January 8, 2019

Democracy in the Twenty-first Century

Giovanni Allegretti

The initial framing of the research is the growing concern of national urban policies and its relationship with institutions of public participation. In the last decades, there has been an expansion of democracy and the emergence of new forms of society participation in the elaboration of public policies. The study draws attention to the need to understand certain contexts in the implementation of public policies where, although the policy theme is intrinsically linked to local, local authority is often only the executor of policies defined in other scales. Experiences of public participation that try to reduce this distance can tell much about how to bring society closer to the national government and help build democracy on multiple scales. From the context of urban politicization and institutionalization of public participation in Brazil and Portugal, the thesis analyzed public policy councils dealing with urban policies at the national level as the object of study. The central question is the relationship between the institutionality of public participation and the participatory public, that is, the individuals and groups of individuals who organize themselves around public issues for the implementation of their preferences, formed by mechanisms of face-to-face deliberation and freedom of expression and association. The objective of the thesis is to understand how the councils help the public in the elaboration of national urban policies. The research defined three analyzes: to understand the functioning of the institutional design of the councils; to identify the location of the councils in the process of elaboration of the national urban policies; and to understand the interaction between councilors and entities inside the councils to observe the performance of the public in the public policy councils. It was analyzed: in Brazil, the Council of Cities (ConCidades), linked to the Ministry of Cities; in Portugal, the National Council for Environment and Sustainable Development (CNADS), linked to the Ministry of Environment, and the Committee on Regional Development and Spatial Planning of the Economic and Social Council (CDROT-CES), linked to the Assembly of the Republic. Hermeneutics was chosen as an epistemic positioning, privileging the relation between the researcher and the object. It allows to understand the object in a subjective way. The result of the research was that it is necessary to have in mind the organization of the public during the institutionalization of the council as the council itself can also help in the formation of the public in the national scale. This raises a greater concern about the mechanisms of construction of social representation within the State.

KEYWORDS: public policy council; participative public; national urban policy; political agenda; Brazil; Portugal