Document(s) 8 de 11

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the subject of youth in Brazil. It has entered the public policy agendas of local, state and federal governments and is also of interest to the media and a focus for intervention by NGOs and business foundations.

^* About the authors:

Livia De Tommasi is the regional supervisor of the study Juventude Brasileira e Democracia in the Recife metropolitan region. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology.

Suzanne Taschereau is a collaborator on the Brazil-Canada project and in the National Youth Dialogue in Canada. Senior advisor & research associate, consultant with the Canadian Policy Research Networks (CPRN).

Nilton Bueno Fischer is the regional supervisor of the study in the Porto Alegre metropolitan region. He is a Professor at the Centro Universitário Lasalle, collaborates with the PPG/EDU/UFRGS and is a CNPq researcher.

Gustavo Venturi holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and is director of the research advisory institute Criterium Assessoria em Pesquisas.

Events that took place between 2003 and 2005 demonstrate that the subject has come to the centre of public agendas. These included public hearings and state and national seminars which were called to pursue discussions of a National Youth Plan, to be drafted by the Chamber of Deputies’ Special Commission on Youth; the installation of an inter-ministerial commission to study federal government action on youth matters; the installation of a National Youth Secretariat and National Youth Council at the federal level; and an increase in the number of municipal and state advisory, coordinating and managerial bodies directed specifically to youth.

There is also a growing perception of how important it is to support these processes with research data and analyses on the realities facing Brazilian youth. A mechanism is needed to highlight young people’s demands and needs, and how and where they express and organize themselves, in order to broaden the picture painted by census studies traditionally carried out by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).

This sets the context for the initiative by two Brazilian NGOs, Instituto Brasileiro de Análises Sociais e Econômicas (Ibase), in Rio de Janeiro, and Instituto de Estudos, Formação e Assessoria em Políticas Sociais (Pólis), in São Paulo. They worked in partnership with a Canadian organization, Canadian Policy Research Networks (CPRN), and the Brazilian government, with sponsorship and financial support from Canada’s International Development Research Center (IDRC). The idea was to conduct a comprehensive diagnostic study of the forms, content and meanings of social and political participation by young Brazilians between the ages of 14 and 24.

The focus on participation was designed to counter the view, which is widely reported in the media, that young people in contemporary societies and in Brazil in particular, are ‘apathetic’, and do not participate in political affairs, or engage in social struggles for larger causes. Convinced that youth participation is strategically important for consolidating the process of democratization of Brazilian society, the proponent organizations used a theoretical frame of reference based on the knowledge of specialists in the field. In recent decades, these specialists have stressed the importance of new forms of youth participation and new ways in which they express their demands in the public sphere. These specialists include authors such as Helena Abramo, Marilia Sposito and Paulo Carrano, in Brazil, and Leslie Serna, Miguel Abad and Rossana Reguillo, in other Latin American countries.

The study Brazilian Youth and Democracy: Participation, Spheres and Public Policies was carried out in seven of Brazil’s metropolitan regions (Belém, Recife, Salvador, Belo Horizonte, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre) and in the Federal District, through a network of local partners, mostly nongovernmental organizations and academic institutions. The most significant novelty and challenge – besides the specific subject focus – lay in applying the Choice Work Dialogue methodology for the first time in Brazil. This methodology was developed by Canadian groups and is known in Brazil as ‘Dialogue Groups’.

In the democratic system, leaders must take decisions in the light of citizen opinions, values and needs, and their ways of discussing problems and dealing with opportunities in their communities. The Dialogue seeks the most convincing arguments in favour of certain directional changes, that is to say, about what part of the political sphere is susceptible to change.

The Dialogue situation allows people to provide their opinions in dialogue with the opinions of others. In this regard, the method has both research and educational value, and even hopes to prompt changes in the ways citizens think and position themselves with regard to social realities. The methodology can therefore be considered part of the action-research tradition that has so strongly marked the Brazilian social movement activities.

The Dialogue makes it possible to identify what options are possible in addressing a given problem by asking what citizens are willing to do or to accept as a result of their choices. Through the exchange of points of view, the Dialogue is at the same time informative and an interchange intent on producing more refined judgments and values to guide decision-making.

In Brazil, a total of 913 young people participated in the five Dialogue Groups held in each metropolitan region surveyed. These young participants were selected from among respondents who filled in a questionnaire during the first stage of the study. The questionnaire was designed to sketch an overall profile of Brazilian youth’s situation, specifically regarding schooling, work, access to culture and leisure, and participation.

In Brazil the Dialogues lasted one day (the Dialogue Day), during which a sequence of methodological steps was systematically followed. First the goals of the study and of the responsible organizations were presented. Then the participants were introduced and the pre- and post-Dialogue questionnaires were handed out. The participants were then split into subgroups of at most ten members. Together, these groups read the Manual (Dialogue template) which contains key information on the subject of the Dialogue and on the three Caminhos Participativos (Paths to Participation) proposed (the path of participating in social movements, political parties or trade unions; the path of volunteer work; and the path of participating in informal youth groups), with arguments for and against each type of participation. The groups then presented their work to the plenary session. Participants were then able to jointly identify a set of similarities and differences in the various presentations and explore the consequences of the choices made. Finally, the Day was brought to a conclusion and evaluated.

