INCT Participa, a network made up of 15 research centres focused on social participation, activism, and political confrontation, marks its first year of existence with the launch of the Participa Observatory, or OPar.
A collective effort to systematise and make available data on social participation at both national and international levels, OPar presents itself as a reliable source of information for academic research, for the work of social movements and civil society organisations, and for the formulation of public policies by government officials.
As explained by Professor Lizandra Serafim (UFPB), coordinator of OPar, “the aim is to contribute to democratic development through the production and dissemination of knowledge focused on the advancement and improvement of participatory experiences and tools, and on strengthening social movements and civil society organisations.”
OPar launches with the first in a series of databases that will now be made available on its dedicated page on the INCT Participa website. “These are databases that we often systematise and organise for our own research. This is a way of sharing with others working on the same topics, allowing them to benefit from data that has already been structured,” notes Serafim.
The data compiled by OPar, she adds, are also “of interest to public administrators and anyone working directly or indirectly with participation, who often need this kind of information but cannot find it in an organised and systematised format.”
OPAR
The first database to be released and now available on the OPar page is the MUNIC database, designed to facilitate and promote research on municipal governance, with a focus on participatory councils in Brazil. It is an initiative of INCT Participa and was developed using data from the Survey of Basic Municipal Information (MUNIC) by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
MUNIC, an annual survey conducted by the IBGE since 1999, is a rich and comprehensive source of data on municipal public management. The database, Serafim explains, “brings together information that already existed in various editions of the MUNIC survey, but had never before been organised into a single dataset, with proper alignment across the variables used in the different editions.”
“What we did was, for the first time, to consolidate data that had previously been presented separately and without proper correspondence across the various editions of MUNIC. The same process will be carried out with data from the Survey of Basic State Information – ESTADIC, also from the IBGE,” she adds.
According to OPar’s coordinator, other databases already produced by the INCT Participa research centres in various studies on the network’s thematic areas will also be made public. She mentions, for example, datasets on municipal councils, national councils, collective candidacies and mandates, social movements in rural areas of the Northeast, and participatory budgeting in Brazil, among others.
The idea is to publish these and other datasets curated and organised by the OPar team, in collaboration with INCT member centres. “It’s essentially a task of organising and translating this knowledge in a way that makes it accessible to a broader audience, so that it can be effectively applied and useful to public managers, civil society and researchers,” she explains.
ONE YEAR OF INCT PARTICIPA
In April, INCT Participa marked one year since its formal establishment. As Adrian Gurza Lavalle (USP), coordinator of the network that brings together over 200 researchers across all five regions of Brazil, points out: “The field of participation studies has matured considerably over the past 20 years, with the training of many researchers and the accumulation of substantial knowledge. But until recently, this work remained relatively fragmented, limited to academic events and conferences.”
“There was already a great deal of integration in terms of our shared understanding of the phenomena, but we lacked the resources to develop joint initiatives. That’s why we took on the challenge of creating an INCT—not to fund what we were already doing individually in our research centres, but to structure real research dialogues and collaborative initiatives, such as the creation of an observatory,” he explains.
Once the INCT was approved, the idea of the observatory began to take shape. “OPar is a landmark example of the broader spirit that motivated this group of researchers to establish an INCT dedicated to reconfiguring participation, associativism and political confrontation,” says Lavalle. It reflects “INCT Participa’s commitment to extension work focused on social impact and on strengthening the field’s capacity to generate knowledge.”
This field of knowledge, he notes, encompasses “a large academic community with a substantial body of research, public officials working with participatory mechanisms, and what the Anglo-Saxon literature refers to as practitioners—that is, civil society actors, including those from the private sector, engaged in promoting participation through governance models.”
Through OPar, “INCT Participa not only assumes the role of producing research as a direct generator of knowledge, but also enables other actors—including public administrators and non-state stakeholders—to access more sophisticated information to generate knowledge relevant to their own practices.”
BACKSTORY
With 20 years of experience in the field of social participation—particularly in research on the role of municipal councils—Lavalle recalls that, at the outset, most studies in this area followed qualitative methodologies and focused on individual case studies.
“We began to develop more formalised, quantitative methodologies to allow for a more systemic evaluation of these mechanisms, systematically gathering data on councils—data that didn’t previously exist from the perspective of evaluating their activities,” he explains.
For four years, he led a pilot study in the city of Guarulhos, analysing every official gazette published by the municipality to identify resolutions made by the municipal councils and other governing bodies (executive branch, mayor’s office, and city council) related to them.
