People’s Participation in Other Countries

No system is perfect. After 61 years it has become more than apparent that our system of governance is deeply flawed. We have followed a top-down centralized approach to governance which has proven to be inefficient, incompetent, and corrupt. Let us take a look at governance in other countries and see if there are lessons to be learned from them.

1. United States
2. Brazil
3. Canada
4. Switzerland

United States

• In the United States, decisions at the town level are taken by local citizens’ assemblies. Whether a particular project should be implemented or not, how are officials and government institutions performing – all these are discussed and decided by citizens’ assemblies in town halls. If local government plans to take up any project, each family receives a written notice before planning, before implementation begins and after implementation to seek public opinion. Even a footpath is not made without the written consent from each family living on that street. There are several interesting instances of people’s power. Walmart, the US chain of Departmental stores, wanted to set up shop in Oregon. However, the people of Oregon met in town hall and voted against it saying Walmart’s entry would lead to closing down of neighbourhood Pop and Mom stores and thus lead to unemployment. And Walmart could not set up shop in Oregon. In another town, there was a proposal to construct underground railways. This would have led to land acquisition from several people. People gathered in town hall and voted against the proposal and the project had to be scrapped.

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Brazil

• Brazil’s participatory budgeting exercise has become quite famous now. It was started by the Workers’ Party in the city of Porto Alegre in 1989. Participatory budgeting was a part of a number of innovative reform programs started in 1989 to overcome severe inequality in living standards amongst city residents. One third of the city’s residence lived in isolated slums at the city outskirts, lacking access to public amenities (water, sanitation, health care facilities, and schools).
  Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre occurs annually, starting with a series of neighborhood, regional, and citywide assemblies, where residents identify spending priorities and vote on which priorities to implement. Porto Alegre spends about 200 million dollars per year on construction and services; this money is subject to participatory budgeting. Around fifty thousand residents of Porto Alegre now take part in the participatory budgeting process (compared to 1.5 million city inhabitants), with the number of participants growing year on year since 1989. Participants are from diverse economic and political backgrounds.
  The outcomes have been stupendous. Since 1989, the Workers Party has won four consecutive municipal elections in Porto Alegre, which stands out against a record of well-known electoral failures of comparable leftist municipal administrations across Latin America. Its share of votes has also risen sharply, from 34% in 1988 to over 56% in the 1996 elections.
  An influential business journal has nominated Porto Alegre as the Brazilian city with the ‘best quality of life’ for the fourth consecutive time. A city in an indifferent financial state before 1989 because of de-industrialization, in-migration, indebtedness and poor revenue base, not only have these indicators been improved with major fiscal reforms between ’89-‘91, but it has witnessed some spectacular achievements in recent years, credit for which has largely been given to the participatory budget process.
  Between 1989 and 1996, the number of households with access to water services rose from 80% to 98%; percentage of the population served by the municipal sewage system rose from 46% to 85%; number of children enrolled in public schools doubled; in the poorer neighbourhoods, 30 kilometers of roads were paved annually since 1989; and because of transparency affecting motivation to pay taxes, revenue increased by nearly 50%. Over 80 Brazilian cities are now following the Porto Alegre ‘model’ of participatory budgeting.
  The Porto Alegre experiment also presents a strong example of democratic accountability, equity, and re-distributive justice, with the participation part guaranteeing legitimacy to decisions, and objective budgeting ensuring fairness in an otherwise arbitrary process of translating political decisions into distributed resource.
  The middle-class people who were skeptical of the ‘demagogy’ of the Worker’s Party in the early years, have now begun to actively participate partly after seeing that the city has been supportive of services that this class cherishes (like garbage collection and public spaces) lending a hand to a ‘trans-classist’ revival and pride in the city.
  A notable change in attitudes of technical staff, well-versed in matters of budgeting and engineering, has also been observed as a result of their increasing interface with lay citizens. Called a jump from ‘techno-bureaucracy to technodemocracy’, the technical staff has changed the way they communicate with the communities and have tried to make themselves understood in simple language. Overall, from a protest-based culture of the 80s, these participatory budget exercises have fostered a more ‘civil’ and less disruptive form of conflict resolution through dialogue and negotiations.
  Since its emergence in Porto Alegre, participatory budgeting has spread to hundreds of Latin American cities, and dozens of cities in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America. More than 200 municipalities are estimated to have initiated participatory budgeting.