In order to adapt the methodology to the Brazilian situation, a CD-ROM was prepared to present the content of the Manual in clear, accessible, enjoyable language. In the morning, participants were supposed to dialogue about ‘the Brazil we want’, in answer to the question: ‘Thinking about the life you lead as a young Brazilian, what could improve in education, work, and culture and leisure activities?’. After agreeing on what improvements they wanted, these improvements would serve as a frame of reference for the afternoon Dialogue. In the afternoon the guiding question was: ‘Thinking about what you listed this morning on what should improve in education, work, culture and leisure in Brazil, how are you willing to participate in order to help these improvements come about?’

The Dialogues were professionally facilitated by educators tasked with facilitating the course of the Dialogue by providing information and moderating the discussions. The Dialogues were also registered and monitored by observer-researchers who were responsible for recording significant situations and behaviour. On the basis of this material, each local team of researchers prepared a report commenting on the results obtained. Then the central team responsible for the study – after discussions with all the researchers involved – drew up an overall report that was widely circulated among public policy-makers, researchers and the general public electronically, in print and through the audiovisual media.

It was a considerable challenge applying the methodology in Brazil, not only because it was being done for the first time, but because it needed to be applied simultaneously in several places by different teams of researchers and facilitators. These teams had to embrace the methodology and try to suit it to Brazilian realities. Accordingly, when the report was being produced for publication, two researchers (Livia De Tommasi, regional project supervisor in the Recife metropolitan region, and Nilton Bueno Fischer, supervisor in the Porto Alegre metropolitan region) decided to engage in a dialogue with one of the CPRN consultants, Suzanne Taschereau, and a Brazilian research specialist, Gustavo Venturi (responsible for conducting other studies on the situation of Brazilian youth in recent years). They did so in order to explore certain aspects of the methodology application in Brazil in greater depth and analyze these critically on the basis of the comments contained in the regional reports.

In order to be consistent with the proposed methodology, which centres on participants expressing their opinions, respecting the opinions of others and dialoguing with them, this text maintains the original format of our dialogue. Also, the distances separating the people involved precluded any face to face dialogue, which would have enabled us to produce a collective text.

The outcome of this virtual conversation on the methodology and the outcomes of the Brazilian Dialogues on youth and democracy can be found below.

Conversation on the Dialogues

LIVIA: To start with, I would like to single out what I consider the greatest potential and at the same time the greatest challenge, of the Dialogue methodology. It pursues three goals at the same time. These are: 1) to educate citizens, both in terms of learning new content (the information provided on the subject of the study) and fostering a space for dialogue, listening and thinking; 2) to deliberate on choices and their consequences with a view to influencing public policies, that is, exercising democracy; 3) and to carry out research.

Can these three dimensions be combined in a single process? How do you prevent one goal from taking precedence over the others, thereby invalidating their results? In the course of our conversation, so as to stimulate our dialogue, I will be referring to remarks made by researchers responsible for the study in Brazil, which bring out contradictions, difficulties and possibilities that surfaced in applying the methodology.

SUZANNE: This is an issue we faced in Canada too. What we saw in practice leads us to believe that the three goals can be attained and what’s more, they can reinforce one another. For example, the research can reinforce the educational goal, by feeding into the Manual with data expressed in opinion polls on the issues that concern young people and on what action is possible. For example, the link between education and employment, the demographic trends, how public policy decisions are taken and so on. Thus, the goal of educating citizens is reinforced by empirical data gathered by the quantitative first stage of the study.

However, there may be tensions between pursuing the goals of education/reflection and deliberation. For example, the need for rigorous comparative research may limit the possibility of adjusting the content of the deliberative process from one region to another.

There is therefore a creative tension among these three goals and the actors pursuing them. As an animator/facilitator, my main concern is for the young people who take part in the Dialogue to have a positive experience of the democratic process: for them to go home having learned something, to be ‘turned on’ by the Dialogue experience and by discovering the values they share with others and the possible courses of action that may open up. To my researcher colleagues, the methodology and the analyses are the most important concerns. It is through dialoguing among ourselves and by thinking critically that we improve how we do things in practice.

Note that the main goal of the Dialogues we held in Canada was to create a public space where young people, as citizens, can:

• learn together about some of the issues that concern them (health, education, how decisions are taken) and which also represent a public policy concern;
  
  
• exchange ideas on what values should guide public policy choices and to deliberate on these choices and their consequences for them as social actors;
  
  
• identify the roles they are willing to play (and how they want to play them) and what they expect of actors responsible for improving their lives (governments, private sector etc.).

Unfortunately, very often agencies will not fund post-Dialogue follow-up studies. In Canada, we managed to do it once with surprising results (a significant percentage of citizens identified the Dialogue as an importance influence on their lives or their active civic engagement). It would be interesting to be able to explore what influence the study and the report you have written have had on decision-makers and young people, six or twelve months later.

