a genuine participation can truly be achieved and, thus, positive social changes can be made, with the autonomy of society; which can serve as an inspiration and landmark for many processes counterhegemonics in Latin America.