Social participation and decision-making process in communications in Brazil: The 1 National Conference on Communications

Abstract

This article analyzes the initiative of Brazil‟s 1st National Conference onCommunications (1st CONFECOM), which took place in Brasilia on December 14-17, 2009, after its regional and state stages, along with the final stage with a nation-wide reach. This conference established a new way of debating communicationpolicies in the country, as the state, private and civil-society sectors were organized inone same forum with the purpose of jointly discussing and deciding on importanttopics of this area. The recent understanding of communications as a human rightunder the scope of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and otherevents, such as the World Social Forum and the election of Lula in 2002, entailed theemergence of a new perspective of political construction at the same level for areassuch as Health, Education and others, in which the multilateral mobilization fordecision-making has taken place – for better or worse – based on a popular claim forchanges, from which the 1st CONFECOM emerged as a direct consequence. This studyis based on a descriptive research that focused some important concepts related to thestudy on the 1st CONFECOM and the pro-democratization movement ofCommunications in Brazil, and it will also examine important areas, themes and decisionsof the 1st CONFECOM, based on official documents and analyses by researchers andactivists, as well as on the expectations and the forms of organization around the future ofdemocratic communications in the country.Keywords: Democratization of communications; policies of communications; NationalConference on Communications Submission date: 2011-02-09Acceptance date: 2011-08-10