PUCPR – PPGTU Master and Doctoral Program in Urban Management World Urban Forum 5

1. PUCPR – PPGTU Master and Doctoral Program in Urban Management World Urban Forum 5 Rio de Janeiro, 22-26 march 2010 How to Foster Livelihood Strategies in Slums/Informal Settlements Urban Governance Klaus Frey

2. Public Governance – the concept • Descriptive concept for a “supposed” new praxis of collaborative public management • A normative approach to government action (good governance) • An analytical approach: polity, politics, and policy • Strategic concept: network governance

3. Some challenges for urban governance • The dual city: polarization and fragmentation of social and economic life and also of institutional structures • Increasing technical complexity and social diversity and inequality • Traditional sector-oriented public action • Multiple scales: neighborhood, community, municipality, metropolitan region • Functional overlapping competing jurisdictions

4. Public governance – the new discourse • Institutional strengthening, coordination, collaboration, partnership, empowerment, self-organization, social networks • A new development approach able to give voice and power to the poor and excluded? or simply: • A “seductive mix of buzzwords” – “the new feel-good rhetoric” of international development agencies? Do institutions matter?

5. Cases from Brazil – Porto Alegre I: participatory budgeting • Complex procedural participatory arrangement for the elaboration, implementation and monitoring of the local budget • Mix of direct and indirect democracy • Attempt to integrate the participation of the poor with participation of the establishment • Strengthening of citizen’s engagement and political culture

7. Cases from Brazil – Porto Alegre I: participatory budgeting – criticism • Dependent on (previous) participative culture • Unclear conditions of accountability – who is responsible? • Scarcity of resources might jeopardize democratic legitimacy and provoke political disappointment • New elitist democracy?

8. Cases from Brazil – Porto Alegre II: solidary local governance; Curitiba: Model of Collaboration • Partnership between government, private sector and civil society • Network model favoring informal relations • Project-, result- and self-help oriented • Participation only in the implementation process

9. Cases from Brazil – Porto Alegre II: solidary local governance; Curitiba: Model of Collaboration - criticism • Hierarchical institutional structure • Collaboration with the “best” amongst the poor • Apolitical approach: “constructive” cooperation with the “willing” partners – exclusion of critical and oppositional forces • Inadequate for overcoming social inequalities

10. Public governance – some guiding questions • How to deal with conflicts? Institutional arrangements should provide an arena for political confrontation or enable societal consensus? • Is there a fundamental contradiction between efficiency-oriented and democracy-oriented governance approaches, or are they reconcilable? • Public governance should, first and foremost, foster local leadership action or focus on expanded participation and the inclusion of the habitually excluded?

11. Public governance – some guiding questions • Are strong institutional arrangements needed, in order to guarantee the right of participation for the “weak”? • Or do strong institutional rules in participatory practices exclude the mass, paving the way for participatory elitist democracy? • What opportunities and difficulties exist to overcome administrative fragmentation by means of integrative institutional arrangements?

12. Thanks! Klaus Frey klaus.frey@pucpr.br (++55) 41-3271-2623