International Seminar

THE FUTURE OF PARTICIPATIVE DEMOCRACY:

CONTROL TECHNIC OR POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY
Porto Alegre, RS – Brasil
October 25, 26 and 27, 2007

SISTEMATIZATION OF THE THEMATIC TABLES

Objectives of the Seminary

a. To analyze and discuss the places of the State and the popular classes in the urban
context of the 21st century.
b. To evaluate the limits and possibilities of the following experiences, based on the
current state of art:
- Participatory Budgeting;
- Communitarian Outsourcing;
- Sector Councils.
c. To provide a space for analysis presentation and discussion of actual alternatives for
participative democracy as emancipation and social transformation.
d. To offer principles and suggestions to build a movement network, engaging grassroots
activists of the experiences of participative democracy around the world.

Systematization methodology
According to the directions given at the Final Table of the Seminar, Ong Cidade’s team based on
the writings of the Relaters of each Thematic Table, presents to those enrolled in the Seminar
the synthesis of the observations and propositions that were raised by the panelists and also by
the audience.

Returning of the observations and remarks

30 days after receiving the Systematization.

Attachments
Folder and panelists list of the International Seminar.
The speeches and papers of the panelists.
A list of al people enrolled in the International Seminar.
SYSTEMATIZATION OF THE THEMATIC TABLES

Thematic Table of October 26 – 9 a.m

Participatory Budgeting and Income Distribution – Panelists: Adalmir Marquetti,
Paulo Muzell, Geraldo Adriano de Campos e Ubiratan de Souza

1. Reflections:
- Potentialities of Participative Democracy: to discuss and define how to use the profits of state
owned companies, such as Petrobrás.
- To democratize the administration of Banco Central (Central Bank) in a way that would make
it possible to define the macro economic policies of the countries.
- The notion of Partnership decreases the possibilities of social transformation because it takes
the conflict off the political sphere.
- Urban Planning must also be a mechanism of income distribution.

2. Future:
- To guarantee mechanisms to ensure effective participation of women, African descendents
and minorities such as homosexuals, people who live on the streets, disabled people and
others.
- There is a need to quit with the leader’s logic and to build horizontal relations.
- To give value to the affective dimension of the democratic experiences because it can break
the capitalist logic, because it questions the identities pre-determined by capitalism.
- To include technological resources in the participative organization.

Thematic Table of October 26 – 2 p.m

The insurgent architect and the privatization of the Urban Experience
Panelists: João Rovati, Anne Latendresse, Leandro Andrade

1. Reflections:
- Popular and social movements must be strong and keep the pressure over any government,
be it from the left or from the right.
2. Future:
- To reinforce women’s participation with the implementation of specific policies.
- To establish movements that won’t act only in the state-institutional spheres and that aren’t
directly related to political parties.
- To reinforce the citizen perspective and not the political-partisan perspective of the popular
practices.
Thematic Table of October 26 – 2 p.m
Political Training and Social Emancipation: which tools, for whom and what for
- Panelists: José Clovis de Azevedo, Gerardo Bacalini, Ernesto Morales

1. Reflections:
- The community must have influence on the educational policy.
- To democratize the school means to have access, permanence, administration and access to
knowledge to ensure learning.
- The education must dialogue with the life contexts.
- School administration must be participative and guarantee knowledge for everyone.
- Not to treat knowledge in a fragmented way.
- The schools must receive the surrounding communities and incorporate their daily life and
their culture in the school curriculum.
- Political training and social participation must be aggregated and complementary actions in
order to cause a higher impact.
- Understanding and management of the territorial space by the organized community is a
fundamental strategic basis.
- To have popular interest as a reference.
- To understand the conflict as an opportunity for each of us to change, not avoiding it but to
discuss and debate.
- To have self-management (awareness rising) and co-management (relationship between the
organized community and the State) as tools to strengthen social participation.
- The Participatory Budgeting (PB) must be a strategy not an end by itself.
- To overcome the too economicist centrality of the PB.
- Participation needs to create a general dispute process, to generate alternative power.
- To build the collective subject.
- To react to the process of introducing the culture of market values in school.

2. Future:
- To listen to the other person to advance together.
- To look for new and authentically education processes as a strategy for local development.
- To build from bottom up. To recognize the ideology of the people’s necessities.
- To resist by seeking a civic, solidary and democratic education.
- To improve the political training of the communitarian leaders.
- To recover the principles of popular education.
- To reorient the power relations. To start with small experiences to strengthen the social
movements.
- To have a communitarian plan, to have strategies (political process and educational process).
- To build and to develop an organization methodology (in political, technical and citizen levels).
- To ensure interchange in the spaces of communitarian power.
- To rescue the participative culture.
- To perceive the PB as a solidarity exercise.
- To keep processes of permanent self-evaluation.
- To transform the PB in a broader political project.
- To guarantee clear processes.
- We will not conform, we will not abide. The future is built beginning with the practice.

