A gestão democrática do Conselho Municipal do Orçamento Participativo de Campina Grande-PB: impasses, desafios e avanços.

Abstract

In some municipalities of Brasil, the civil society can decide of the allowance of a certain part of the municipal budget, through representants who form the Participatory Budget. This dissertation presents the performance of the Municipal Counsel of Participatory Budget of Campina Grande-Paraiba (named CONSE), starting from the discussion of the theory of participative democracy and of the construction of the Brazilian democracy. The objectives that addressed the research were: (i) to analyze the performance of the CONSE, as a practice of local governance; (ii) to verify which type of relationship is established among the different social actors involved in the Participatory Budget process; (iii) to observe how these actors reelaborate their participation practices. In this way, we noted the CONSE as a space of negotiation of social demands between the government and the population that tries to reduce the consequences of the clientilist political practices. In this context, the CONSE appears as an institutional innovation, but it faces serious challenges concerning the elaboration of strategies of confrontation with the Executive, which does not accomplish on time the execution of the demands. In this respect, we believe that, on one side, the Participatory Budget of Campina Grande inaugurates a new practice of democratic administration, ruled through citizen participation; on the other side, considering the paradoxical context in which it is emerging, it is submerged with a series of impasses and challenges that hinder the process of execution of prioritized requests.