public administration and development

Public Admin. Dev. 26, 253263 (2006) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/pad.400

PUBLIC POLICY MANAGEMENT COUNCILS IN BRAZIL: HOW FAR DOES INSTITUTIONALISED PARTICIPATION REACH?
J. BARTH*
Centre for Financial and Management Studies (CeFiMS) University of London, UK

SUMMARY During the past two decades, Brazil has experienced a wide range of new participatory management instruments. One of the most important are the so called public policy management councils, composed of governmental and non-governmental members, which have been implemented mainly in social sectors in order to discuss and develop public policies as well as to decide on the allocation of public funds. The practice shows that several structural factors still limit the potential of such a form of institutionalised participation. The most innovative result is without doubt the contribution towards transforming political culture, a prerequisite for the success of the ongoing democratisation process in most of the Latin American countries. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

key words participation; public administration; management; Brazil; democratisation; decentralisation; civil society; public councils

INTRODUCTION With the end of the military regime in 1985, Brazil initiated a process of democratisation characterised by a high level of social mobilisation throughout society and signicant reforms of the federal system, whereby local governments gained considerable autonomy and responsibilities. Participation became an essential element in the new Constitution of 1988 and appropriate laws were enacted in order to constitute participatory mechanisms in the public sector. As a main instrument so called public policy management councils,1 composed of governmental and non-governmental members, have been implemented mainly in social sectors in order to discuss and develop public policies as well as to decide on the allocation of public funds. This new form of institutionalised participation is considered as important to reduce corruption and clientilistic structures and to improve the effectiveness and efciency of public policies. The results obtained to date show that expectations have to be adjusted as several structural limitations still hinder such forms of participation to develop their inherent potential. PARTICIPATION: AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT OF DEMOCRATISATION AND DECENTRALISATION PROCESSES Analysing political regimes and political transformation processes always requires reection on the central issue of the role and nature of the state and how the relationship between state and society is designed. In the last 30 years,

Andre s Aybar Castelleanos, 161/apt.602, La Esperilla, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. *Correspondence to: J. Barth, Av. Jose E-mail: jubarth@terra.com.br 1 ticas pu blicas. I will use the denomination, which is most used in Brazilian literature for this kind of council: conselho gestor de pol Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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most Latin American countries have passed through the so-called third wave of democratisation (from 1974 onwards) and changed from authoritarian regimes to partially democratic or liberal democratic regimes (Potter et al., 1997). Even when the characteristics of the democratisation processes vary between the countries, participation is always a central issue. Participation will be dened as the degree of active involvement of a person in the denition and decision process of a group (or in political terms: society) about its objectives and their implementation. Liberal versus participatory democracy In transition processes different concepts of democracy, advocated by different groups in society, are proposed and disputed. In practice, political reforms are mainly guided by the concept of liberal democracy. More progressive social actors criticise the concept as limited as it does not affect the underlying power relations and inequalities within a society, established throughout history (Held, 1993). The advocates of participatory democracy defend a much more comprehensive form of democracy which allows the involvement of most of the people in political life and which expands the sphere of democratic accountability beyond government and state. People are not passive, but assume an active role as makers and shapers (Cornwell and Gaventa, 2000). Citizenship participation thus dened, broadens the agenda around which people can mobilise and make demands. The new quality is that, as citizens, people can exercise their right to propose or oppose social policies that affect them. They may create their own spaces and enact their own strategies for change. Consequently, the local becomes the place that provides most opportunities for state and citizens to evolve new and participatory forms of governance. Decentralisation, good governance and civil society Arguments in favour of democratisation are closely linked with those in favour of decentralisation. In the last two decades, national governments have not only been criticised because of their authoritarian style, but also as being inefcient and ineffective in solving the increasing social inequalities. Decentralised structures should therefore enhance political education, development of political leadership, political stability, more equality, accountability and responsiveness of governments (Turner and Hulme, 1997). These arguments t partly with the approach of New Public Management (NPM), which focuses on greater efciency and effectiveness of public administrations. The causality between decentralisation, improved and effective participation and effective