The claim and the construction of participatory public spaces multiplied in the 1990s, due to political openness and legal markers, which represented, to a certain extent, the consolidation of civil society s desire to establish spaces for dialogue between the State and civil society. These spaces expressed the institutionalized form of a new political culture of participation, in the sense of guaranteeing the universalization of the rights, guaranteed by the State. However, the process of social participation, conquered and constituted in Brazil, is taken as complex and contradictory and was permeated by the risks of depoliticization of action, emptying of political content, by clientelistic politics, by the neoliberal offensive. With a view to deepening the problematic / complexity of the phenomenon social participation in the Baixada Fluminense. Thus, this dissertation seeks to analyze, from the perspective of Social Service, the process of Social Participation, in the Iguaçu Project based on the actions developed in the axis of mobilization and community organization. We used as a methodological basis qualitative research, which through semi-structured interviews opened a listening channel that enabled a greater understanding of the social subjects perceptions regarding advances and limits in the process of social participation. Since the idea proposed would be to analyze if the channels of social participation built through the Iguaçu Project were able to break with the culture of bureaucratization and whether or not they succeeded in guaranteeing dialogues between government and civil society to incorporate necessary strategies and agreements. This is because the hypothesis proposed was that social participation exposed tensions, disputes and conflicts about strategies, agreements and bureaucratization, so their effectiveness contributed to change the political culture in the region after political opening. Finally, we believe that in a national and local context marked by authoritarianism, this research on the channels of participation and the struggle for social participation will contribute to broaden the analysis of those interested in the democratic practices developed in the Baixada Fluminense.