Following that, another seven years were invested in expanding this pilot model to six large municipalities. The team systematically collected every council decision recorded in the official gazettes over more than 15 years of continuous operation.
“With that, we built a longitudinal database—the richest and most comprehensive in the country on council decisions,” Lavalle notes. He says this model has since been replicated.
“Other research centres began applying the model in smaller municipalities and in different regions of the country, but all of this work remained scattered and unconnected. Now, with OPar, we are finally in a position to bring this knowledge together and produce much broader overviews of what is happening in councils across Brazil, in municipalities of different sizes and contexts,” he concludes.
OPar also responds, notes Lavalle, to a diagnosis within the field of participation studies: that it was no longer feasible to continue relying solely on case studies to generate systematic information capable of measuring the reach and impact of participatory institutions.
These are institutions that “grew extraordinarily,” particularly throughout the 1990s and the early 21st century. “We were no longer talking about a handful of interesting and promising mechanisms, but about institutions that had multiplied into tens of thousands across the country—whose evaluation depended on the ability to produce aggregated knowledge about their outcomes.”
“On one hand, we faced the challenge of the increasing diversity of participatory institutions; on the other, the challenge of scale—the need to account for these bodies not one by one, not city by city, but to be able to assess tens of thousands of such mechanisms at a national scale. In the case of councils alone, we have approximately 70,000,” he explains.
“Our field comes from a tradition of qualitative research. The development of systematic capacities to work with quantitative data on a macro scale is less common, as are the skills to handle complex databases,” Lavalle adds.
OPar addresses this demand. Through it, it will be possible to “make these data available and methodologically harmonise them, making them compatible and accessible so that anyone can use them. This will have extraordinary effects on the capacity of the participation field to produce systematised knowledge,” he assesses.
Lavalle also emphasises that OPar will be useful not only for databases created through researchers’ specific projects—such as his work on councils—but also for official datasets.
The aim is to expand the field’s overall capacity for knowledge production, including by “providing a set of information that will allow public managers and other interested actors to access high-quality data on the diversity of participatory institutions across the country, with information relevant to the institutional landscape as a whole, at national scale.”
The goal is to ensure that even those without specific skills in working with quantitative data can benefit from information made available in a friendly and accessible format.
“This could lead to multiple outcomes—not just for those conducting direct research on these themes, but also for those who, for instance, need evidence to support management decisions or to guide funding efforts aimed at strengthening civil society initiatives,” he concludes.
Under the coordination of Lizandra Serafim and Adrian Gurza Lavalle, OPar benefits from the technical collaboration of Rodrigo Martins (Postdoctoral Researcher – Capes), who led the development of this first database, as well as Camila Oliveira Santana (Capes–INCT Participa outreach fellow) and Laura Pimentel Barbosa (Academic Management Training Fellow, part of the Research and Innovation Pro-Rectorate at USP – FGA/PRPI). The project is also supported by an advisory committee composed of Professors Silvia Cervelini (Delibera Brasil), Clóvis Souza (General Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic), Uvanderson Silva (Tide Setúbal Foundation), and Roberto Pires (IPEA).
In addition to its databases, OPar is also preparing further initiatives, such as those currently being developed under Radar Participa, which include mapping and publicising innovative participatory experiences in Brazil and abroad, as well as providing reference and practical materials for public managers and civil society organisations aimed at improving participatory institutions and practices.
AN OPEN INVITATION
The coordination team at OPar extends an open invitation to explore the Observatory’s page on the INCT Participa website—particularly aimed at researchers in the field of participation studies, civil society actors, social movements, and public managers involved with participatory institutions and citizen engagement initiatives. The invitation also reaches educators in popular education, advocates for social mobilisation, and members of civil society and philanthropic organisations who have committed part of their work, energy, and resources to strengthening social participation.
This call to action, stresses the coordinator of INCT Participa, is also directed at the wider community interested in participation studies and in advancing social participation in Brazil in order to influence public policy:
“Everyone is invited to take part in this collective effort to build and develop the Participa Observatory—by making use of its information and encouraging us to explore paths that you consider promising. Visit the site and make full use of the data made available. Share this body of information through your networks and engage with OPar by sending us suggestions to improve our data accessibility, tips on relevant participatory experiences, or recommendations of other public-interest datasets that we could make available through the INCT Participa website.”
