Examining the Claims of Proponents of the Participatory Budget

Abstract

Over the years, I have been impressed at the number of Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) leaders and activists who describe popular participation (more often than not, exemplified with a reference to the Orçamento Participativo (OP) in terms of the well-known Christian parable: “You can give a poor man a fish today and he will be hungry tomorrow, or you can teach him to fish and he will never be hungry again.” As discussed in chapters three and four, popular participation is said to engender empowerment: as the poor and otherwise excluded/disengaged majority take part in processes of decision-making and policy implementation that improve their lives and that of their communities, they are able to see themselves as agents in their own self-improvement and not mere supplicants of generally inadequate and ultimately demobilizing “gifts from on high.”¹ They are able to see themselves, in other words, as bearers of human and political rights. For an individual’s empowerment to be effective, however, PT leaders are quick to point out that empowerment has both an individual and a collective dimension. The transformation of the individual as summarized earlier cannot bear fruit without the necessary collective dimension of political engagement. Empowerment therefore explicitly assumes an acceptance of the responsibility of active democratic citizenship: since one has acquired the consciousness to act, one is obligated to use that consciousness in the continuing struggle against economic inequality, political authoritarianism, paternalism, and other forms of oppression.