Bootstrapping public participation in the global south : participatory budgeting reforms in Brazil, China and South Africa

Abstract

Institutional innovation is important for human development. It engendered new opportunities for people of different backgrounds to reflect on the institutional development and strive to push forward its progress. Among these innovations, participatory institutions offered people the chance to work with government officials and ruling elites in state-sanctioned policy making venues. In this process, depending on how the participatory institutions are designed, various relationships between government and citizens are forged, so as their mutual learning and understanding through consultation and discussion.

Taking participatory budgeting as an example, this thesis studied participatory budgeting practices in the local communities of three developing countries: Brazil, China and South Africa. It argued that the party politics of a specific country determines the choice of a particular mode of participatory mechanism. In Brazil, the multi-party system is practiced and the national ruling party is corrupted with clientelism and patrimonialism. With the aim to gain an electoral advantage in the mayoral election of Porto Alegre, the Workers’ Party promoted citizen participation as its signature manifesto to fight against the party in power. The participatory reform in Brazil is broad and deep in terms of inclusiveness and the citizens’ decision making power. In Wenling of China, the Chinese Communist Party’s one-party rule gave rise to a myriad of social problems. To address the acute tension between different social groups and between government and citizens, the party decided to adopt ad hoc citizen consultation forums. The consensus and reconciliation reached at the forums has largely resolved the conflicts. The participatory mechanism in China is ad hoc but effective. South Africa adopted the one-party-dominant system with the African National Congress (ANC) party dominating the national and various levels of local governments. To readjust the imbalanced resource allocation inherited from the previous apartheid regime, along with pressures from the society for a more inclusive democracy, the ANC established ward committees to facilitate community-level participatory budgeting. However, since the committees were firmly controlled by the ANC due to the electoral system, budgetary decisions were made usually without considering feedbacks from the general public. In a broad sense, the finding of this research and the explanatory framework bridged the literature gaps of the underexplored relationship between party politics and institutional innovation, the lack of comparative study of cross-continental cases of participatory reforms and insufficient exploration of participatory reforms in authoritarian states. In a narrow sense, it provided a novel perspective – party politics to explain the emergence of participatory budgeting in different countries.