Participatory Budget and the New Tools for Participation: How Effective is the SICONV in Brazil?

The participatory budget (PB) is recognized as an innovation from the South which has been appropriated and transformed by a myriad of municipalities and locations across the globe during the last three decades. Defining what is a PB has become a serious challenge due to the plasticity associated with this disposal. In other words, an extensive range of arrangements are referred as PB, but one can find major variations across these political apparatus. In order to make sense of this evolution, several typologies have been designed by different authors. We therefore would like to address, in first place, some of these typologies, presenting the added value and any eventual drawback. While addressing these typologies, it will be important to denote the challenges that participatory budgeting has been facing throughout the years alongside the criticism that flourished in many perspectives. Secondly, we would like to travel transversely the innovations that emerged around the PB during the last years and its ultimate trends. In that respect, we would to present data about a new instrument of interoperational democracy and to test its data in order to check if an improvement in the quality of democracy has been achieved. The focus will be on SICONV, a Brazilian management system of voluntary transfers from the federal government to the municipalities. The SICONV has been an instrument to build financial capacity in many municipalities. In other words, more ambitious projects can be sustained with this type of support, therefore overcoming the limitations imposed by the scarce local resources. The PB has been playing a role in the capture of resources using this option and therefore decentralizing budgeting credits. Improved transparency and improved audit of public resources expenditure can be an output under this new tool, but strong assessment is for now mandatory.