social policies that may contribute towards more social justice have not yet been clearly demonstrated. Experience has shown that social changes are much more complex and depend on different factors, which are economically, socially, culturally and politically determined. Nevertheless, nowadays special attention is given to local governance and local governments as they are considered to have greater capacity for responsiveness and representativeness. The position taken by the state is a crucial element for the success of participatory mechanisms. Participatory local governance needs to be based on new forms of relationships and trust has to be built between the government and the people. Recognising that in most societies the relationship between state and society has been conictive, at least for the more excluded parts of the population, the challenge is, how to establish rules and mechanisms that will make this concept work. Great emphasis is given to the role and potential of certain social actors to bring about democratic social change. Civil Society has become a concept of growing importance in this context. Walzer (1995, p. 7) denes civil society in a broad sense as a space of uncoerced human association which lled by a set of rational networks, formed for the sake of family, faith, interests and ideology. There are differences between countries in terms of the number and vitality of such associations and relational networks, as well as the social forces that can facilitate or obstruct democratisation processes. The strength and active role of organised civil society is mostly seen as crucial and an essential condition for successful democratisation processes. Another important issue to be analysed is political culture. In many Latin American countries patrimonial and clientilistic features have prevailed for centuries and such a relationship between state representatives and citizens hinder the effective implementation of participatory procedures. Changing the existing political culture is one of the major future challenges to consolidate the ongoing democratisation processes. Probably in each circumstance
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there is a different net of complex relations among the different stakeholders, which has to be analysed carefully in order to identify the positive and relevant forces for change. The scope of local governance and participation is also restricted by the chosen form of decentralisation: devolution, deconcentration or privatisation (Turner and Hulme, 1997). The analysis of the relations between the different levels of government is important in order to see what are the possibilities and constraints of local government to implement more participatory policies and procedures. Insufcient nancial resources and political autonomy for the local governments, as well as power disputes between the different levels of governments may form important constraints. At the same time, central government may have a positive inuence on local governance beside the traditional transfer of resources and political powers. For instance, they may make legal provisions for more participatory mechanisms in local governance, as illustrated by the examples of the Philippines, India, Brazil and Bolivia.2 But legal provision may not be sufcient, because the main difculties encountered are the unwillingness of central governments to relinquish power, and the weakness of newly established institutions of local governance (Heller, 2001). The transfer of responsibilities and resources requires capable local administrations, which in most cases have to undergo major institutional changes to prepare for the new tasks. This requires appropriate training and capacity-building. To sum up, effective participation of citizen is a key issue for the consolidation of democratisation as well as for the decentralisation process in Latin American countries. The existence of formal representative democracies is seen as insufcient since the formulation and implementation of public policies need to be based on more equal power relations, where it is possible that people become citizens who have rights and duties. Only with a new political culture may the newly created spaces and institutionalised mechanisms of participation be successful nwa lder, 1997; Schneider, 1999). This argument will be tested in the next chapters about the Brazilian case. (Scho BRAZIL: RECENT CHANGES IN THE RELATION BETWEEN STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY Brazil began its transition to democracy in the beginning of the 1980s, opening up softly the military regime established in 1964. The decade was characterised by the formation of new political parties, a signicant mobilisation of civil society, and an accelerated decentralisation process. Some of the most important results were the new constitution and the rst free municipal elections in 1988. Democratisationredening the power relations Throughout its history Brazil has been marked by an oligarchic conception of politics where private interests have taken precedence over public interests. Several authors and intellectuals refer to this phenomenon as the privatization of the State, as the State mainly serves to satisfy the interests of the powerful and dominant classes. Representative democracy has been established by the Constitution, but many social actors are advocating going further in order to tackle the social inequalities in Brazil. Participatory democracy is seen as the possibility not only to defend or guarantee its own citizen rights, but as the possibility for every citizen to play an active role through participating in the denition and implementation of these rights. Furthermore, the concept of citizenship as a right to have rights serves to reorganise social relations within civil society itself, founding more egalitarian forms of sociability (Chaves et al., 1999). The creation of new public spheres, where debate, negotiation and deliberation are possible without being controlled or co-opted by the State, is dened as a necessary condition for developing the capacity to participate effectively in public decision-making processes. The new social movements play a signicant role in the democratisation process as they have decisively affected the political debate on the nature of the democratisation process and of its scope. The different social movements had already experienced participatory procedures and in the constitutional process people all over the country started to get organised in public forums and to discuss the content of the Constitution. As one result
