Upon These Terrible Ruins: Social Participation and Participatory Institutions in Brazil During Lula’s Third Administration

Thus, the Brazilian experience offers some lessons on the vulnerability and resilience of participatory institutions in hostile circumstances.</p><p dir="ltr">Towards the end of Lula’s third term, a combination of three patterns characterizes what has happened to participatory institutions: reactivation, innovation, and evasion.</p><p dir="ltr">• Reactivation restored the existing participatory institutions, with their already known strengths and limitations.</p><p dir="ltr">• Innovation significantly advanced participatory institutions compared to past experiences that had been developed under the previous federal governments of the Workers’ Party.</p><p dir="ltr">• Evasion occurred when the government strategically avoided making progress on its initial commitments to rebuild social participation, in order to sidestep political damage.</p><p dir="ltr">The detailed analysis of these patterns, and their combinations, shows the importance of political costs to a government operating in a situation where the majority in the Congress was in opposition to its participatory policies.

The Lula administration preferred to strategically reserve the politically costly support it needed from the legislature not for social participation, but for priority projects such as tax reform.</p><p dir="ltr">This analysis leads to two key lessons.</p><p dir="ltr">First, participatory institutions prove more resilient to hostile governments when they are firmly institutionalized and when they maintain strong ties to public policy communities, civil society actors included.</p><p dir="ltr">Second, social control regimes generate long-term structuring effects that shape both the possibilities for progress and the limits of participatory innovation.

Incremental development built upon the foundations of a consolidated regime offers considerable advantages. However, unlike reactivation, innovation cannot rely on established institutional frameworks. When a government seeking to drive large-scale innovation lacks broad legislative majorities, the costs become prohibitive, and evasion emerges as a strategic response.</p>