NILTON: We should remember that the things the young people say during the Dialogue Group process are connected in one way or another with their ‘prior’ situations. Therefore, the data collected do not reflect ‘raw’ information or purely reactions to the ‘research moment’. Therefore we can gauge the dimensions of possible continuities, new knowledge that they acquired (multiple learnings) during the Dialogue Day, developments in their respective ‘social environments’ (experiences in the family, at school, in groups of whatever kind – musical, sporting, political, religious etc.).

For the purpose of evaluating the repercussions of this methodology, impact is gauged using a broader approach where it is related to young people’s lives rather than considered a result from an activity dissociated from their practices and experiences. During the period of research, the three dimensions are contemplated as an interconnected process and, at the same time, as a connection with the lives of those young people, before and after the experience.

GUSTAVO: I would like to reaffirm my admiration for this methodology and for the processes and challenges embedded in it. At the same time, recall that doing applied research means making a succession of choices, all with their pros and cons. In this case, the tension among the proposed goals takes a reasonable toll on the survey’s validity in terms of the how far the results can be generalized. As ‘the intention from the outset was to perceive how Brazilian youth, considered in all its diversity and complexity, would be willing to occupy the democratic public sphere’,¹ it seems relevant to me to discuss how far results can be generalized.

The young people who participated in the Dialogue Groups were all drawn exclusively from Brazil’s metropolitan regions, so the survey’s representativeness must be delimited to the population actually studied – and that goes for interpretation of the quantitative research as well. Even without going into the merits of the criteria for selecting the Dialogue participants, at best the survey results offer insights into metropolitan youth.

This is not to play down the project’s importance – with 8,000 interviews and 39 Dialogue Groups in seven metropolitan regions and the Federal District, it is extremely valuable in itself – but rather to be clear about the limits inherent to the sample designs chosen.

The national survey by Instituto Cidadania that resulted in the publication Retratos da Juventude Brasileira ² brought out some contrasts between young people in the big cities and in medium and small towns in the interior, that is to say between urban and rural youth. These contrasts relate to young people’s willingness to do volunteer work, their perception of institutional channels of participation, and the nature of the self-managed groups they engage in, which are the paths for participation proposed in our Dialogue Groups. We should not disregard these issues when talking about the diversity of youth.

LIVIA: I think Suzanne made an important point regarding the division of tasks among the study team. Having a multidisciplinary team made up of specialists from different fields, each responsible for one dimension of the process in depth, may help keep those dimensions (research, deliberation and education) separate and address the challenges intrinsic in pursuing each goal more objectively. Each specialist can alert colleagues to possible biases that may be caused by not distinguishing these three dimensions clearly. In that regard, I think that the observer – who in this case is responsible for the research dimension – plays just as important a role as the dialogue animator (the educator/facilitator). It is also important to prepare objective instruments to record observations, and they should be common to all teams. ‘How’ the participants speak is probably just as important as ‘what’ they have to say.

Nonetheless, the question remains: when subjects are placed in a research situation and prompted to discuss a specific theme, can they at the same time reach conclusions and ‘ponder’ what is the best course of action to follow? Inversely, when subjects are prompted to deliberate, make choices and take decisions, can they at the same time be research ‘informants’? The two processes are quite different in nature. It would be interesting to learn more about what happens in focus groups. I would like to hear from Gustavo on that.

GUSTAVO: I think the answer to both questions is yes. There are no – nor should there be any – ready-made packages of research methods and techniques capable of dealing with any object and goal. The creativity of the methodology in question is a good example of how that necessary freedom can be exercised and the fruits which can result. However, just as in any act of legitimate freedom, you must not lose sight of the consequences of each choice you make.

In this case, the participant selection criteria, the laboratory setting for data collection and the instruments prepared in advance with a view to making the Dialogue dynamics work, all conditioned the results and the range of possible deliberations, although it is impossible to discern to what extent. Even if participants were offered the option of constructing new scenarios or paths to participation, interviewing is full of examples of the inductive power that stimulated choices exert over final choices to the detriment of original suggestions. For the latter to prevail, participants must have a reasonable degree of autonomy and/or prior experience – in practice or thinking – with the issues in question.

If there is prior consensus among the organizers about the deliberations on the suggested paths, and if that is important for the subsequent, politically key purpose of impacting impact ongoing public policy-making, then a choice was made that put deliberation before research.

My hypothesis is that we would see differences in the research results if, for example, the Manual distributed at the start of the dynamics was followed not by a presentation of the scenarios (which is a substantive and necessarily leading stimulus), but rather by opening remarks from each participant ‘spontaneously’ expressing their main concerns on the issue in question.

That would have made it possible to control a result that would be more generalizable to the surveyed population such as the group’s opinions on the envisaged paths to participation for example. However, having been influenced by preexisting scenarios (and by the presupposition of the project’s designers that participation is intrinsically good), they do not represent exactly what metropolitan youth think about participation, but what they would tend to think if they were all subject to the same scenarios in groups with profiles and educational dynamics similar to those of our Dialogue.

