Liderança | Empreendedorismo | Gestão | Planeamento | Estratégia | Escrita para Financiamento | Especialista em financiamento para desenvolvimento | Orador internacional
13 de dezembro de 2025
The World Forum Favelas emerges at a crucial moment for global civil society, as debates over inequality, climate justice and democratic backsliding increasingly intersect in the everyday lives of residents of informal settlements (Cities Alliance, 2022; World Resources Institute, 2025). Between 11 and 14 December 2025, the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is hosting the second edition of this international forum, bringing together delegates from more than seventy countries to co‑define a global agenda grounded in the priorities, needs and goals of under‑privileged communities (CUFA Global, 2025a; Empresa Brasil de Comunicação, 2025). This gathering signals a shift from viewing favelas and slums as passive recipients of policy towards recognising them as transnational political actors capable of shaping narratives, solutions and governance arrangements that affect millions of people (CUFA Global, 2025a; CUFA Global, 2025b).
For decades, top‑down interventions in informal settlements have prioritised macro‑infrastructure, real‑estate interests or short‑term visibility over the lived priorities of residents, often resulting in displacement, social fragmentation and unsustained projects once external funding fades (Mitra & Batley, 2016). A bottom‑up approach contests this paradigm by positioning residents, grassroots organisations and community leaders as the primary authors of problem diagnosis, agenda‑setting and solution design, rather than as sources of local feedback to externally defined strategies (Cities Alliance, 2022; Mitra & Batley, 2016). Evidence from cities in the Global South shows that when communities co‑produce upgrading and service delivery, interventions tend to better reflect everyday needs such as safety, mobility, livelihoods and social infrastructures, and exhibit higher levels of legitimacy and durability over time (French et al., 2019; Urban Transformations, 2016).
Brazilian favelas illustrate both the failures of technocratic, securitised approaches and the transformative potential of community‑driven initiatives (World Resources Institute, 2025). Experiences of participatory urban integration in Rio de Janeiro demonstrate that meaningful community participation in planning can mitigate forced evictions, reduce conflict and generate more context‑sensitive solutions in housing, public space and social services (Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, n.d.). At the same time, cultural and educational movements led by organisations based in favelas have expanded individual and collective agency, reframed public perceptions and built new forms of democratic participation that challenge racialised and class‑based hierarchies at the city and national level (Voz das Comunidades, 2025; Williamson, 2025).
Within this landscape, the second World Forum Favelas functions as an institutional experiment in transnational bottom‑up governance, placing favela and peripheral communities at the centre of global conversations usually dominated by states, corporations and traditional NGOs (CUFA Global, 2025a; Empresa Brasil de Comunicação, 2025). By convening leaders from dozens of countries to share practices and formulate joint positions, the forum creates a counter‑public sphere in which under‑privileged communities articulate their own priorities on issues ranging from public security and social protection to digital inclusion and climate adaptation (CUFA Global, 2025a; CUFA Global, 2025b). The choice of Rio de Janeiro as host city is symbolically and politically significant, given its dense network of community organisations, its history of state violence and neglect in favelas, and its emerging role as a reference point for international debates on urban inequality and peripheral protagonism (Voz das Comunidades, 2025; Williamson, 2025).
For non‑profit organisations, funders and policymakers, a genuinely bottom‑up World Forum Favelas poses both an opportunity and a challenge (Cities Alliance, 2022; Mitra & Batley, 2016). It invites international actors to move beyond consultative practices towards shared governance arrangements in which agenda‑setting power, resources and recognition are redistributed to community‑based organisations and favela leaders (French et al., 2019; Cities Alliance, 2022). It also demands new accountability frameworks that treat commitments made in Rio de Janeiro between 11 and 14 December 2025 not as symbolic endorsements, but as binding reference points for subsequent programmes, investments and diplomatic processes affecting under‑privileged urban populations (CUFA Global, 2025a; Empresa Brasil de Comunicação, 2025). In this sense, the importance of a bottom‑up approach is not merely methodological; it is a question of epistemic justice and political equality in the construction of local and global futures (Mitra & Batley, 2016; Cities Alliance, 2022)
References:
French, M., Popal, A., Rahimi, H., Popuri, S., & Turkstra, J. (2019). Institutionalizing participatory slum upgrading: A case study of urban co-production from Afghanistan, 2002–2016. Environment and Urbanization, 31(2), 447–466. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247818791043
Mitra, S., & Batley, R. (2016). What is the evidence on top-down and bottom-up approaches in improving access to basic services for the urban poor? UK Department for International Development. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5832d330e5274a7022000015/SR_-_Q7_Final_Draft_for_Publication.pdf
Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. (n.d.). Community participation in urban integration of Rio de Janeiro favelas [Capstone project]. New York University. https://wagner.nyu.edu