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, 1998. For the Philippines see Villarin, 1999; for India see Datta and Sen, 2000; for Bolivia see Blackburn and Toma Public Admin. Dev. 26, 253263 (2006)

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of these discussions and political mobilisation, different new forms of participatory decision-making, which directly involve State representatives and society, have been implemented in the 1990s. It may be concluded that the 1990s were characterised by a plural and active society in which, under the impact of the neo-liberal adjustment, the main debate revolves around different visions of democracy and citizenship, and on the attempt by civil society to consolidate the participation channels opened by democratisation. Participation has become a widely acknowledged concept, but there exist different underlying political objectives, which create a certain dilemma for the implementation of the democratisation process (Dagnino, 2003). Social participation is not always related to the democratisation of the State, to the strengthening of civil society and to the sharing of power between them. Depending on the forces and on the political projects involved, social participation may also simply be used to legitimate a mere decentralisation of tasks, the unburdening of the States expenditure and the co-optation of social organisations by the State. Decentralisation and participation Participation has also been a crucial element in the discussion and accelerated process of decentralisation that began by the end of the 1980s. What makes Brazil special is the fact that the design of decentralisation was the result of political negotiation during the constitutional process and not, as in many other countries, a policy adopted by central government. Two main arguments are used by different social actors in favour of decentralisation. One is linked with the democratisation objectives. As a reaction to the experiences of authoritarian regimes in the past, signicant political pressure has been exerted to transform the model of decentralisation into one of devolution, characterised by the broad autonomy of the different levels of government. The second argument is linked to the role of the national government, which has been harshly criticised because of its inefciency and ineffectiveness to deal with the problems of social inequality and the rising poverty in the country. Decentralisation is advocated as the remedy to improve the efciency of public administrations and their openness to citizens need. The political and scal decentralisation in Brazil has been signicant. First of all, municipalities became legally an independent political unit in the 1988 Constitution. Due to facilitated procedures and nancial advantages, the number of municipalities has increased signicantly since 1988, reaching 5561 municipalities in 2000 (IBGE, 2000). Brazil nowadays has a very high percentage of small municipalities that are confronted with serious problems in managing their increasing responsibilities. 24.85% of all municipalities have less than 5000 inhabitants and 23.52% between 5000 and 10 000 inhabitants. Only 4.05% of the municipalities have more than 100 000 inhabitants (IBGE, 2000). Nowadays the federal government has a share of about 52% in the overall public revenues, rio de Financ the states about 32% and the municipalities about 16% (Ministe as, 2000). But, as many of the municipalities did not develop their capacity to levy their own taxes, they are highly dependent on intergovernmental transfers (Samuels, 2000). The results of the decentralisation of resources and responsibilities in the area of social policies have been diverse and often contradictory. As all three levels of government have political autonomy, the decentralisation of social policies depends very much on the willingness of the respective government level to assume future responsibilities. Intra-governmental relations have always been conictive and policies are implemented as a result of political compromise and bargaining between the competing political forces and political projects. The fact that local governments have gained signicant political inuence does not necessarily mean that the performance of the local administrations improved. Effective public management and service delivery is still a weak point of a large number of Brazilian local administrations. Citizen participation takes place in this complex eld where the relations between the three levels of governments are mostly conictive and are negotiated politically. There are several challenges. The formulation of public policies is not only concerned with the development of legal frameworks, which allow establishing new policies. Also the relationships between social actors have to be clearly dened in order to guarantee quality, transparency and accountability of public action and public policies.
