The recent announcements by Hazel Blears, the new Secretary for Communities and Local Government that citizens should be given decision-making powers at the local-level are to be welcomed. All of us who work on participatory budgets and grass-roots democracy have been clear to demonstrate the benefits of these approaches from across the world, such as the hugely successful Participatory Budget process of Brazil. The truth is that this approach has been gaining ground and followers around the world and is rapidly becoming an intrinsic part of our understanding of what it means to be democratic. However it is only through an agreed inclusive framework that citizens can take part on a more equal footing and will therefore choose to engage over successive years.

In Brazil the process of participatory budgeting emerged from the struggle for popular democracy against a brutal military regime. Community organisations were one of the key forms of resistance during the 1970s and 1980s as people struggled to regain their democratic rights. Within the movement for democracy, the PT party, that is now in government, developed out of a conjunction of community organisations, trade unions, progressive church leaders and independent intellectuals. Once democracy was re-established in 1985, a constitutional convention was set up that ran until 1988. The constitution that emerged is a very comprehensive document that guarantees a wide range of rights including social provision, employment rights and political rights to all the groups who had previously been excluded from power; it also crucially established a deeply federal system that hands a very wide range of powers to the state and municipal levels, thereby opening the possibility for much greater degrees of local citizen involvement.

Local community organisations were then able to take power and adopt a style of local government that built on their roots within civil society, particularly in the city of Porto Alegre where the Participatory Budget was pioneered. The process was so popular that it was then rolled out to many other major cities of Brazil, including Sao Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Recife and Belem at the mouth of the Amazon and has since received cross-party support in Brazil and World Bank recognition. This experience has led to a broader use of participatory democracy in Brazil, including at the national level, on a range of issues such as the environment, gender rights and even the first steps towards a participatory budget plan at the national level.

The Brazilian case shows that for participatory democracy to go beyond consultation, to real co-decision making, there must be a recognition of the balance of powers between the citizen and each level of the state, guaranteed within a binding constitutional settlement that cannot be reversed by central government.