Brazils Participatory Plurianual Plan: embedding citizen participation in federal strategic planning

Innovation

• Integration of traditional in-person participation in councils, conferences, or social events with massive digital participation through the platform. This allows for combining the best of community activism with the possibilities of the digital environment. 
• Open strategic planning: The PPA evolved from a predominantly technical instrument and consolidated itself as a policy process shared with citizens, setting a new benchmark for large-scale participation.
• The birth of Brasil Participativo, a platform that seeks to become the digital hub of participation at the federal level in Brazil, first of its kind using Brazil’s secure public digital identity system gov.br.

Impact

The process expanded and diversified the channels of participation while introducing large-scale digital engagement. This co-management process for the Plurianual Plan (PPA), which brought together government and civil society, began with the first meeting of the Inter-Council Forum on April 18–19 and extended across the country through state-level plenary sessions. These were supported by a broad digital mobilization effort carried out through the Brasil Participativo Platform. 

One key achievement was that the process mobilized communities beyond the traditional participatory field. Evidence suggests that organized groups, including social movements, territorial networks, and professional communities such as community health workers, engaged collectively to submit and prioritize proposals.

Overall, this experience set a precedent for the rebuilding and consolidation of a renewed national participation strategy in Brazil, which had been dismantled under the previous administration. As the participatory process for the PPA unfolded and reached its conclusion, Brazil restored and strengthened its institutional framework for social participation, including:

• Reactivation of 60 councils and consultative bodies
• Establishment of the National Council for Social Participation
• Revival of the Inter-Council Forum
• Organization of more than 30 national conferences
• Creation of State Participation Forums in all federal states
• Implementation of an interministerial network of Social Participation Advisors across 35 ministries

Finally, the process enabled the modernization of Brazil’s digital participation infrastructure through the adoption of the Decidim free software platform. Over the past three years, the platform has consolidated more than 9 million visits and over 1.7 million participants, becoming the main digital channel for dialogue between government and civil society. Rather than a one-off consultation tool, the platform became a multi-process hub capable of hosting conferences, consultations, monitoring processes, and policy revisions, establishing the foundations of a digital public infrastructure for social participation in Brazil.

Lessons learned

While this process became the most participatory Multi-Year Plan in Brazil’s history, important structural challenges remain. Despite significant progress, the platform still faces barriers to achieving truly large-scale and representative participation across Brazilian society. Persistent inequalities in access to and use of digital technologies, connectivity limitations, and gaps in digital literacy continue to constrain broader inclusion.

For this reason, our current focus is on modernizing and optimizing the digital participation platform to advance inclusion, enhance representativeness, and enable large-scale engagement, while remaining firmly anchored in the principles of digital sovereignty. This includes, for instance:

• Exploring the responsible use of artificial intelligence to support citizens in drafting proposals and to assist public institutions in analyzing contributions, identifying priorities, and improving resource allocation. 
• Launch of a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) version tailored for subnational governments, enabling states and municipalities, that are closer to citizens’ everyday needs, to more easily deploy and manage their own digital participation platforms.
• The development of conversational participation flows based on the understanding lowering cognitive and procedural barriers is essential to engage citizens who are not accustomed to navigating institutional platforms. In a context where mobile messaging apps are the primary digital environment for millions of Brazilians, embedding participation within familiar conversational interfaces significantly reduces friction in onboarding, authentication, and proposal submission.