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THE PUBLIC POLICY MANAGEMENT COUNCILS Participation of citizens is clearly established by the 1988 Constitution, which denes explicitly in article 198, 204 and 206 that social sectors, such as health, social services and education have to establish participatory systems and mechanisms in order to formulate public policies and manage the allocation of resources. In practice, participation is also strongly encouraged by the federal government. Based on the new legal framework, the government has directly linked the transfer of nancial resources to the establishment of participatory mechanism at the state and municipal level. Consequently, the 1990s saw a mushrooming of councils all over the country. In 1999 about 25 859 municipal councils existed, an average of about 488 councils in each of the total of 5506 municipalities (Braemaeker, 2001, p. 9). The highest representation we nd in the sector of health (98.5%), social services (91.5%), education (91.0%), the rights of children and adolescents (71.7%) and work and employment (30.3%). In sectors where participation is not mandatory, the number of councils is signicantly less. The Public Policy Management Councils (PPMC) are the most comprehensive form of institutionalised participation. They have a legally guaranteed plural composition, deliberative nature and legal competence to formulate blica) citizens can ask the Ofce of the o Civil Pu and control public policies. Through civil public action (Ac a rio Pu blico) to act legally when the correct functioning of the councils is at risk. Several Public Prosecutor (Ministe Brazilian authors speak about a new institutionality, as the councils give society access to the State apparatus and try to create new agendas and criteria for governmental actions. After more than one decade of experiences, discussions started about the extent to which the high expectations have been fullled and whether the real dynamic of the councils allowed the innovative principles to be translated into innovative political practices. Since the councils are inserted in the broader socio-economic context of the country, their effectiveness is highly inuenced by external factors, such as local power relations or macroeconomic policies. The expenditures for social policies have been expanded when sufcient budget resources were available and scal restrictions were low, but they have been cut when the nancial situation of the public sector worsened. This contributed to quite a conictive situation between the different levels of government over the ongoing decentralisation process, where local government units had to assume more responsibilities but did not have enough nancial resources to fulll them. Another factor that probably inuenced the effectiveness of the PPMCs is that social movement started a demobilisation process for several reasons. Main elements of functioning In general the composition of the councils follow the principle of parity and are always composed of representatives of government and civil society. The councils are always established by law and their procedures are individually dened by the respective internal regulations. Therefore there is no complete conformity in the design of the councils. Details often are negotiated in the specic local context between the different stakeholders, but they always have to follow the principles set up by the Constitution and federal laws. Mostly, the mandate of the councils is 2 years. The government representatives are nominated by their institutions and the representatives of civil society in most cases are nominated or elected by civil society. The councils are at the centre of a broader management system (see Figure 1) of decentralised public policies. A special fund is always established as a complement of the councils that receives public revenues from different sources. To get access to nancial resources from upper levels of government, municipalities have to fulll the criteria for decentralised management in the respective sector. This means they have at least to establish a council and a fund, which have to receive the proper resources through the normal budget procedure. The responsibility for the management of the system lies with the respective government unit, at all levels of government. The main tasks are the elaboration of a mid-term plan that denes the priorities, goals and nancial sources for the sector. As the government normally chairs the councils, it is also responsible for the preparation of the regular meetings, preparation of the agenda and elaboration of the annual accounts, among others. They should also develop a monitoring system for the activities and use of resources.
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Figure 1. Social assistance: decentralised structure for policy implementation.

