The promise of participation, the practice of power: an ethnographic study of participatory institutions in Santo Andre, Sao Paulo

Submission note: A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the School of Sociology and Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University, Bundoora.

This thesis is an ethnographic study of participatory institutions in Santo André, Sao Paulo. Projects of citizen participation implemented by Brazilian local governments have received enormous popular and academic attention since the mid-1990s. In the main, studies of these institutions have been motivated by a normative interest that has sought to reveal how they work and the extent to which they live up to democratic ideals of deliberation and active participation. This thesis takes another approach. It reframes participation as a problem of social power that is inexorably bound up with the everyday forms and functions of municipal government. Inspired by recent studies in political anthropology, it argues that citizen participation is crafted through sets of social and organisational practices that tend to reproduce patterns of social behaviour that can either hinder or support the involvement of the lay public in government policy and investment decision making. The thesis is based on 16 months of participant-observation of the institutions and in-depth interviews with their members and other relevant social and political actors. It comparatively analyses three institutions developed by the same local administration: the participatory budget and two management councils for public policy. The substantive analysis begins with the study of the induction ritual, which provides participants with cognitive and behavioural cues for future behaviour. The three institutions are then comparatively studied. It is noted that each of the institutions draws upon a shared organisational form, that of the public meeting. However, as the participatory institutions address different policy and investment issues, are designed in different ways, have different casts of characters, and may be smaller or larger, they each produce distinct patterns of social behaviour. Drawing on interview data, the thesis analyses how non-institutional roles, and previously acquired ideologies and strategies affect participants’ interpretations of what transpires in the three institutions, and their own conduct within them. The participatory assembly is conceived as a ‘front stage’, from which much messy realpolitik is concealed. Finally, tentative suggestions for change are made based on the foregoing argumentation.