Porto Alegre let residents allocate the capital budget in open assemblies

In 1989 Porto Alegre, a Brazilian state capital emerging from military rule, had a bankrupt treasury and an investment budget that followed political connection rather than need: poorer districts had waited decades for water and sewerage. The incoming administration proposed an inversion — let residents themselves decide the municipal investment plan through a yearly cycle of open assemblies.

The cycle, run by the city's planning bodies with regional coordinators, works in rounds: neighborhood and thematic plenaries gather demands, elect delegates by attendance (roughly one per ten participants), and a council of elected councilors turns demands into a ranked investment plan under published criteria — points weighted toward districts lacking a given service and toward population size, with a September deadline feeding the legal budget.

The mechanism converts needs into votes with a transparent formula: any resident can attend, propose and be elected delegate; demands are aggregated by district and sector (housing, sewage, pavement, education, health); the allocation rule — fewer existing services and more people earn more points — is published, so districts can compute their own entitlement and monitor delivery against the adopted plan during the year.

Published a transparent scoring formula so districts could compute their own entitlement, converting needs into auditable votes and replacing patronage with arithmetic.

The scoring rule makes preference aggregation mechanical, removing the discretionary middle where patronage lived.

Direct election of delegates by assembly attendance keeps the process majoritarian without parties.

The yearly cycle builds skill, turning residents into auditors of the plan they set.

Visible early wins in neglected districts drew participation, making the next budget even more responsive.

When factions fight over a scarce pool, replace lobbying with a published cycle: open assemblies, elected delegates, and a scoring formula participants can compute themselves.

Participants rose from under 1,000 (1990) to 14,000+ (1996); water access rose from 80% to 98% and sewage coverage from 46% to 85% (1989-96) Participatory budgeting spread to over a thousand Brazilian municipalities and cities worldwide, and quantitative research has since linked adoption to shifted spending and improved social indicators; Porto Alegre remains the reference case.