Another component is broader thematic meetings, or general assemblies which are held every 1 or 2 years and where a broad scope of people and organisations participate. Often they provide the political space to elect the representatives of civil society, who do the work on a voluntarily basis and are not remunerated. Potentials and limitations Several internal as well as external factors have inuenced the capacity of the councils to assume their legal responsibilities. They are still in a period of consolidation, due to the fact that their legal creation has been very time consuming. Draibe (1998, p. 6) notes that the establishment of the National Councils took in average between 3 to 4 years. Advances depend very much on a propitious political environment, which includes the political will of government, the political culture and the kind of existing local power relations. The potential of the councils is also inuenced by the wider social and economic context. In the following chapters three broader issues will be analysed, which are seen as strategic for the effectiveness of the councils. Representation concentrates on the question if different interests and needs are effectively represented in the councils. Negotiation is concerned with the dynamics of power relations in the functioning of the councils and deliberation is about the results the councils have obtained in the area of policy formulation and allocation of nancial resources.
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Representation One of the principles strongly advocated by the social movements was the parity in the composition of the councils. Practice shows that in implementation numerical equality is not sufcient to guarantee equilibrium in the decision making process. Representation is always linked to legitimacy, which has to be continually rebuilt to allow representatives to really express the opinions and the proposals of their constituents. Representatives of civil society as well as from different government institutions in most cases have different interests and political proposals. The interests that bring the entities to dispute a council seat vary widely, as does the very notion of what participating in policy formulation means. Experiences in the area of social assistance show that there has been signicant disharmony in civil society, which can be attributed to various factors. One is the disintegration of civil society itself, as the example of the councils for social assistance show, where many entities are interested in capturing nancial resources to maintain their programs, as opposed to the organizations which represent the social movements, the worker class and others, who are more advanced in their understanding of the political concept of social assistance and therefore are working towards a more just and equal society (Martins, 2000, p. 89). Distinct political projects based on different understandings of what it means to participate in the formulation of public policy turn the heterogeneous eld of civil society into a highly fragmented one. Several authors call attention to the fact that often there is resistance by more politically oriented organisations to recognise the presence of other organisations as legitimate representatives of civil society (Silva, 1994; Paz, 2000). The main dispute is about who has legitimacy to represent civil society and its interests. The heterogeneous civil society faces the difcult challenge of maintaining the principle of legitimacy in favour of accepting less democratic groups that make their participation on the councils a condition for maintaining old privileges and old practices of negotiation with the State. Heterogeneity exists also among the State actors, as there are governments that may take more progressive attitudes. A second important issue is the nature of relationships between the representatives and their own organisations. Several case studies have pointed out that governmental representatives often have a very weak relationship with their agencies of origin. One of the reasons is that little priority and importance have been given by the respective governments to their participation in the councils. In this case, the representatives have little decision making power, which weakens the councils as they are unable to inuence the real decision making processes taking place in the public administration (Krueger, 1998). In the same way, weak relations between representatives of the civil society and their entities have been noted (Dagnino, 2002). Social organisations gain their legitimacy from the groups they represent; therefore a functioning and active exchange between both is essential. Some authors argue that the efforts undertaken to negotiate with the government end up consuming the movements energy and they are unable to maintain the link with their bases (Ferreira, 1997; Carvalho, 1998). The impressive number of councils functioning today often leads to overwork for some councillors, who end up serving on several councils at the same time. The challenge nowadays is how to invest in institutional space and, at the same time, create projects and proposals to mobilise society within such an adverse context. Costs and benets of participation are increasingly discussed. Several entities started to prioritise those councils that have a greater chance of transforming state agencies and producing effective policies As the councils have heterogeneous representation, the ability to build alliances around projects seems to be a necessary condition for lending efcacy to council actions and for broadening their democratising potential. Parity involves a constant dispute for hegemony inside the councils. This requires an adequate level of public visibility of the negotiating spaces and the existence of autonomous public spaces, where segments of society can formulate their positions towards public policies. Beside all the difculties of representation pointed out, the councils help to create, in a slow and discontinuous way, a new ethics of discourse based on the recognition of and respect for differences. It is possible to afrm that they are developing an important pedagogical function in constructing citizenship, as it is important to legitimise in practice those rights already legally conquered.
