A transcript of a presentation by Azucena Morán, Research Associate, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Postdam, Germany.
+49 331 28827 701; azucena.moran@iass-potsdam.de; https://youtu.be/IKQnIL7L35o (10:25-28:00 min); Also at Puravesis Sabhava virtual webinar on July 29, 2022, moderated by late Nirmani Liyange https://www.facebook.com/citizensforumSL/videos/757600282151566.
Well, first of all, I’d like to say that I’m really honored to be here. Truly thankful to be able to share this space of resistance and transformation. The powerful pictures of communities taking the presidential house in Colombo have truly inspired me, and I’m sure many movements across the planet.
Today, I’d like to share with you some experiences from Latin America that I think might become useful or inspiring as you think about next steps, demands, and future agendas. I would like to talk to you about some processes that tried to engage everyday citizens in the radical transformation of some Latin American democracies. Especially in times of uprising and resistance. In times of governmental repression and conflict.
How have other nations of the South failed and succeeded?
I’d like to believe that Franz Fanon, who thought about the anticolonial struggles throughout the Americas, Asia and Africa, would smile at the possibilities given to us by the digital age. The possibility of strengthening solidarities across the global south.
Today, I’ll talk about participatory processes, spaces and institutions that go beyond elections and protests.
The kind of spaces that I’m talking about can be implemented by different actors like governments or local leaders or NGOs or even everyday citizens. These spaces can bring together people to set an agenda for the future, or decide on a policy or a public budget. They can crowdsource ideas for a new constitution, evaluate governmental action. They can even do all of the above. They have different forms, means, and names, but all of these processes and governance systems have something in common: they want to bring lay citizens to the decision-making space.
Two famous examples are citizen assemblies and participatory budgeting.
Citizen assemblies are spaces where everyday residents gather to create policies. Policies about climate action, policies about food security, policies about health or other reforms. They’ve become quite famous in the past years, especially in the Western world. So imagine 100 people from your town or from other parts of the country being randomly picked by, say, a computer. Imagine a big lottery: any person in the country or in the city can be chosen to come together, hear from different experts, discuss different ways of organizing our societies, deliberate, and decide on the future policies of their towns, their regions, or their country. Now imagine elected officials then implementing the policies deliberated by these groups of everyday people. Education policies or agrarian reforms imagined by people like me, like you, like your mom. Or your grandmother. Or your neighbor. Or somebody from the other side of town. Somebody you’ve never heard about.
Then we have the famous Participatory budgeting. It started in Brazil in 1989. A long time ago. It’s been implemented over 7000 times all around the globe. The idea of this process is to bring citizens together to discuss ideas and priorities of their neighborhood or their municipality. These places allow everyday people to decide how a part of the municipal or the regional budget is going to be spent. They can be online or in-person spaces, and can have a deep impact in the governance of the city. On the use of public money. On things people are able to see and feel every day. Research shows that with proper support from the organized citizenry, they can continue existing despite a change of regime or political party in office.
But participatory processes are not limited to citizen assemblies or participatory budgeting and perhaps, more importantly, they are not confined to the borders of a continent or limited to the processes imagined decades ago.
They can happen in any context. I’d like to share with you three examples of participatory practices that emerged in times of state repression, mass mobilizations, and authoritarianism. Times in which you couldn’t count on the government implementing spaces of deliberation and citizen engagement.
Consultations of Good Faith in Guatemala
First, there are Guatemala’s Consultations of Good Faith. So, for years, the Guatemalan government has criminalized indigenous peoples’ resistance against mining and other extractivist projects. They systemically persecute, intimidate and kill indigenous and environmental leaders using the state of siege, the state of prevention, attacks, arrests, harassment of journalists, forced evictions, unlawful killings. I’m sure this sounds familiar.
But not only. The government has also used and corrupted participatory processes and the right to consultation by dividing communities, spreading misinformation, and exchanging deliberation with negotiation strategies. So they take away the right of peoples to decide on the future of their territories. They try to erase historical demands like the legalization of community land in exchange of basic services, like schooling or water, which have been completely absent before these lands were to be exploited.
So in response to these attacks and the corruption of government-led spaces of participation, communities have started to develop their own consultations. They use mechanisms embedded in municipal law or international law or no law at all and turn them into a site of resistance. A place of deliberation. Participation from the grassroots. They take away the convening power from governments, and put in place their own process. In Guatemala they are called consultations of good faith.
These autonomous forms of participation and deliberation have been met by fierce repression. In some cases, they’ve been declared unconstitutional. But they have also succeeded in many ways. They’ve pushed the government and the international community to question the mechanisms in which they implement prior consultation. It’s a slow yet fierceful way of resisting. Creating, from the bottom-up, the spaces of community deliberation that the government has corrupted in its institutionalized form.
Cabildos in Chile
Second, we have the Cabildos in Chile. I can roughly translate cabildos as town halls or bottom-up open assemblies. They were the main form of organization during the Chilean mass protests of 2019 and 2020. They were the biggest protests since Chile became a democracy. These movements eventually led to the drafting a new Constitution.
Before the mass protests of 2019, there were two institutionalized processes that tried to engage citizens in gathering ideas and proposals for a new constitution. They both failed. In 2019, after the success of the first mass protest, the national coalition Unidad Social launched a call for a citizen-led national debate through local assemblies and cabildos.
Over 1200 cabildos have been registered between October 2019 and March 2020. They took place in every district of the country.
The movement convened these open, bottom-up assemblies to identify the causes behind the massive and-ever growing support for these mobilizations. The protests, in fact, gathered the biggest number of participants since Chile became a democracy.
Even though the participatory spirit of these decentralized bottom-up assemblies wasn’t part of the Constitutional Process, as many had hoped, they allowed protests to come together to a space in which they could create and formulate collective demands. To imagine together what would happen after the last protest.
Perhaps everyday citizens didn’t directly draft proposals for a new Constitution, but I’m sure time and research will tell how much these open-ended and locally-anchored processes led to deep changes in the country’s social fabric.
Let me finish with, perhaps, a gloomy but important example.
Institutionalized Citizen Assemblies, Venezula
There are many conversations today regarding the potential of institutionalizing processes of citizen assemblies. The dream of creating open democracies in which random citizens are in charge of, say, the legislative branch. Of deliberation and institutionalized participation as the solution to the failures of our democracies.
Many of them ignore the experience of countries in the Global South, like Venezuela. Venezuela’s Constitution and legal frameworks are one of the most ambitious I’ve seen in terms of citizen participation. Besides the three branches we all know: the legislative power, the judicial power, and the executive power, Venezuela has also a People’s power. Since 1999, 23 years ago, it has regarded participatory democracy as a fundamental principle of governance and citizenship. It doesn’t only include traditional mechanisms like referenda, elections, legislative initiatives, but also citizen assemblies, cooperatives, economic co-governance systems.
But the partisan instrumentalization of all of these mechanisms of participation has greatly characterized the political crisis in the country until today.
The Venezuelan crisis and its ambitious legislation shows us, perhaps, that embedding and institutionalizing forms of citizen participation is not enough. It is perhaps our collective task to try to imagine new ways in which citizen-led resistance and bottom-up deliberation can sustain and lead to better democracies, together with institutionalized forms of engagement.
To imagine new ways of what Nicole Curato calls ‘listening out’ and ‘partaking’: not only ticking boxes of inclusion in elite-driven or government-driven processes, but to listen subtle ways of expression, finding spaces in which historically marginalized communities voice their views daily- where historically marginalized communities are not forced to speak louder or perform better.
I’ll definitely keep an eye on the People’s Movements in Sri Lanka. Thank you all for listening.
Sujata 