LIVIA: ‘It was very difficult for most of the young people to express their opinions on a subject they had probably never stopped to think about. Even more so since the way the question was formulated implied the need to draw on a readiness for action (and not just to give an opinion). How are you all willing to participate?fl presupposes a willingness to participate in something and, at the same, the ability to choose.’³

SUZANNE: That really is a major challenge. Citizens, including young people, get involved to the extent that they are brought face to face with issues that affect them. The central questions of the Dialogue must be relevant to young people’s daily lives and be a concern to them. The subjects of employment, education, mental health and violence concern them. The themes of the Dialogue can be identified and formulated by polling a smaller number of young people before the Dialogue, so as to ensure that the participation question ties in with something concrete that young people would like to act on. Being able or unable to act is probably connected with how difficult it is to imagine the possibilities. If the researchers have already worked with young people to identify possible courses of action that are present in society and that young people are already involved in, then it is possible to stimulate them to think about the advantages and limits of that model of action and about the possible alternatives.

GUSTAVO: I don’t think the fact that it was the first time many of them had stopped to think, and the clichés they repeated as a result, are factors that invalidate their opinions. Rather, they should be considered as starting points for the Dialogues. I’m assuming the facilitators had the resources and time to explore these issues and will have helped bring out the latent discourses underlying the discourses initially manifested in embarrassing situations. Meanwhile, the expectation implicit in the Dialogue’s setting a high value on participation may have forced responses that the young people felt were expected of them, particularly as no prior provision was made for it to be called into question.

On the other hand, it is possible to find ways to lessen the constraint. For example, if some groups contained just participants with prior experience and others just participants with no prior experience, then the dynamics could have developed at paces of their own. Some groups would spend longer discussing the importance of whether or not to participate; others would take it as given and more quickly move on to discussing the various paths.

LIVIA: Few of them took the opportunity to speak, particularly during the plenary session. Those who did so generally had more public speaking experience, and deployed discursive repertoires that spoke of their activities as – mainly political party, religious or student – militants. Others marshalled repertoires connected to family life and experiences.

NILTON: I agree that different histories, experiences and realities strongly influence what people put into words during the Dialogue. For a more enlightening analysis of the Dialogue Groups, it is important to understand what young people say and do in their respective contexts. Some members of the groups found it difficult to speak out during the deliberations, which were dominated by those who spoke most, and several young people said nothing at all. This was the same in all metropolitan regions in Brazil. Even if the issues are of interest to all the study participants and are legitimatized by the literature on youth, it is up to the researchers to think critically about these group reactions, both of ‘domination’ and of inhibition (silence).

GUSTAVO: I suspect that the groups’ heterogeneity – in terms of social background more than prior experience of participation – may have contributed to making it difficult for some of the participants to express themselves. As I understood it, selection of Dialogue participants contemplated the ‘diverse social classes and levels of schooling’ that are characteristic of Brazilian metropolitan youth – which is a legitimate concern if the study is to be representative.

Another thing that seems to have happened – accidentally or deliberately, I don’t know – was that this diversity was reproduced in each group in the Dialogue. That is a procedure that goes against the practical experience accumulated in group discussions or focus groups. A relative degree of homogeneity among the participants is both decisive in reducing inhibitions and helping the discussion flow and is half way to ensuring that the majority participate (which always depends partly on the discussion moderator’s skill in balancing speaking times).

Other than that, if the methodology assumes that opinions form when points of view are shared among people who identify with each other (a premise that fits with Piaget’s observation that development, whether cognitive or moral, occurs particularly in horizontal, peer relations), then relatively homogeneous groups are more appropriate for investigating the changing and rebuilding of opinions that come into conflict.

SUZANNE: Large social distances between participants in a group may make them hesitant to express their opinions. In Canada, we noted that participation by ‘native people’, when we managed to involve them, was generally silent. In their traditional culture, it is the elders who call on the younger ones to speak. However, if we agree that the richness of dialogue and deliberation depends on a diversity of viewpoints in a democratic process, then it is also important for there to be heterogeneity in the group – possibly representative of the diversity in society. Of course there will be different points of view and conflicting opinions in heterogeneous groups. The basic rules of the Dialogues are proposed precisely so that young people can express different opinions and be heard, and so that they can hear different opinions and try to understand them.

GUSTAVO: There is no doubt that opting for diversity in the group make-up is decisive for the Dialogues’ educational goal and is more realistic as regards their deliberative purposes. It seeks to reproduce the plurality of disputing values and viewpoints that characterizes our societies. In this case, however, the choice is made at an unavoidable cost to generalizing what is implicit in this (as in any) study. Diversity in the composition of the groups does not guarantee that the same diversity will be expressed in the final results, as suggested by the reports of participants keeping silent or of declarations made in the small groups, but suppressed in the plenaries.

