UNDERMINING PARTICIPATION MECHANISMS AND ATTACKS ON CIVIL SOCIETY

Despite being provided for in the Constitution at different stages of the public policy cycle, popular participation in the public administration has been systematically undermined. This weakening is leveraged  by authorities with hostile speeches against NGOs (labelled as  ‘cancer[igenous]’ and ‘Shiites’ by the president) and becomes real by decrees, ordinances and other regulations, which extinguish councils and working groups, change compositional frameworks and reduce or even eliminate seats for university and NGO representatives.

One of the first acts of President Jair Bolsonaro on January 1st 2021  was to issue an Emergency Decree allowing the Government Secretariat of Government to carry out the supervision and monitoring of the activities of international organizations and NGOs. Although the measure was hindered by the  strong social counter response, it has already signaled the type of relationship that the president seeks to establish with these civic actors. Another wide-ranging formal measure taken by Bolsonaro against the presence of civil society materialized in April 2019, by means of a decree extinguishing collegiate bodies from the federal public administration that were not established by law. At least 734 spaces for participation were affected. Among the bodies struck by these formal measures, we can mention:

• National Council for Drug Policies
• National Mechanism of Prevention and Fight against Torture
• National Council for Labor
• Committee on Basic Education
• National Council for the Rights of the Child and the Adolescent
• National Council for the Promotion of Racial Equality
• Collegiate bodies for the promotion of gender equality, diversity and inclusion
• National Council for the Environment
• National Biodiversity Commission

Constitutional provision

The Brazilian democratization process after 20 years of military dictatorship was marked by intense social mobilization with the ‘Diretas Já’ (‘Direct Elections Now’) campaign and also by demands from civil society, who fought to partake in the constitution-making process. The 1988 Brazilian Constitution is seminal as it inaugurated the democratic period. struggled to guarantee its participation in the process of writing the Constitution that inaugurated the democratic period. LAUT researcher Natália Neris explains that due to these actors’ political mobilization the Constituent Assembly incorporated mechanisms of popular participation. Among these mechanisms, we can mention: the holding of public hearings, the creation of popular amendments, and the possibility for social movements to forward suggestions for the then emerging constitutional text.

The 1988 Constitution foresees:

• In article 14, item III, the ‘popular initiative’ as one of the ways of exercising popular sovereignty.
• In article 29, item XII, the ‘cooperation of representative associations in municipal planning’.
• In article 193 that the State actions included in the planning of social policies must count on the ‘participation of society in the processes of formulation, monitoring, control, and evaluation of these policies’.
• In article 204 that government actions in the field of social assistance must have as one of their guidelines the ‘participation of the population, through representative organizations, in the formulation of policies and in the control of actions at all [administrative] levels’.

Contrary to these recommendations, the formal and informal measures registered in the timeline below undermine mechanisms for popular participation in public administration.