Rights and citizenship in Brazil: The challenges for civil society

Participation, "Rights" and "Power Relations" are operated by Brazilian NGOs and social movements as articulated and indissoluble dimensions of the same political process of fight for citizenship. Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) have been playing a key role in the building of a more democratic governance system in Brazil. After two decades of intense advocacy work in participatory arenas for influencing the decision making of public policies, civil society organisations have developed interesting critical reflections of the potentials and limits of these spaces of social control: they are arenas for political dispute and not an end in themselves in the exercise of citizenship. This debate becomes more complex in relation to the new political context of a (expected to be) left-oriented government, after the election of the new president, from the Labour Party.