More than one thousand participants from nearly 60 municipalities from Colombia participated in the Second National Meeting on Local Planning and Participatory Budgeting.
Source: Corporación Viva la Ciudadanía
More than one thousand participants from nearly 60 municipalities from Colombia participated in the Second National Meeting on Local Planning and Participatory Budgeting.
The event was considered as a framework for the reinforcement of democracy in Colombia and around the world.
The National Network of Local Planning and Participatory budgeting congratulates the regional and local governments, social organisations and leaders that got to gather in Yumbo -the Colombian industrial capital- more than one thousand people representing the processes of local planning and participatory budgeting being implemented nowadays in that country. Therefore, we are consolidating a process which is against the management models having a monopoly in charge of the decision-making levels. Instead of that, we want to achieve a different model allowing the community to make decisions too.
One of the key aspects of this meeting is “the importance of allowing communities to build their public agenda in order to get higher management and negotiation skills for the development of their territories in collaboration with public entities”. This aspect was pointed out in the plenary session by the group nº2, which gathered many experiences related to citizen participation and the institutional character of participatory budgeting.
During this second meeting, the participants were informed about the experiences of governance of every city council and local government aiming at including people’s expectations in their development plans through participatory budgeting as a tool for democratising power.
The mayors, together with their public officials, Territorial Planning Committees, social organisations, town councillors, Communal Action Committees and other delegates coming from Pasto, Medellín, Bogotá, Barrancabermeja, Ocaña, Yumbo and other municipalities, shared their strengths and weaknesses with the rest of the country. They plead for the autonomy of the territories in order to keep increasing the decisions’ level through participatory budgeting and to establish strategies for overcoming the limitations imposed by the recentralizing model to the territorial entities.
In this sense, the participants believe that in order to achieve the transformation of public management, the rulers must focus on “orienting the efforts of local Administration towards the strengthening of public power legitimacy and credibility and the consolidation of participatory democracy processes”.
These are some of the considerations pointed out in the framework of the National Network of Local Planning and Participatory Budgeting, which promotes the establishment of bonds of trust between the government institutions willing to implement new management models and the citizens, men and women, which participate in their local development processes.
In his speech, Jaime Castro stressed: "The exercise of power, out of habit, produces centralisation, not decentralisation. It is essential that the last one is led, with a strong political will, by the government, the congress and the parties."
As a consequence of this meeting, a new stage for the National Network members starts: the consolidation of regional groups able to establish new dynamics for citizen participation via local planning and participatory budgeting.
The next meeting will take place in Medellín, during the second week of November. We will be there once again and will keep on consolidating this political challenge, which gathers all the Colombians committed with a transparent, effective and participatory development management.
