The elaboration of public planning with the participation of civil society has expanded at the
federal, state and municipal levels, and has been based, above all, on the experience of Porto
Alegre-RS with Participatory Budgeting, which began to be practiced in the late 1980s. The
practice of participatory democracy in public policy decisions has already reached many
countries. Thus, the effects of participation in public planning have been the target of many
studies that also seek to understand other aspects in these contexts, such as the functioning of
mechanisms that allow for inclusion of participants, interaction and decision making in these
processes. Motivated by this prosperous conjuncture of knowledge seeking, this work has as
its object of study the planning of the city of Palmas-TO, with the objective of verifying what
was the contribution of the civil community in the construction of the multiannual plans, in
the period that goes from 2013 to 2019. For this task, we used primary and secondary
documentary data sources, as well as information collected through semi-structured
interviews. The description and analysis of these data, in addition to relying on a theoretical
basis aligned with the theme of this study, relied specifically on the analytical model
conceived by Fung (2006), called the cube of democracy. Therefore, after intense and indepth investigation it was found that the performance of civil society members in the
construction of the 2014-2017 and 2018-2021 PPAs of Palmas-TO Local Government was
positive, although these people participated in a small number and with access only to the first
stage of carrying out these processes, that is, to presential and virtual public hearings, and for
a period of less than two months. Once many public actions devised or defended by these
actors were inserted in these plans. So, civil society interaction in these two processes has
reached a level capable of producing practical results, although it has not been able to directly
reach the decision-making process in these contexts.
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