ABSTRACT
There is a certain consensus among scholars, public intellectuals in Brazil and representatives of civil society that the Lula administration was not particularly innovative in promoting meaningful and broad-based participatory processes, especially when compared to PT sub-national government experiences. 1 The Lula administration, however, did make some important efforts to include civil society and listen to its representatives. Nevertheless, participation as a political agenda at the national level was embedded in a larger and more complex political game than existing studies have acknowledged. In this chapter, I contend that participation during the Lula years was caught between electoral politics and governability strategies, which shaped both the implementation and scope of participatory initiatives.
