Suchergebnisse

This article addresses the long-standing controversy over the World Bank's role in the promotion of participatory budgeting (PB). Some on the left have celebrated the Bank's funding and advocacy for PB as signifying the legitimacy or mainstream success of the process, while others see the Bank's endorsement of PB as a sign that participatory budgeting is becoming watered down and losing its transformative potential, if it ever had such potential. This debate has mostly been an ideological one, and little research has been done to provide evidence to either side. The article is the first to address what the Bank is doing to promote PB and why. It makes six main points. First, the originators of participatory budgeting, the Workers' Party in Brazil, is not promoting it as strongly as it used to. Second, the World Bank has become the most active promoter of PB (perhaps alongside the United Nations Development Program). Third, within the Bank, some promote PB as part of its fairly standard pro-market agenda, while others share many of the same goals as PB's originators. Fourth, though the Bank has become very important for the diffusion of PB, overall PB remains marginal within the Bank. Fifth, the Bank has little influence over the eventual outcomes of PB in different countries because it has little or no control over many of the factors that affect PB in practice. And sixth, because PB's effects have strong potential to be positive, the Bank's role in promoting PB should be encouraged.

Social Movements and State Power: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia,
Ecuador. By James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto
Press, 2005. 288p. $90.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.Anyone interested in the recent renewal of social movement activity
and the rise of ostensibly left or center-left governments in Latin
America might be tempted to pick up this book, with its provocative jacket
photo and appealing title. Unfortunately, the book cover is nearly the
only thing going for this sectarian jeremiad from James Petras and Henry
Veltmeyer. If one is looking for serious scholarship, or even solid
journalism, neither can be found here. Instead, one finds a poorly
organized collage, including descriptions of recent history, critiques of
government policies, and tendentious and contradictory evaluations of left
strategy. Despite the promise of the title, the authors do not engage the
literature on social movements, nor do they contribute much in the way of
new analytical perspectives. The class analysis announced in the
introduction only emerges occasionally in the subsequent chapters, and
even then it is applied mechanically and reductively, yielding an
extremely limited capacity to help us understand the character and
trajectory of social movements or the nuances of political behavior in
diverse contexts. Important cross-national differences in terms of
political institutions, ethnic composition, and international constraints
are not addressed, much less systematically compared. Furthermore, the
book lacks consistent citations of sources, and serious empirical and
orthographic errors are sprinkled throughout. Those knowledgeable about
the countries in question might be amused by the almost congenital
inability to spell correctly the names of politicians, political parties,
and labor confederations; those without such knowledge, especially
undergraduate students, will only be confused or misinformed.

La creación de diferentes mecanismos de participación popular fue una de las grandes innovaciones de los partidos de izquierda y centroizquierda que gestionaron ciudades latinoamericanas durante los 80 y 90. El presupuesto participativo impulsado por el Partido de los Trabajadores (pt) en Porto Alegre ganó fama mundial y se extendió por toda la región. Sin embargo, una vez que llegaron al gobierno nacional, estos mismos partidos descartaron los mecanismos participativos y el objetivo de construir una democracia profunda. El artículo analiza los casos del pt en Brasil, el Frente Amplio en Uruguay y el chavismo en Venezuela y los motivos por los cuales las instancias participativas han sido reemplazadas por visiones más corporativas o, en el caso venezolano, más cercanas a la izquierda ortod