The ways of popular participation: Understanding this process in a poor community in Rio de Janeiro - Brazil

This paper focuses on the participatory process of a low-income community located in the west zone of Rio de Janeiro, from the perspective of emerging and established community leaders, reflecting on what promotes and hinders this process, as well as on its contributions to the individual and collective empowerment of its residents. The research was developed as a thesis to obtain the Masters degree in Psychossociology of Communities and Social Ecology. In addition, it also analyses how a local intervention of multiple strategies promoted by an NGO influenced the community´s mobilization and participation. Based on the ethnographic method, participant observation and in-depth interviews the research were conducted in 2005.  There are about 8,000 inhabitants living in unacceptable conditions of habitability and in a context marked by the lack of basic rights of citizenship. Our data reveals that this community presents two types of participation: one based on the passive participation of people who seek an individual and material gain through the lense of reciprocity; the other motivated by individual and collective empowerment of community leaders. We conclude that the local participation is based on an exchange relationship, wheteher material or symbolic, where the attainment of the individual gain prevails for residents. Those results help to evaluate until what extend the presence of the NGO have contributed to the individual and collective empowerment of the people who took part in the NGO’s activities. They also show the boundaries of the NGO’s program in this territory, and the women’s predominance in participatory actions. Finally, it was observed that the local participatory process is based in material and symbolic reciprocity among the inhabitants. 

Key words: Participation, reciprocity, local development, Health Promotion. Social Movements, leadership.