Françoise Montambeault

Participatory citizenship in the making? The multiple citizenship trajectories of participatory budgeting participants in Brazil

ABSTRACT Most scholarship on participatory budgeting (PB) has highlighted its impact on democratic processes and redistributive outcomes, but there is also an implicit argument associating it with citizenship learning processes at the individual and collective levels. As a mechanism for social interactions, it is often called a ‘school of citizenship’ nurturing the development of ‘better citizens’ who participate as agents and members of a political community. This relation is, however, more ambiguous in practice. The article looks at this relationship and at the rise of so-called participatory democratic citizenship. Drawing from surveys conducted among PB participants in two Brazilian cities in 2009 (Porto Alegre) and 2014 (Belo Horizonte), the article shows that, at the individual level, multiple trajectories of citizenship can emerge among participants and can coexist in participatory processes. Contrary to the common wisdom, the article brings to light the complexity of differentiated citizenship learning processes among individuals active in participatory mechanisms. These cases thus show that PB does not necessarily contribute to the creation of a civic community, that is, a durable and active form of social organization that fosters the rise of a participatory and democratic citizenship.

The politics of local participatory democracy in Latin America : institutions, actors, and interactions

Participatory democracy innovations aimed at bringing citizens back into local governance processes are now at the core of the international democratic development agenda. Municipalities around the world have adopted local participatory mechanisms of various types in the last two decades, including participatory budgeting, the flagship Brazilian program, and participatory planning, as it is the case in several Mexican municipalities. Yet, institutionalized participatory mechanisms have had mixed results in practice at the municipal level. So why and how does success vary? This book sets out to answer that question.Defining democratic success as a transformation of state-society relationships, the author goes beyond the clientelism/democracy dichotomy and reveals that four types of state-society relationships can be observed in practice: clientelism, disempowering co-option, fragmented inclusion, and democratic cooperation. Using this typology, and drawing on the comparative case study of four cities in Mexico and Brazil, the book demonstrates that the level of democratic success is best explained by an approach that accounts for institutional design, structural conditions of mobilization, and the configurations, strategies, behaviors, and perceptions of both state and societal actors.Thus, institutional change alone does not guarantee democratic success: the way these institutional changes are enacted by both political and social actors is even more important as it conditions the potential for an autonomous civil society to emerge and actively engage with the local state in the social construction of an inclusive citizenship.

Democratizing Local Governance? The Ley de Participación Popular and the Social Construction of Citizenship in Bolivia

The article develops a theoretical framework to analyse the social construction of citizenship at the local level in Bolivia through the Ley de Participación Popular (LPP). It explains how decentralization at the municipal level and the introduction of participatory mechanisms affect the development of civil society in Bolivia. I argue that decentralization at the city level can provide new formal spaces for the development of civil society in relation with the state, which can in turn foster the social construction of a more inclusive citizenship regime. Many factors, however, determine if such potential is exploited. Drawing from the Bolivian experience, the article elaborates on the socio-political conditions necessary for local governance to have a positive impact on citizenship. It shows that the institutional shortcomings of the LPP, an elite-driven reform adopted in a country with a legacy of weak institutions and civil society, posed fundamental limits for social participation at the municipal level to lead to the social construction of an inclusive citizenship regime.

The participatory democracy turn: an introduction

Since the 1960s, participatory discourses and techniques have been at the core of decisionmaking processes in a variety of sectors of society and of policy domains around the world – a phenomenon often referred to as the participatory turn. Originally associated with this turn have been a strong critique of liberal and representative democracy, the corollary idea of a ‘real utopia,’ that is, the necessary radicalization of democratic practices (Barber, 1984; Mouffe, 1992), and a rethinking of the public sphere (Fraser, 1990; Habermas, 1962/1989). Participatory mechanisms were thus initially conceived and designed as a way for citizens’ views and input to have some influence on otherwise political and bureaucratic decisionmaking processes. It was also imagined that they would become tools for making elected leaders accountable for their decisions, and for citizens to become empowered through the participatory process (Fung & Wright, 2003). The idea of participation has also attracted considerable attention in the ‘good governance’ literature (Tendler, 1998), where it is rather understood as a way to make governments (especially local ones) more transparent, responsive, and in turn more efficient with regard to public spending, as well as to make public (and sometimes contested) decisions socially and politically acceptable. Over the years, the participatory turn has given birth to a large array of heterogeneous participatory practices developed by a wide variety of organizations and groups (Bherer & Breux, 2012), as well as by both leftand right-leaning governments around the world. Among the best-known practices of citizen participation, we find examples such as participatory budgeting (PB), citizen councils, public consultations, neighbourhood councils, participatory planning, etc. Participatory processes are thus often associated with the idea of a top-down mechanism implemented to include citizen input in the public sector. However, participatory practices have also grown in a variety of – sometimes unexpected – public and private spaces. Social movements have adopted participatory strategies in order to (re)mobilize their members and citizens (Occupy, Podemos, for example) (Della Porta, 2013; Nez, 2012; Polletta, 2015); bureaucratic organizations have adopted practical participatory reforms (Nabatchi, 2010); NGOs and community organizations have included participatory elements in their programmes and in the way their own organizations function (Eliasoph, 2011); unions have become more and more interested in a variety of participatory mechanisms in order to mobilize and get in touch with their members; and even private companies are using certain forms of participation as an internal management mechanism, or as a social acceptability tool for economic development projects (Lee, 2015). A whole industry of participatory consultants and experts has emerged, marketing participatory practices among organizations of all sorts and

When Clients Become Collective Actors

Political clientelism is traditionally defined as a vertical relationship based on an informal and unequal exchange of private goods for political favors where the client (often the poor/vulnerable citizen) is maintained in a position of weakness through his dependence on the patron (the powerful politician/political broker) for access to the basic rights of citizenship. Public goods are distributed according to political loyalty, an exchange based on informal (yet binding) understanding of the relationship on both parts and generally conducted through direct and face-to-face interactions guided by a certain sense of reciprocity and friendship (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1984; Roniger 1990). Originally associated to a marginal phenomenon pertaining to traditional/agrarian societies, the type of informal exchange characterizing clientelism has however survived and adapted to economic and political modernization, becoming a central concern for analysts of state-society relationships in democracy.