NILTON: The Dialogues revealed the richness of dense listening which makes it possible, within the time constraints, for all and any kind of assertion, opinion or position to be explicitly stated. Democratic practice was produced by way of interaction and argumentation at two points. Firstly, in the small groups, young people had complete autonomy to speak more freely and informally, and also to prepare their posters and syntheses to take to the plenary. At a second point, in the plenaries, where the adult world was present, they employed argumentation and the ‘art of persuasion’ in order to build – multiple, not single – consensuses among all the groups.

LIVIA: The educational dimension brings a normative sense to the process: it aims to ‘induce’ young people somehow to engage in some action, to participate, according to a frame of reference which is interpreted through the facilitators’ mediation. Once again, it seems to me that this normative dimension may introduce significant biases into the observation and knowledge dimension.

Certainly it is fundamental to have information in order to give qualified opinions and to have information and knowledge circulating is one important element in extending democracy. In that regard, we could say that participating in the Dialogues allows young people to acquire instruments for exercising citizenship. However, we cannot forget that in Brazilian society young people are considered much more in terms of negative attributes than positive ones. Their interventions in the public sphere are generally discredited by the adult world or, as Nilton says, are tutored, as if they were ‘second-class citizens’ who can only intervene through the mediation of adults. That is why the Dialogue process is an important space for experimenting with speaking, listening, and plural, horizontal dialogue.

SUZANNE: This happens in Canada as well. We asked organizations working with youth, a group of young people and a group of decision-makers for suggestions on how to change that situation. They offered advice – which we have taken – and gave interesting clues:

• It is important for the young people to have ‘their space’ and enough time to learn together, to gain confidence in their analyses and to develop concrete, ambitious, realistic proposals for change. Accordingly, we devoted a day and a half to the educational process, to deliberating and identifying both the actions that the young people would be willing to embrace and what they expect from institutions.
  
  
• It is useful to create ‘another space’, which is neither the space of adults nor the space of youth, but a ‘third space’ where both youth and adults discover a different way of relating, each respecting the other’s world, which stimulates them to dialogue. We invited decision-makers who were interested and who were open to dialoguing with young people and they participated in two periods with the young people.

Three-day Dialogues are expensive and it is not easy to keep young people motivated all that time. We managed to do so because we had identified a lot of Dialogue themes in our focus groups with young people. We wanted to explore values, choices and roles in four public policy areas (education, work, environment and health). Many public and private institutions were interested in discovering young people’s values and outlooks in these areas and were therefore willing to fund that effort. We had to work hard to get that funding and, in fact, it is a rare occurrence.

The important point I want to underline is that changing decision-makers’ perceptions of young people and of their contribution, and changing young peoples’ relationship with those responsible for policy decisions, takes time and requires favourable conditions.

GUSTAVO: Nonetheless, I believe the least impaired, or most favoured, dimension of the Dialogue process is the educational dimension. It is the immediate and subsequent effect that involvement in this kind of experience can have on the participants. In fact, it is a shame, as Suzanne says, that agencies do not usually fund subsequent process follow-up to systematically investigate how engaged Dialogue participants are in some form of participation.

LIVIA: Regarding the deliberative dimension, we were really quite worried about the possibility that the Dialogue would be experienced as yet another frustrating process, because we cannot guarantee that what was discussed and deliberated on will be heard and taken into consideration by government.

NILTON: We identified two possible repercussions of the Dialogue Days. On the one hand, certain young people may have ‘made gains’, in that they were listened to while they expressed their demands and proposals. If they expressed scepticism (or realism) in relation to future developments, it is worth including that element in our analyses by introducing the ‘time’ category. How in fact do you create a ‘cultural melting pot’ with regards to a public policy? On the other hand, the researchers and institutions involved in the study play a ‘clear’ mediation function in that the results are being socialized in a wide variety of forms.

GUSTAVO: To me the issue has two distinct, but interconnected components. The degree of frustration can be minimized if the young people are given a realistic assessment of how permeable institutions are to absorbing their deliberations at the outset. Another factor is the maturity necessary for them to understand that in political participation you don’t always get or win what you want (which I suppose the method’s educational component must contribute to, although not necessarily resolve). Among other things, the deliberations that may be constructed or predominate in one group’s Dialogue may be different from the demands arising from the groups overall – or existing in society. Therefore, they are unlikely to be given priority, even in contexts where democratic policy-making processes prevail.

SUZANNE: I agree. The challenge is that we do not know how far the research results will be taken into consideration by responsible politicians. In the case of the Dialogues in Brazil, we knew that the Lula government’s National Youth Secretariat was interested and that there was an opportunity to influence policies and programmes. We could guarantee the young people that their opinions would be aggregated in a report and that their voices would be heard by decision-makers. In Canada, we sent a copy of the report to all the participants together with a letter telling them who had been informed of the results and when. The young people could then be sure their voices were recorded and know that the organizers followed up on the work. We also told them clearly at the end of the Dialogues that they should keep tabs on decision-makers: democracy does not mean that whenever we give an opinion the authorities will act the way we want them to. In order for things to change, you have to engage, through whatever path you choose.

