FAL’s history

On January 2001, the 1st World Social Forum was held in Porto Alegre, gathering activists, intellectuals and different movements from all over the world determined to propose alternatives to groupthink and neoliberal globalization. At the same time, we carried out the 1st Forum of Local Authorities for Social Inclusion. This event hosted around 180 authorities and representatives from European, Latin American and African cities willing to create an open debate about the difficulties of local public management in a world of social exclusion and growing inequalities. The Forum of Local Authorities assumes, basically, the fact that cities became main agents of the globalization process. Even more, they are agents capable of building and developing public management alternatives together with civil society. The Forum of Local Authorities for Social Inclusion challenged local rulers from all over the world to take up a political place and assume their role by implementing inclusion-oriented public policies aiming at democratizing wealth and power.

Even with the limitations of local power in the struggle against the misery caused by neoliberal macroeconomic policies, the local administrators assembled wrote the Charter of Porto Alegre, where they state that "the cities are important instruments to stop the social exclusion processes, to develop inclusion policies and to provide answers to problems that hamper citizenship. They are a decisive landmark to promote and consolidate processes of participative democracy and public control over the State, breeding citizenship solidary consciousness... " .