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This was Wright's last major work. He describes the "institutional designs" of actual institutions that in his view prefigure socialism.
Chapter 1:
Instead of the city budget being formulated from the top down, suppose that a city was divided up into a number of neighborhoods, and each neighborhood had a participatory budget assembly. Suppose also that there were a number of city-wide budget assemblies on various themes of interest to the entire municipality – cultural festivals, for example, or public transportation. The mandate for the participatory budget assemblies is to formulate concrete budget proposals, particularly for infrastructure projects of one sort or another, and submit them to a city-wide budget council. Any resident of the city can participate in the assemblies and vote on the proposals. They function rather like New England town meetings, except that they meet regularly over several months so that there is ample opportunity for proposals to be formulated and modified before being subjected to ratification. After ratifying these neighborhood and thematic budgets, the assemblies choose delegates to participate in the city-wide budget council for a few months until a coherent, consolidated city budget is adopted.
This model is the reality in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil. Before it was instituted in 1989 few people would have thought that a participatory budget could work in a relatively poor city of more than one and a half million people in a country with weak democratic traditions, plagued by corruption and political patronage. It constitutes a form of direct, participatory democracy fundamentally at odds with the conventional way that social resources get allocated for alternative purposes in cities.
In Chapter 6 (around page 107), EOW endorses a standard set of distinctions within the category of "democracy": direct, representative, and associational. He worked with Archon Fung to describe "Empowered Direct Democracy", a variant of direct democracy he believes can handle decision making at the municipal scale at least. The Porto
Alegre participatory budgeting system is held forth as an example of EPG.
The system of participatory budgeting was instituted by the Worker’s Party (the PT), a Leftwing Socialist Party that unexpectedly won the election for Mayor in 1988 and adopted the Participatory Budget as a way of instituting a kind of “dual power” within city government. 6 Without going into details, the basic idea is that citizens meet in popular assemblies throughout the city to deliberate about how the city budget should be spent. Most of these assemblies are organized around geographical regions of the city; a few are organized around themes with a city-wide scope – like public transportation or culture. At the beginning of the budget cycle each year these assemblies meet in plenary sessions. City executives, administrators, representatives of community entities such as neighborhood associations, youth and sports clubs, and any interested inhabitant of the city attends these assemblies, but only residents of the region can vote in the regional assembly. Any city resident participating in a thematic assembly can vote in those. These assemblies are jointly coordinated by members of municipal government and by community delegates.
At this initial plenary assembly the results of the previous years’ budget process are reviewed by representatives from the Mayor’s office. Also at this plenary assembly, delegates are chosen to meet in regional and thematic budget councils in order to formulate spending priorities. This is where the most intensely participatory work on the budget is done. These delegate meetings are held in neighborhoods throughout the region over a period of three months during which delegates meet with residents and representatives of secondary associations to hear proposals and consider a wide range of possible projects which the city might fund in the region. Typical projects include such things as street paving and repair, sewage, day care centers, public housing, and health care clinics. At the end of three months, these delegates report back to a second regional plenary assembly with a set of regional budget proposals (or in the case of the city-wide thematic plenary assemblies with budget proposals on the thematic issues). At this second plenary, proposals are ratified by a vote of people participating in the meeting, and two delegates and substitutes are elected to represent the assembly at in a city-wide body called the Participatory Budgeting Council, which meets over the following several months to formulate an integrated city-wide budget from these regional and thematic budgetary proposals. It is mainly at this point that technical experts enter the process in a systematic way, making estimates of the costs of different projects and discussing technical constraints on various proposals. Since citizen representatives are in most cases non-professionals, city agencies offer courses and seminars on budgeting for Council delegates as well as for interested participants from the regional assemblies. At the end of this process, the Council submits a proposed budget to the Mayor, who can either accept the budget or through veto remand it back to the Council for revision. Once a budget has been agreed on by the Mayor and the Budget council, it is finally submitted to the regular city council for formal adoption. The whole process takes about six months and involves tens of thousands of city residents in active policy-making deliberations.
When the participatory budget was first introduced, it was conceived as a way for citizens as individuals to actively participate in core decision-making in city governance. Over time, however, much of this participation became mediated by secondary associations in civil society. In particular, most of the people chosen within the plenary assemblies to serve as delegates in the regional and thematic budget councils are active participants in civil society associations of one sort or another. This means that the delegates are embedded in broader social networks and settings within which budget priorities are discussed, thus extending the social reach of the public deliberations on the issues. These connections of delegates to secondary associations also deepen the ways in which the participatory budget functions as a mechanism of social empowerment. Over time, therefore, the participatory budget has become a kind of amalgam of direct democracy and associative democracy.
EOW summarizes the results in a numbered list of statements:
There has been a massive shift in spending towards the poorest regions of the city.
Participation levels of citizens in the process have been high and sustained...around 8% of the adult population participated in at least one meeting in a typical budgetary cycle.
There has been a clear thickening of civil society stimulated by the participatory process.
Corruption largely disappeared: this is a transparent, clean process.
The vote for the PT increased significantly over several electoral cycles within the city, indicating that this process has generated high levels of legitimation.
There are some indications that tax compliance has increased among the middle class and affluent even though tax surveillance and enforcement has not really changed and even though the more affluent segments of Porto Alegre are not the principle beneficiaries of the participatory budgetary.
TODO Summarize "What's so bad about capitalism?" chapter, compare to Tony Smith, Patrick Murray, William Clare Roberts.