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The councils are conceptualised as spaces of political debate and deliberation and therefore they serve as an instrument of mediation in the relation between State and society (Gohn, 2001). The different stakeholders have to develop alliance-building skills in order to bring forward matters of interest. The negotiation process is signicantly inuenced by the nature of the existing power relations and the strong or weak positions of the parties involved. Several studies criticised the fact that there is a predominance of matters related to the internal organisation of the councils, practical items of service delivery or urgent demands. In dening the council agenda one has to be clear about the crucial question of what really is the role, what are the attributes of the council and what does it mean to formulate public policy. For some it meant to outline larger directives and dening investment priorities, others may have had a more restricted understanding and limited the role of the councils to responding effectively to the immediate needs of the population. For instance, the discussion in many health councils has shown that there can be different objectives between clients/consumers and the service providers, a dispute between longterm oriented strategic issues and operational issues related to existing needs of the clients of the social policy ger, 1998). A central condition is that civil society organisations has to be strong enough to (Silva, 1996; Kru impose their issues on the councils agenda, which depends on a strong organisation and mobilisation of their constituency. The results of negotiation depend very much on the position and exibility of the parties involved. Government has to demonstrate the political will to take the process of negotiation and its outcomes seriously. But in many cases, the refusal of the State to share power is reported as a major obstacle to the effective functioning of the councils (Costa, 1999; Vogel, 1995). At the municipal level the relationship between State and society may be even more difcult, as the interdependences and political interests are much sharper. If in theory, local governments are much closer to the needs of the population, at the same time social relations are very much inuenced by the interests of political parties or traditional clientelistic dependencies. Council members, who feel a certain fascination with power, may be co-opted. Case studies show that in conictive situations it may be important to have the capability to create alliances. Timelimited alliances are utilised by civil society as a strategy to confront the concentration of power of the Executive, as well as the mobilisation of the population in order to press certain decisions. Another point which creates inequalities in relations is the infra structural support of the councils. In practice we nd very diverse situations ranging from adequate support to very precarious conditions. In a sense the councils have become hostages to the governments, which can retaliate against decisions contrary to their interests by suspending their administrative support or evicting the councils. To be an equal partner in negotiation a councillor needs access to the relevant information and the capacity to formulate his or her own position and strategy. One of the major obstacles reported in the case studies is the lack of information and qualications of both governmental and non-governmental council members to intervene more actively in the policy formulation process. As representatives of the civil society work on a voluntary basis, they implicitly have less time to dedicate to participating in the councils. They often do not know enough about the role of the councillors, the dynamics and attributes of the councils, the functioning of the funds and procedures of the public administration. As a consequence, in the last few years several NGOs have started training programmes for councillors as well as for a broader audience. Deliberation It is difcult to evaluate the councils capacity to inuence the elaboration of public policies as well as the efcient application of the nancial resources available. Several studies point to the low capacity for innovation in public policy based on the participation of civil society on the councils, suggesting that this participation is more reactive than proposal making. But there are several structural factors that signicantly determine the existing potentials. The Brazilian public administration is characterised by a discontinuity of public programmes and administrative staff when governments change after elections. Often, new priorities are dened by the government in order to
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demonstrate difference from its predecessor. Such profound changes often create turbulences and make a longterm perspective and continuous policy development difcult. A second important structural factor is the institutional embeddedness of the councils. The absence of a clear delimitation of the functions of the councils in relation to the Executive has generated an overlapping of functions. This is a legal problemthe councils are not tied in a more organic way to the whole of the administrative or political machine, since the problems indicated earlier make state recognition of the councils difcult. As a result, it is difcult for the councils to nd their place in the public decision-making process and within the overall group of organs that make up the administrative apparatus. Another crucial issue is public budget procedures and their constraints. The councils normally decide about the application of funds, whose amounts have been previously dened, but not about how much will be allocated to the different sectors. The Executive manages the budget and presents the proposal to the councils for approval, but the ultimate instance of approval is the respective parliament. What will be really implemented is then up to the Executive. Often during the execution of the annual budget governments may cut down expenditures or delay allocation of funds due to nancial restrictions or diverging economic policy priorities. All these factors impose structural limitations that are beyond their inuence. Many statements point to the risk that council actions may reinforce the existing practice of removing responsibilities from government functions. Teixeira (2000, p. 113) adds to this scenario another important obstacle: the fragmentation of social policies. He states that with the neo liberal policy adopted by the federal government, they (social policies) become oriented towards the most problematic social situations and ght the most perverse impacts of economic policies. They have compensatory and emergency character, aiming more for welfare than for equity. ( . . . ) For every situation of social exclusion special programs are created, and generally, a council is established for every program. Considering the excess burden and diversity of tasks, these councils mostly only exist as a formality, and do not enable the effective participation of society in implementing the policy. As federal resources continue to be a signicant part of the funds available for social policies, the federal government continues to have great inuence on the lower government units. It is also an indicator that decentralisation of social policies is still at an early stage, and that the transfer of more funds to the lower government units may be converging with the interests of macroeconomic policies as well as the interest of each government to have instruments to make their action visible.