Thematic Table of October 27 – 9 a.m.

Trenches war: Sector Councils and Communitarian Outsourcing
– Panelists: Isabela Valença, Adolfo Castillo e Sérgio Baierle. Moderator: Teresa
Melgar

1. Reflections:
- Citizenship is cornered, with poverty administration and merchandizing of the social
movements.
- There is no wealth redistribution even with the acquired citizenship.
- Participation brings responsibilities for those who are acting, but they have neither political
power nor improvement in quality of life.
2. Future:
- To publish systematized data about income distribution in Brazil.
- To politicize the partnership relations that happen between the State and the popular
organizations of the society.
- To strengthen society’s Forums and Networks to fortify the movements and the participation
of the people inside them.
- To politicize the relations of the NGOs with governments to break with the patronizing logic.

Thematic Table of October 27 – 9 a.m.

Public Opinion, Information Technologies, Communication and Direct Democracy
– Panelists: Araam, Hilary Wainwright

1. Reflections:
- Word has been loosing its value.
- Virtual history has been occupying more and more space, we don’t know what happens in our
city, but wee know what happens on the other side of the world.
- To see each other with our own eyes.
- To have civil society as knowledge source.
- To democratize public space.
- To serve the community and not to be served by it.
- To break paradigms.
- To ensure the right of hope.
- To disrupt the fatalist imaginary.
- To rescue pluralism.
- To regain solidarity.
- To recover self esteem.
- To discuss the ideas.
- To give access to education not only to alphabetization.
- There is the need of producing our own information to confront the hegemonic production.
- To analyze conflicts and arguments.
- To encourage creativity.
- To democratize the communication means.
- To use the media to make politics.
- To recover the thinking of the World Social Forum.
- To conquer massive means of communication.
- To rescue the cultural identity of the people.

2. Future:
- Constant mobilization to assure public spaces.
- To regain our memory and our language of social and popular movements to know where we
are going to.
- To cause the hidden processes of the big media to become viable.
- To create massive communication networks that will form citizens.
- To support alternative communication means.
- To strengthen those communitarian means of communication that really can serve the
communities.
- To broaden the communication discussion.
- To build information networks.
- To mobilize in favor of an auditing of the communication means, to inspect.
- To make alliances with other social movements to organize information and alternative media.
- To be alert for new alternative communication ways appearing in the cities outskirts.
- To speak and to make democracy all the time.
- To give a face to the human, to give a face to the social movements.
- To give voice and image to diversity.
- To give space for the new generations.
- We need to insert ourselves in our own country; we need to know each other and to
integrate.
Conclusion Table, October 27 – 2 p.m.

1. Reflections:
- To build a popular sovereignty network; sharing movements involving different actors.
- To build a projectable network: which development model to face neoliberalism.
- Network as methodological and conceptual interchange space bringing forth praxis.
- The main objective of this NETWORK MOVEMENT is to strengthen popular power and the local
participative democratic experiences.
- A network with real commitment.
- The network must be democratic being committed with the people.
- To build instruments of alternative media.
- To overcome the language paranoia, to guarantee the right of different thinking.
- To develop the popular sovereignty subject more deeply.
- To strengthen the autonomous spaces of civil society.
- To develop our own tools.
- To strengthen the democratic power source.
- To develop a discussion about principles.
- To build alliances based on principles.
- To be a tool of popular education.
- To use new technologies.
- To take information down.
- To use every day things in a shared manner.
- The challenge: to disrupt the PB itself – to turn the popular participation process radical.

2. Directions:
- Ong Cidade will act as the facilitator of the horizontal process of producing a MOVEMENT
NETWORK (or a WEB) that will articulate all participants of the International Seminar.
- Ong Cidade will act as the Network nucleus to give orientations and to receive everybody’s
contributions, to materialize them.
- To build a common agenda to support the Network.
- To create an idea interchange process.
- To open space for exchanges.
- To continue doing events from bottom up.
- To exchange innovative methodologies.
- To have more international meetings.
- To discuss a possible Network coordination.
- To seek financial support for the Network.
- To create a symbol for the Network.
- Each participant, after receiving the Systematization, will return observations, comments and
critics to everyone who is part of the Network. Besides, each person will bring two principles
and two obstacles of a Participative Democracy that seeks popular sovereignty.
- Possibility of linking the next meeting with the Agenda brought by Belem do Pará’s delegation:
International Seminar in March, 2008 and World Social Forum in the beginning of 2009, both in
Belém.