Without a doubt the Dialogues are an intervention in relation to complex political processes where various factors come into play. In both Brazil and Canada, civil-society organizations, collaborating with researchers, the media and others can play an important role in giving citizens a voice, creating conditions to influence decision-making processes and/or to broaden the reach of the dialogue in media networks and in communities. In Brazil, you have achieved a lot in that respect, and we can learn from you.

LIVIA: Without a doubt, Brazil has experimented with many different ways for citizens to intervene in political deliberations. The sectorial councils are one example and participatory budgets are another. Nonetheless, studies show that numerous stumbling blocks must be surmounted if these arrangements are really going to gain a significant role in the decision-making process. Politicians are rather unresponsive to electorate influence, which generally lacks legitimacy with the administrative ‘machine’.

Along with that there is this whole rhetoric, which is definitely hegemonic in society, which holds people responsible for solving their problems. This accountability is expressed particularly strongly in relation to marginalized groups. Only by activating their own resources, ‘rolling up their sleeves’, as some of the young people said during the Dialogues, is it possible to improve the conditions of their lives and escape poverty. In that way, calls to participate have less to do with deliberation and decision-making than with engaging in some social activity to ‘improve’ the life conditions of the ‘excluded’. ‘Participation’ has thus become rather ambiguous terrain where the political and social planes intermingle. Participating has become synonymous with implementing a service and deploying individual resources to benefit the community. Participation in the public sphere as a place for speaking out, for clashes among differing opinions, as a plural space where interests are negotiated with a view to taking the decisions that are intrinsic to collective living is therefore lost sight of. In that regard, we should remember Hannah Arendt’s warnings about the need to separate social and political matters, as well as private and public spheres.

The Dialogues can represent spaces open to expressing and valuing differences of opinion, as well as public spaces for negotiating and constructing consensus. Confidence that everyone has the ability to give opinions and argue them in public seems to me to be at the root of the Dialogue proposal. Once again, it is worth remembering Hannah Arendt’s thinking on social situations and the political conditions that prevent individuals from formulating and expressing opinions.

NILTON: Perhaps we should explore the relationship between public and private further and leave that contrast or ambiguity ‘open’, because it is what imbues the human condition. What is contradictory, (un)sayable, or forbidden is as present in moments of research as in young people’s (and our own) daily lives. We are thinking about how what the young people say can be brought out ‘explicitly’, but in all its richness and complexity. That can perhaps help us understand the participatory ‘process’ in all of its countless possibilities which are not included in the more classic view (participation in the public sphere, in collective struggles, in claiming rights be granted etc.), but rather take place in mini-territories (school, family, neighbourhood, dance associations, music groups, churches, ecology and so on).

LIVIA: In my view, the Dialogue was more successful during the morning, when the young people were asked to discuss school, work, culture and leisure on the basis of their experiences since these are issues where they all have formed some opinion. In the afternoon, when the theme for discussion was participation, the exchange of opinions was less significant since the subject in most cases does not form part of their experience, is an abstract topic and, as we have seen, is full of ambiguities. Therefore it was difficult to make any interpretation in terms of the research data. Personally, I think that one important datum was discovering precisely that the young people do not consider ‘participation’ to be a significant theme that they think about. Rather, it is up to us researchers to interpret that datum in light of, among other things, the results of other studies on the subject.

GUSTAVO: This calls to mind what Bourdieu calls ‘imposition of the problematic’ in the provocative essay Public opinion does not exist. Even though in that case he is talking about public-opinion surveys, the problem that Livia has noted of abstracting themes in the middle of a Dialogue process is one example of how this issue can arise in qualitative research as well.

SUZANNE: Even though in Canada the discourse may be full of appeals to citizens to participate, government channels are generally quite guarded or even resistant to significant participation, unless they have encountered no major resistance to implementing a public policy (for instance, increased education costs or acceptance of nuclear energy) or if implementing their priorities requires citizens’ engagement. In spite of this, there are ‘model’ decision-makers in various institutions who are influential and really interested in changing the paradigm and the practice on specific issues of importance to citizens. One has to identify and work with these people, with whoever has some influence and is willing to act. Without that, we run the risk of adding more cynicism to the ‘fake’ participation process.

LIVIA: On the one hand, the Dialogue was observed to ‘produce a shift in the focus of [participants’] thinking, from private matters to public affairs, enabling them to express a critical analysis and an appreciation for collective action, and to situate themselves as subjects of thought and action (the Dialogue Day awakened them to the importance of thinking and taking a position with regard to the situation in Brazil’).⁴ On the other hand, it was said that ‘young people tend to generically formulate participation (the path and the actions) for youth. There is a tendency for them not to see themselves as subjects of action on the path they choose, perhaps because they do not feel capable, in terms of real individual action, of actually intervening in real situations’.⁵

SUZANNE: How can they be made to feel responsible for acting both individually and collectively, and to see themselves as actors? That is one of the most important challenges in this deliberative process. It is relatively easy to identify what others (governments) should do. It is more difficult to acknowledge that, as a young citizen, I can make choices that I must live with: I can act or not, but how and with what consequences? The quality of the Manual and the group facilitation count for a lot, because it is necessary to stimulate their imaginations, elicit options and also deliberate on the personal choices and their consequences, and at the same to respect the participants. It is not easy. Do you have any ideas on that?