CONCLUSIONS The example of the PPMC in Brazil shows that effective pluralism and representation, disposition towards and capacity for negotiation and the ability to deliberate are interlinked factors, all of which have to be developed appropriately to make the participatory mechanism work. What became clear is that when the principles and prerequisites, as analysed above, are not fullled, the potential of the councils to democratise the relation between State and society remains limited. The political commitment of governments at all levels, a capable and well organised civil society, a long-term developmental perspectives of all stakeholders involved and sufcient nancial resources are essential. Representative and institutionalised forms of participation can and should not substitute other forms of citizens active involvement. They should be seen as a complement because of their specic nature, which is to mediate on a legal base between State and society. Why are we talking so much about the council today? We are speaking of the councils because today this is the model that was forged by us, it was what we managed to accumulate inside a historical process, and there is an entire history that has led to this. Will it be the denitive mode? I dont think so! It could be that ve years from now other forms of participation arise, and it could also be that our evaluation will be that this space is not worthwhile anymore, that experience will show that it has more limits than possibilities (non governmental councilor on the National Council for Social Assistance, cited in Raichelis, 1998, p. 179).
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For those, who emphasise changes in political culture as the most important expected impact and prerequisite for democratisation, the results are considered quite positive, as it is a process that has provided learning experiences, instituted new social control mechanisms and contributed to the reduction of the ad hoc criteria used by the state itself in administering public resources. For those who see the councils mainly as an instrument to make public management more efcient, the results obtained until now may be considered as less positive. But we have to be aware that the causes of inefcient management are complex and cannot be erased only by the broader participation of citizens. Institutional changes and a new prole of leadership and management procedures are necessary to make service delivery more effective. But this requires different measures to be taken by the management. It would be too simple to assume that the serious problems public administration is facing today may be resolved through participation. Participation is costly as citizens work on a voluntary basis and need to dedicate much time and efforts without any compensation. Under these conditions, they always have disadvantages compared with public servants, who have easy access to information and do the job during their normal working hours. The councils face the same limitations as any other form of representative democratic decision making, therefore expectations have to be adjusted to circumstances. In addition, the dominant macroeconomic policy of the federal government and the overall amount of nancial resources available are structural limitations for the councils functioning, but out of their control. To sum up, the experiences of the PPMC in Brazil made clear the most innovative result has been the contribution towards transforming political culture. These changes are reected in the increasing awareness and pressure for more transparency and accountability of public actions, an improved qualication of civil society to discuss policy issues, more public control and denunciation of misuse or corruption as well as changing attitudes of public sector managers towards the importance of peoples knowledge and contribution. Participatory procedures are not the solution for effective public management, but a valuable ingredient. The PPMC, like other forms of institutionalised participation, may be co-opted by the interests of the elites, but they have the potential to overcome traditional unequal power relations. Therefore they are worthwhile and necessary.
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