Orçamentos participativos, cidadania e geoinformação: potencialidades e diretrizes metodológicas a partir da experiência de Belo Horizonte

Abstract

This thesis intends to contribute to the debate on the application of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to participatory public policies through methodological products — scripts and guidelines — with technological support. The main study objects are Digital or Semi-Digital Participatory Budgets (PBs) and, more specifically, the experience of the Digital PB in Belo Horizonte between 2006 and 2013. It was proposed to analyze its conduction and verify the possible contributions of tools and methods such as Geovisualization; VGI (Voluntary Geographic Information), crowdsourcing and Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) for its dynamics. Based on this analysis, methodological proposals were made to improve the process of participation in similar practices. As a general methodological approach, a case study structure was adopted, combining descriptive and exploratory modalities. The PBs, which emerged in Porto Alegre in the early 1990s, and quickly spread throughout Brazil and the world, constitute an important milestone for the debate on participatory urban policies, even though their different experiences show significant variations and allow for different degrees of democratic expansion. Belo Horizonte appears with Porto Alegre as a reference for the consolidation of PBs, which lasted for several administrations of different parties, mobilizing a considerable number of participants between 1994 and 2016. In 2006, the city inaugurated the Digital PB, an experience initially considered as a pioneer, which attracted high participation rates at first, but then registered a drastic drop in mobilization. Previous studies point out several hypotheses about the decline of the Digital PB in Belo Horizonte, but there is a convergence in the assessment that the participation process failed to be based on a simple election model between predefined options, excluding the possibility of collective proposal construction and emptying the citizen's active role in deliberation. However, it is not assessed that OPs can be successful exclusively through face-to-face participation, and that online participation would, in principle, be incompatible with their nature. It was sought, therefore, to develop guidelines for restructuring the method of participation for Digital or Semi-Digital OPs, conceiving the application of ICTs as support for a hybrid process, involving both face-to-face and online participation, and incorporating Geovisualization and IDE resources in search of a structure that provides better conditions for collective deliberation.

Keywords: Citizen Participation, Digital and Semi-Digital Participatory Budgets, Geovisualization, Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs), Digital Citizenship.