Participatory Democracy proposes a new institutionality
The city of Bogota hosted the 4th National Meeting of Local Planning and Participatory Budgeting in June 2011, which took place after the 3rd Meeting of the International Platform for Participatory Budgeting.
The event permitted to reaffirm the commitments undertaken with the network and to involve new territories, municipalities and departments, by emphasizing the idea of a participatory construction of the territories based on rights and the dialog with international experiences coming from Brazil, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Argentina, Canada, United States, Spain, Portugal and Africa, belonging to the platform of the FAL Network. As a result of this meeting, the Platform commits itself, under the “Declaration of Bogota”, to consolidate a model of global work for local action in the field of direct democracy. The proposals of this meeting aim at defining a model of citizen participation considering “Participatory Democracy as an alternative for the commodification of politics and the privatisation of the public sphere promoted by neoliberal globalisation”; and for doing so, it suggests to carry out measures developing a new democratic institutionality which reinforce citizenship and public institutions. In this sense, the Platform proposes to consider Participatory Budgeting as a political-pedagogical tool including the concepts of self-regulation, inclusion, with spaces for deliberation, which are binding and mobilizing.
The conclusions of this event point out that the progress towards direct democracy is achieved through “the incorporation of participatory budgeting in the agendas of political parties, social movements, civil society and the State action in other territorial levels”, making a step further towards the decentralisation of the state stated in the Declaration of Malaga, a text of international reference in the field of Participatory Democracy.
Even if participatory budgeting already has many years of history, the international platform is a young space for international debate around these tools. The growing articulation of national networks of Participatory Democracy has allowed the creation of this international network which promotes, apart from meeting and exchange, the creation of new national networks, the reinforcement of the current ones and the enlargement of the capacities of the International Platform in order to become a tool for local actors.
INFO OP, the first international information system for Participatory budgeting. www.infoop.org
The INFO OP tool, developed by the Association In-Loco of Portugal, is both a mechanism for mapping international experiences and the first software created at a world level for supporting the creation, management, monitoring and evaluation of Participatory Budgeting processes. Even if it is not considered as a manual or a model of PB experiences, it aims at offering support elements for the organisation of this king of processes, based on accuracy and quality of the dynamics of participation.
Apart from the international observatory and the information system on participatory budgeting, the tool offers web support to the International Platform and the PARLOCAL project, a school of participatory policies between Europe and Latin America.
