Governance Innovations in Brazil: Understanding Participatory Practices at the Local Level

• In Event: Re-thinking urban governance: Making theory from ordinary cities

Abstract

Brazil has now become widely known for local practices of participatory governance including policy councils and participatory budgets, resulting from longstanding claims by Brazil’s urban social movements. This lead to the enactment of the Statute of the City, an important urban law that provides tools for cities to use to achieve social justice, the ‘right to the city’ and to apply proposals of urban reform (Fernandes, 2011). It is now becoming increasingly clear, however, that this process has not been institutionalized at the local level as intended, illustrating a gap between theory and practice (Caldeira & Holston, 2014; Friendly, 2013). In this paper, I use literature urban governance (Healey, 2006) to shed light on the question of implementing progressive and participatory planning practices in Brazil. For Healey (2006), governance transformations are sustained through long-term shifts in economic, socio-cultural and political relations, yet such innovations need to become institutionalized to endure. In this paper, I ask the following question: What are the potentials of governances practices for understanding the long-term effects of progressive planning approaches in Brazilian cities? In the Brazilian case, despite implementation challenges and the distance between theory and practice, a transformation of governance discourses and practices within Brazilian planning based on the social function of property and the right to the city is occurring (Maricato, 2009), pointing to important lessons to be gained from applying the right to the city in Brazilian planning practice.

Author

• Abigail Friendly, University of Toronto