Blog by Mayara Soares Faria, Ricardo Poppi and Carla de Paiva Bezerra: “We have heard it before and will likely hear it again: democracy is facing serious challenges. Around the world, levels of trust in governments and institutions are low. To overcome this, one of the most telling findings, highlighted in the latest OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust, is that people trust governments more when they feel their voices are genuinely heard.
Participation, therefore, has become a key ingredient for strengthening democracy and rebuilding trust. However, participation on its own does not guarantee trust. On the contrary, poorly designed processes can backfire, creating frustration and enhancing mistrust. Meaningful participation requires careful design, transparency, and a real link between what citizens ask for and what governments do.
It was to address this challenge that Brazil placed social participation at the heart of the government’s agenda. Within the General Secretariat of the Presidency, the National Secretariat of Social Participation was entrusted with a bold mission: to make policymaking more inclusive, reflective of the country’s regional and social diversity, and more effective by grounding it in the reality of each territory. To achieve this, a federal strategy of social participation was designed to foster dialogue between civil society and government, reduce barriers to participation and empower citizens. This required a concerted effort to rebuild the participatory structures that had been dismantled in previous years..(More)”.
