Between Collective Action and Individual Appropriation

• Author: Camille Goirand,Françoise Montambeault
• Published date: 01 March 2016
• Date: 01 March 2016
• DOI: 10.1177/0032329215617467
• Subject Matter: Articles

Politics & Society

2016, Vol. 44(1) 143 –171

© 2015 SAGE Publications

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329215617467

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Article

Between Collective Action

and Individual Appropriation:

The Informal Dimensions

of Participatory Budgeting

in Recife, Brazil

Françoise Montambeault

Université de Montréal, Montréal

Camille Goirand

Institut des Hautes Études de l’Amérique latine, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle: Paris 3, and Centre d’études et de

recherches administratives, politiques et sociales, Université Lille 2

Abstract

Examining the concept of clientelism in analysis of participatory processes, we

investigate how collective and individual action are articulated in practices in the case

of participatory budgeting (PB) in Recife, Brazil. We use ethnographic work to look

how collective actors mobilize within the PB process in Recife and show that PB’s

territorial and redistributive nature provides fertile ground for informal exchanges to

be entrenched in institutional processes at the micro level. Microsocial interactions

between political entrepreneurs, intermediaries, and ordinary participants in Recife

participatory practice are shaped by two processes: individualization of political

loyalties and territorialization of politics. These, we argue, allow informal exchanges

to coexist with institutionalized forms of collective action. PB presupposes that

participants engage in local struggles and introduces competition and inequalities

among them, as access to resources is conditioned by their ability to mobilize and

enter into informal interactions that underlie political exchanges within PB.

Keywords

clientelism, collective action, participatory budgeting, informal politics, Brazil

Corresponding Author:

Françoise Montambeault, Département de Science politique, Université de Montréal, Pavillon

Lionel-Groulx, C.P. 6128, succ. Centre-ville, Montréal, Québec, H3C 3J7, Canada.

Email: francoise.montambeault@umontreal.ca

617467PASXXX10.1177/0032329215617467Politics & SocietyMontambeault and Goirand

research-article2015

144 Politics & Society 44(1)

Following the well-known experience of Porto Alegre, as cities throughout Brazil

implemented participatory budgeting in the 1990s and 2000s, international organiza-

tions, experts, and politicians had high expectations for social change and the deepen-

ing of democratic practices. Participatory budgeting (PB) is a rule-based social

program with deliberative mechanisms for resource allocation to local communities. It

was conceived and implemented as a means to changing how citizens relate to the

local state. It required them to formulate demands collectively, and is generally

regarded as a path to social inclusion through participation and citizen-based decision

making about redistributive policies. More important, PB is understood by many as a

way to weaken political clientelism: that is, the direct relationship between unequal

individuals, the patron and the client, based on an exchange of political loyalty for

privileged access to material goods and resources.1 In short, PB is often seen as a

potential and effective means to empower civil society, foster transparency, and under-

mine clientelism at the local level.

Those high expectations rest on fragile ground. On the one hand, the redistributive

function of PB institutions entails an inherent paradox with respect to the mediation of

redistribution. On the other hand, participatory institutions at the local level in Brazil

are designed to organize the territorial distribution of municipal resources linked to

social policies and urban planning. Thus PB allows us to observe how collective action

may be associated with informal political exchanges. Such exchanges, often described

as clientelist, can prevail as a mode of interaction between citizens and politicians,

either during elections or within participatory mechanisms, but also in everyday life

interactions.2

Although conceived as a policy instrument for organizing redistribution on a uni-

versal and transparent basis, on which participants have equal chances to access

resources, in practice PB is quite different. In a context of competition over scarce

resources, access to public goods through PB is based on mobilization capacity and

informal intermediation. Delegates thus become participatory entrepreneurs who

mediate the relationship between their neighbors and the municipal administration. As

such, they negotiate their territory’s access to public goods allocated through PB,

resources on which their legitimacy as local entrepreneurs relies. The very territorial

and redistributive nature of PB provides a fertile ground for informal political

exchanges to be entrenched in formal institutional processes.3

Drawing on ethnographic work in the municipality of Recife (Brazil) in 2008 and

2010,4 this paper aims to make two contributions. First, unlike most of the literature

opposing clientelism to “good governance” and “democracy,5 this paper follows ana-

lytic avenues recently opened by a few scholars to revisit our understanding of clien-

telism.6 Clientelism, defined as a form of informal political exchange, may be

understood as a dynamic interaction taking shape in various institutional and political

contexts. As our case study reveals, unequal exchanges can adapt to institutional

change—such as participatory reforms—and can thus exist at the intersection of par-

ticipatory and representative institutions. Here, we understand informal politics as a

large range of political activities, interactions, and behaviors rooted in ordinary politi-

cal life and social activities, and situated out of institutionalized political spaces and