Participatory governance has been used to direct public budget and policy priorities. Grassroots politics also offers democratic pathways for negotiations over permits for businesses such as mining. In this paper, I focus on notions of time in policy-meetings between a mining company, the affected community in the district of Miguel Burnier, Brazil, and mediators between them – members of a municipal council for cultural heritage. I used ethnographic data to investigate whether participatory councils could abridge temporalities and offer a compromise. While the company offered improvements in quality of life in an uncertain future and the council needed to preserve local cultural heritage, residents suffered from pressing problems in the present: depopulation, pollution, and unemployment. My findings show that participation could not solve residents’ socio-economic problems efficiently, for these same problems affected their ability to voice concerns and wait for compensations. Relaxing immediate economic pressures improves the process of participation.
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