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Canada

• Canada recently decided to increase direct people’s participation in governance. According to a Canadian website, this decision was taken by the Government because Canada is facing a crisis in civic engagement. Voter turnout rates, typically at 30-40% in municipal elections, have been falling steadily in provincial elections, and are among the lowest in all Western democracies at the federal level. Trust in government and political leaders has reached alarmingly low levels. And while citizen groups have demanded more opportunities for participation in decision-making, most initiatives for public participation in local governance are often merely consultative, and have not allowed for real, deliberative decision-making. Such initiatives may only create unmet expectations, and could even lead to greater voter apathy and distrust of government. This democratic deficit creates difficulties in addressing social exclusion, economic dislocation and environmental degradation, and in fostering citizenship in a multicultural, multi-ethnic context like Canada. These challenges however are collective in nature, and can only be addressed through collective action, the normal vehicle for which is government.

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Switzerland

• Switzerland is considered by many to be the most democratic country in the world. It is also one of the world's most successful nations in economic terms. The Swiss people have the highest per-capita incomes in the world, and Switzerland is consistently rated among the top ten nations in terms of quality of life.
  One of the most important factors in Switzerland’s social and political stability and economic success is its political institutions that have ensured that ordinary people have a voice in how they are governed and commendably balanced the views and interests of its multi-cultural people.
  Switzerland is divided into 26 areas called cantons. The cantons, in turn, are made up of about 3000 communes. The country is a three-tier federation; so citizens are subject to three legal jurisdictions: the commune, canton and federal levels. The 1848 federal constitution defines a system of direct democracy. The instruments of Swiss direct democracy at the federal level, known as civil rights, include the right to submit a constitutional initiative and a referendum, both of which may overturn parliamentary decisions.
  By calling a federal referendum, a group of citizens may challenge a law that has been passed by Parliament, if they can gather 50,000 signatures against the law within 100 days. If so, a national vote is scheduled where voters decide by a simple majority whether to accept or reject the law. Eight cantons together can also call a referendum on a federal law. Referendums on more than a dozen laws per year are not unusual in Switzerland. For the past century and a half, the Swiss electorate has given its opinion on over 534 federal bills, while also taking part in thousands of cantonal and local votes.
  Similarly, the federal constitutional initiative allows citizens to put a constitutional amendment to a national vote, if they can get 100,000 voters to sign the proposed amendment within 18 months. Parliament can supplement the proposed amendment with a counter-proposal, with voters having to indicate a preference on the ballot in case both proposals are accepted. Constitutional amendments, whether introduced by initiative or in Parliament, must be accepted by a double majority of both the national popular vote and a majority of the cantonal popular votes.
  A central or federal government links the cantons into one unified country, but this central government controls only those affairs which are of interest to all the cantons. These areas of federal government control include foreign policy, national defence, federal railways and the mint.
  All other issues – education, labour, economic and welfare policies and so on – are determined by the governments of the cantons and communes. Each canton has its own parliament and constitution and they differ substantially from one another. The communes, which vary in size from a few hundred to more than a million people, also have their own legislative and executive councils. The cantonal and communal governments are elected by the citizens resident in their areas of jurisdiction.
  The Swiss constitution may be changed only if an overall majority of the electorate agrees in a referendum and if the electorate of a majority of the cantons agrees, too. The latter is sometimes just a little more difficult because it means that the rather conservative electorate of smaller rural cantons must be convinced as well.

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