Seattle hails its working model

By Hilary Wainwright

LONDON: While the elite of the deregulated economy met in Davos last month for the World Economic Forum, in southern Brazil social movements and municipalities gathered in the city of Porto Alegre for the World Social Forum.

As the title implies, the purpose was to develop alternatives that make economics the servant of social objectives.

The 10,000-strong World Social Forum marked a new phase in a movement that has already had a global impact. "Seattle was not enough; we need to show the world our alternatives," was the recurring explanation delegates gave for their trip to Brazil.

They had come to a city which enabled them immediately to point to an alternative that works. For the last 12 years the radical Brazilian Workers' Party has governed Porto Alegre, an industrial city with a population of 1 million, on the basis of principles that run consciously counter to neo-liberal orthodoxy.

Each time the party goes to the electorate it wins a greater popular mandate -- it has several times won the United Nations Habitat prize for good government.

Porto Alegre has provided a model of public administration now followed or aspired to by several states and many city governments across Brazil.

The crucial achievement of Porto Alegre is that it has relegitimized the state as an institution to be trusted to meet the needs of the majority of people.

It has won trust because people are able not only to call the city government to account through the normal electoral process, but they also have control over the budget -- or that part of it not laid down by federal law -- through a transparent process of direct popular participation.

The "participatory budget" (PB), as it is known, is an annual cycle of neighborhood meetings where people identify their priority needs for new investment -- whether pavements, schools, health provision, drainage, cooperative industries -- and then elect delegate s to meetings for wider districts.

These delegates apply criteria and rules, developed in previous years, which give the priorities different weights. They then elect a budget council which represents every part of the city.

Through an open process of negotiation and reporting back, the overall budget is drawn up to be put to the mayor and municipal council for final agreement. The same bodies of direct democracy monitor its implementation. Officials have to report back to citizens' meetings on the progress of the projects agreed through the participatory cycle. After 12 years, direct participation has spread to every area of the city council's work.

The most celebrated result is an end to the corruption that was rife in this and most other Brazilian cities.

Neo-liberal orthodoxy has been able to run riot worldwide partly because the social-democratic state lost its legitimacy. Monetarism led to cutbacks that made the state appear tatty and inefficient.

But social democracy also had a false optimism that parliamentary representation was enough, that it was able to represent and know people's needs within a multi-faceted and powerful state apparatus. When parliamentary control failed, the selling off of the state apparatus was presented as the only alternative.

The experiences of Brazil do not provide a simple transferable alternative. But the weaknesses of Brazilian parliamentary institutions have led to the invention of principles of democratic public control over the state and private vested interests from which others can learn.

The writer is editor of the Red Pepper magazine, in the United Kingdom.

-- Guardian News Service