International Policy Diffusion and Participatory Budgeting: Ambassadors of Participation, International Institutions and Transnational Networks

275 Pages·2017·2.57 MB·English

by  Osmany Porto de Oliveira (auth.)

OSMANY PORTO DE OLIVEIRA
INTERNATIONAL POLICY
DIFFUSION AND
PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING
Ambassadors of Participation, International
Institutions and Transnational Networks
URBAN POLITICS IN
A GLOBAL SOCIETY
Urban Politics in a Global Society
Series Editors
Richard Stren
Department of Political Science
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Christopher Gore
Department of Politics &
Public Administration
Ryerson University
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
‘This is a pioneering study in the field. It raises the big questions of how ideas of
democratic participation spread, and why they “stick” or do not. We don’t have
anything comparable in the field of local government, urban planning or compara-
tive politics to rival the spread of this very specific “tool” of local participation.
The trend in urban studies internationally is to move from localized case studies
to comparative studies involving different cities and even countries, but this study
goes further with both comparative case studies in several continents, and the
description and analysis of a general process of diffusion.’
— Richard Stren,
Emeritus Professor of Political Science,
University of Toronto,Canada
Today, cities around the world house more than half of our global popu-
lation, and their size and economic power are growing. Nowhere is this
more evident than incities of the so-called “developing” areas of Latin
America, Africa, and Asia. In many countries of the global south, large
cities have already outstripped most northern cities in size, while the func-
tions and administrative powers of all cities—large, medium-sized, and
small—are growing as a result of decentralization, democratization, and
the initiatives of civil society and community groups at the local level.
These changes are uneven and almost always localized, but they highlight
the increasing importance of understanding the politics of cities and the
manners in which cities are taking their place globally among the major
nodal points in the international political system. Urban Politics in a
Global Society publishes well-researched and topical books that examine
the political aspects of cities and urban development from the vantage
points of political science, sociology, economics, geography, environment,
planning, and policy. The series focuses especially on cities in the global
south, and/or on populations from the global south living in cities in the
north. The series editors will also consider proposals that examine urban
politics or approaches to urban development in countries not considered
the global south, but where there are lessons, experiences or trends from
the global south that resonate or are applicable to cities in the north. The
series editors welcome comparative or single-country studies that address
a range of topics, including, but not limited to: urban reform; political
opposition or movements; housing and resettlement; health, sanitation
and infrastructure; migration, mobility and demographic transitions; pov-
erty and well-being; intergovernmental relations; electoral systems and
systems of representation and exclusion; public-private partnerships and
relations; financial assistance, investment and revenue generation; and
innovations in research strategies and method.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/15467
Osmany Porto de Oliveira
International Policy
Diffusion and
Participatory
Budgeting
Ambassadors of Participation, International
Institutions and Transnational Networks
sponsored by
The opinions, hypothesis and conclusions or recommendations
expressed in this material are of responsibility of the author
and don’t necessarily reflect the vision of FAPESP
Osmany Porto de Oliveira
Department of International Relations
Universidade Federal de São Paulo
Osasco, São Paulo, Brazil
Urban Politics in a Global Society
ISBN 978-3-319-43336-3 ISBN 978-3-319-43337-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-43337-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016954256
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This book is dedicated to my family,
for the support during these years of study and research.
F
oreword
Sometimes a young academic comes along and reminds us how excit-
ing research can be. Osmany Porto de Oliveira is just such an academic.
His text, International Policy Diffusion and Participatory Budgeting,
invites the reader to look at the process of policy diffusion in new and
more intergraded ways. By approaching the topic as a holistic enterprise,
International Policy Diffusion and Participatory Budgeting will make the
discussion of diffusion as a formulaic process nearly impossible. Osmany
has written a text that future generations of scholars are well advised to
read and follow in their own studies.
This text goes against the ever-increasing tendency to rely on statisti-
cal analysis within diffusion studies to illustrate the evermore common
S-shaped pattern of policy diffusion amongst localities and nations, either
voluntarily amongst advanced industrial nations or as a form of obligation
or coercion amongst less developed nations. By pulling us out of this narra-
tive, Osmany neatly and clearly demonstrates the importance of extensive
and high-quality qualitative research for merging macro- and micro-level
political processes that are occurring as ideas and policies diffuse across the
globe. His extensive use of multi-level interviewing and document analy-
sis presents a much more nuanced picture of the spread of participatory
budgeting across the globe than studies which rely on a more statistical
and quantitative analysis. More importantly by combining his qualita-
tive data to examine the role and interaction of agents and institutions at
the local, national and international level, International Policy Diffusion
and Participatory Budgeting offers a considerably more nuanced analysis
