The purpose of this work is to discuss the administration of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) under the perspective of the social movements and their roles in the consolidation of participative democracy. It is intended to reveal the influences of the institutional and cultural environment in the administration of NGOs, emphasizing the limits and reaches of the participative administration as to the construction of the programs of thematic action of the Centro de Agricultura Alternativa do Norte de Minas (CAA-NM). The interpretative approach was used as a theoretical-methodological perspective of social investigation, because at certain moments (time and space), some claims are more appropriate than at others, fruit of the historical process of social construction of reality. From their results, it is evident that inherent challenges to the legitimization of democracy - the question of the representation and of bureaucracy - are part of the administration of CAA-NM. For its administration to be participative and, for being an eminently political organization, to be inserted in a complex reality (social and economic inequality), it faces the inherent challenges to the legitimization of social demands starting from the political socialization. Because of this, it creates dialogue channels between the social movements and the market, state, and its own civil society, looking for to reduce the asymmetry of "social" information.