NILTON: It is possible to detect levels of participation and acceptance of responsibility in the Dialogues, both in minor matters and in larger ones. Examples of solidarity-based activities in education and health were extremely important in bringing young people to speak about their ‘lived experience’ in their countless, diverse situations. Perhaps ‘stimulating the imagination’ should start there. Especially in the small groups, we found young people looking for solutions to situations of that type. When they come to having to formulate policy more comprehensively, then it is up to the facilitators to act appropriately. In this way it may be possible to create conditions for young people to formulate creative proposals and not just grievances (blaming the adult world), both in the public/State sphere and in private matters.

LIVIA: Establishing subjects as actors is an important issue. What makes individuals feel concerned about a given issue and ‘prevented’ from acting and publicly taking a position? The factors that theories of social movements speak of include defending interests, the ability to envisage future scenarios and to choose rationally among possible alternatives, as well as the availability of material and symbolic resources. Under what conditions does collective action come about? How is it possible to stimulate individuals to become active subjects?

I would risk the hypothesis that, in Brazil today, young people are subjects of word and action, but of words and actions that take place in separate spaces (subordinate public spheres) which do not correspond to the normative definitions of the adult world. This ‘speech’ is expressed, for example, through music, dance and graffiti. Risk behaviours, such as drug use, may be considered moments of experimentation to nullify the separation between body and reason which is so characteristic of Western culture. Therefore these behaviours may express demands and a search for new meanings.

During the Dialogue, young people identify Path No. 3, which corresponds to youth groups mostly working in culture and communication, and which in fact attracts the most participants, as the ‘fun’ path. Does this identification of this path of action with no commitment, not reproduce the dominant discourse on what is considered legitimate participation for the ‘good of the community’?

SUZANNE: I agree.

GUSTAVO: In cognitive social psychology, the theory of moral development put forward by Lawrence Kohlberg in the wake of a germinal study that the epistemologist Jean Piaget had published in 1933 (The moral judgement of the child), sustains that there is a development path running roughly from heteronomy to moral autonomy by way of three socio-moral points of view. These are the pre-conventional level, where individuals are concerned with their own interests and do not perceive the existence or importance of moral conventions and rules for living in society; the conventional level, where the individual’s attitude is to maintain the social order and the status quo; and, finally, the post-conventional level, where – ideally – a critical perception of the historicity of moral norms and laws underpins a position of individual freedom with social responsibility, making it possible for autonomous subjects to emerge as potential agents of change of the present state of affairs.

Although this course is potentially open to everyone, the conditions and the sociocultural context of one’s life are decisive factors in whether or not one advances through the stages. Frequent exposure to dialogue situations among peers facilitates genuine role-playing – the practice of putting oneself in someone else’s place – and is therefore regarded as a strong driving force in the development of moral autonomy. From that standpoint, the Dialogue methodology is perfectly attuned to the educational goal of forming active citizens. However, practical experience with applying Kohlberg’s theory in middle schools in the United States indicates that moral development occurs gradually over the course of months or years, which would suggest that participation in one or two Dialogue days would be insufficient to produce this type of maturation.

LIVIA: There’s one last point I wanted to raise, returning to our opening remarks. Overlapping among the distinct functions of facilitator, animator and researcher led to many doubts among the people responsible for the Dialogues in Brazil. ‘The posture of the facilitator and the team came to exert considerable influence over the young people’s thinking. Although the purpose of the Dialogue (as mentioned many times since the invitation) has been to learn their opinions, on several occasions what one sees is that young people’s expectations of the adults are very much mirrored in the teaching-learning relationship connected with their everyday interaction with teachers in the classroom’.⁶

SUZANNE: We also addressed that issue. What kind of relationship between the facilitator and the young people can work to favour dialogue? The young people we consulted before holding our Dialogues thought it was important for the small groups to be animated by young people. They also talked about some of the features necessary in plenary animators:

1. they should be perceived and acknowledged to be independent of government;
   
   
2. they should make the young people comfortable, in a horizontal relationship; and
   
   
3. they should make the young people see themselves in the issues raised, by using language that is not too academic and common expressions that young people also use, for example.

We opted to use co-animation where young adults take a leading role in the educational part and are accompanied by a professional animator in the large group. This assumes that the study has experienced animators available who can transit comfortably between the educational role, active listening and deliberative questioning.

LIVIA: The facilitators’ experience is certainly an indispensable ingredient. Personally, I am in favour of regulating the profession of animator/facilitator. This would formalize their training and acknowledge the important role they play in many projects, both governmental and other, while also guaranteeing the quality of their work. Rather, the idea in Brazil is that anyone can be a ‘facilitator’, provided they intend to relate horizontally to the group. I believe, on the contrary, that it is a very important profession and therefore should be recognized and remunerated appropriately.

On the other hand, I think that Brazil has come a long way in using a variety of techniques to animate groups. These techniques go beyond words and involve the body, music, and body language. That is why I think that we could intervene more in the dynamics of the group, bringing in moments of play to help participants mesh and to optimize the time available for them to express themselves using a wide variety of registers.