of participatory budgeting than any of the preceding studies, including
vii
viii FOREWORD
the highly commendable study by Jamie Peck and Nick Theodore, Fast
Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism (2015) or
Xiaojun Yan and Ge Xin’s 2016 article ‘Participatory policy making under
authoritarianism’.
Accessing international diffusion is no simple task. It means taking
huge strides to enter into uncommon places, characterized by multiple
interactions between actors from diverse geographies and cultures’. To
overcome these issues and produce his analysis Osmany completed over
120 interviews during a six-year period in which he travelled to a range
of places in the Americas, Europe and Africa. This allowed Osmany to
ascertain who the key actors and institutions were in the movement of
participatory budgeting within and across Brazil, South America, Europe
and subsequently Africa and the United States. This extensive process of
interview and document collection allowed Osmany to illustrate how key
actors worked both on their own and through regional, international and
transnational institutions and organizations to share information and ideas
related to participatory budgeting.
Just one of the factors making this text stand out as an exceptional
piece of research is the ability of Osmany to go beyond the all-to-often lip
service paid to the need to see diffusion in a wider context and in relation
to the networks of actors and governments. Osmany takes the reader on
a journey through the development of the range of different participatory
budgeting policies that have formed across the globe, illustrating where
and when one actor becomes more important than others or how they
move from one role and location to another across the local, national
and global interfaces. International Policy Diffusion and Participatory
Budgeting does not end here; it goes on to show how and when different
local, national and international institutions entered the process and how
they were fundamental for stimulating the co-operation necessary for the
spread of participatory budgeting. In other words the text focuses on “the
backstage of the globalization of public policies” where Brazil acted as the
initial laboratory from which others were able to borrow and adapt.
As anyone familiar with the diffusion literature will recognize, the pri-
mary focus tends to be on the Anglo-American English-speaking world.
Part of the uniqueness of this text is found in the fact that Osmany focuses
on a diffusion process that broke this pattern. Rather he focused on a dif-
fusion process primarily driven by the Francophone alliance of nations.
Or as Osmany states, “[i]t is possible to recognize that Europe and more
specifically the research of French academics was the locus of innovation
FOREWORD ix
in PB studies”. This is a refreshing new analysis, illustrating that once dif-
fusion studies expand beyond the Anglo-speaking world many new and
exciting findings will emerge.
Confirming the importance of Osmany’s analysis is the fact that it went
beyond diffusion to incorporate how the diffusion of participatory bud-
geting fits into the democratization literature. More specifically he dem-
onstrates how the diffusion of participatory budgeting is used to enhance
the spread of democratic innovations, even when used as democratic sub-
stitutes in more authoritarian regimes. Or as the old saying goes, while
nothing is the same across local and national borders everyone is capable
of borrowing. International Policy Diffusion and Participatory Budgeting
is a prefect example of how it is possible to engage in qualitative research
to provide a depth of analysis that has been disappearing in the era of
quantitative meta-analysis. Everyone should take note of this rising star.
David Dolowitz
Department of Politics
University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
Note
1. Adapted version of this work was also published in Portuguese with
the title Ambassadors of Participation: The International Diffusion
of Participatory Budgeting by Editor Annablume, 2016.
reFereNces
Peck, J., & Theodore, N. (2015). Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the
Thresholds of Neoliberalism. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Yan, X., & Xin, G. (2016). Participatory Policy Making under Authoritarianism:
The Pathways of Local Budgetary Reform in the People’s Republic of China.
Policy & Politics, 44(2), 215–234.
A
ckNowledgemeNts
Policy Diffusion and Participatory Budgeting1 is a continuation from Le
transfert d’un modele de démocratie participative, a book published in
2010 in France as a result of my Master’s dissertation. This work is the
fruition of a long-term piece of research work for my doctorate carried
out for the University of São Paulo and the Institut des Hautes Études
de l’Amérique Latine (IHEAL), of the University Sorbonne Novelle in
France. The idea to investigate the international diffusion of Participatory
Budgeting goes back to the time I lived in France. There I was surprised to
learn that in Saint-Denis, a city on the outskirts of Paris, there was a policy
of participation stemming from Brazil, namely, Participatory Budgeting
from Porto Alegre. At that moment this was for me something unheard
of, as I did not know of any Brazilian public policies that were imple-
mented in Europe.
In that era there was almost nothing written about the international
diffusion of Participatory Budgeting. It was exactly because of this that
creativity was needed to construct my study. I prepared a transnational
field research project. From then onwards I travelled to different places
in the Americas, Europe and Africa conducting interviews, photograph-
ing, collecting documents, leaflets, newspaper clippings, bulletins, fold-
ers and various papers on Participatory Budgeting. I accumulated more
than 120 interviews, a fistful of Gigabytes in my computer and several
boxes of archives. I followed the tracks of the international trajectory of
Participatory Budgeting in the great hope to understand its journey and
explain its movement. Conducting research of this type is challenging as
xi