ELLA Guide: Citizen Participation in Latin America: Innovations to Strengthen Governance
ELLA is the Evidence and Lessons from Latin America programme
Abstract
Boosted in part by the region’s democratic transitions, citizen participation initiatives in Latin America have become increasingly common throughout the region. These initiatives, promoted both by governments and civil society, have sought to strengthen governance, enhance accountability and control, and improve social justice, ensuring that governments’ funds and policies address relevant social issues and benefit socially excluded groups. Citizen observatories, social control mechanisms, social audits, citizen consultations, local citizen councils, citizen assessments of service delivery: these are just some of the mechanisms enabling citizens to actively participate in public life throughout Latin America. This Guide presents some of the key citizen participation initiatives in the region, including analysing their outcomes, lessons learned and the contextual factors enabling them, while also highlighting key publications and organisations to help connect readers with additional resources to learn more.
Key Lessons:
Legal frameworks favourable to citizen participation, such as provisions in constitutions as well as specific laws governing decentralisation, municipal management, public budgeting and citizen participation, are useful as the foundation for the design and implementation of specific citizen participation mechanisms. The Latin American experience underscores the importance of pushing for their enactment.
The Latin American experience also shows that government and public officials' political will is crucial for ensuring that these citizen participation mechanisms exist, are properly funded, and above all are effective, meaning that the citizen input is indeed used to improve policy design and implementation.
Likewise, as the existence of legal frameworks does not always translate into empowered citizen participation, it is often necessary for civil society to keep advocating for the implementation of effective citizen participation mechanisms to bend political resistance and to leverage public authorities into taking into account of civil society's voice in their decision making.
Citation
Oropeza, J.; Perron, M. ELLA Guide: Citizen Participation in Latin America: Innovations to Strengthen Governance. ELLA, Practical Action Consulting, Lima, Peru (2013)