SUZANNE: In our Dialogue with young people we include some group-animation techniques largely inspired by our exchanges on the subject. These include graphic animation, theatre, and music (percussion). We still have a lot to learn from you in this area.

NILTON: In Brazil, we have a tradition centring on the animator ‘category’ deriving from popular education which has its roots in the late 1950s and was strongly consolidated in the 60s. This was a time that converged strongly on the construction of a developmentalist national project. ‘Cultural animators’ became important, leading figures in the emancipation processes of the popular classes. Paulo Freire, who motivated many authors and social practices that advocate ‘dialogue’ as a source of methodological inspiration, reinforced the combination of ‘the educational component, active listening and deliberative questioning’ (Learning to Question: A Pedagogy of Liberation, Continuum 1989).

Regulating the profession of animator/facilitator may incur risks around the order of intensity of the engagement and, at the same time, of autonomy from ideological aspects. Its importance seems to me to lie in animator training that builds on a possible, harmonious combination of background life experience and theoretical and methodological training.

SUZANNE: Paulo Freire inspired the work of animators all over the world! The outlook and skills used in a Freire-based approach are powerful and represent a solid base for building a practice of dialogue. The Dialogue methodology that we adopted attempts to revive the rich tradition of dialogue, which has been forgotten in favour of ideological dispute and civic exclusion. It is evolving and I hope that this kind of conversation can enrich the practice in our countries.

Mediating between results and public policies

The concern over using the research results for public-policy purposes is of fundamental importance for this kind of survey, particularly because of its focus. Martins (1989) has already sounded this alert in his studies on social movements. In scientific research, he highlights the ‘radical shift from the status of object to the status of objective’. He says: ‘In intellectual production, that shift means emancipating the other from the status of object by emancipating ourselves, as intellectuals, from the status of tutors of knowledge’ (p. 137).

From there, we can advance ideas about our ‘role’ in future developments. One of the contributions can be connected with the ‘application’ of research ‘findings’, by virtue of both the originality of the methodology used and the feedback that the young people gave us. However, we do not imagine that Brazil is currently open to this kind of interpretation and ‘application’ by those who formulate and ‘execute’ public policy at any level, federal, state or municipal. In any case, even if it were, this would not take the form of visible acknowledgement of documents forwarded by the institutions responsible for the research.

This text assumes the posture of a necessary mediating role between young people and public-policy makers. This is evident when we clearly state that the idea that youth is – permanently or temporarily – ‘subdued’ is a thing of the past. The study also resulted in interconnections in the adult world (among the survey formulators and our institutions) which proved highly beneficial, not just for us, but for the young people as well.

That said, we can claim to be producing a document that, by consolidating a field of knowledge on youth, affects both the academic/intellectual field and the political field. However in the latter case, the seats of public power are affected by the information in circulation rather then in a cause-and-effect manner.

Is that a limitation? We do not think so. Working with the notion of limits, of ‘finitude’, is also a learning process in knowledge production because this study is based on a situation that is very definitely circumscribed in time and place (seven metropolitan regions and the Federal District, during the year 2005), and on a limited number of participants.

We may perhaps be able to look for interactive situations where this collective paper can be discussed with public-policy makers and managers, taking inspiration from what Alberto Melucci says. ‘You can adopt someone else’s point of view only if you are aware of your own position in the field of social relations, discourses and languages. One additional detail: the other side of the dialogical option, in both civil and social life, is to be aware that you are working at the limit. That option has political consequences in that no single perspective can hope to play a totalizing role. Such a role can only be imposed by exerting force and violence directly’ (Melucci 1994: 195).

We feel we have performed the task in part. We have tried to gather the viewpoint of the young people we surveyed, but without neglecting the conditions of our own status in the process. Another contribution is in the field of knowledge production on the subject of Youth. This contribution was made with a view to the goals stated at the start of this paper and giving prominence to the methodology used as a way of listening to (and, using the techniques implemented in the course of Dialogue Day, of recording) a sector of society that has much to say about its demands and its actions. That contribution is directed to the agencies, both within and outside the academic circuit, that shape young people, and to public and private agencies engaged in implementing actions targeting youth.

Notes

¹  Ibase/Pólis, Relatório Global/Metodologia/Diálogos no Brasil, p. 9.

²  Abramo, Helena Wendel & Branco, Petro Paulo Martoni (eds.) Retratos da Juventude Brasileira: análises de uma pesquisa nacional, Instituto Cidadania/Editora Fundação Perseu Abramo (São Paulo, 2005).

³  Regional report, Recife.

⁴  Regional report, Rio de Janeiro.

⁵  Regional report, Belo Horizonte.

⁶  Regional report, Salvador.

References

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Fischer, Nilton Bueno (Ed.), Relatório qualitativo – Grupos de Diálogo da Região Metropolitana de Porto Alegre (CD-ROM). Research Project Juventude Brasileira e Democracia: participação, esferas e políticas públicas (2005).

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