26
Declining State of Democratic Institutions and the Implications for Governance
of citizen participation may seem much more a chore than a privilege.
The thought of coming home after a long day of work, only to go out
again to attend a meeting or a planning session or a budgeting session
or to do community service can be considered burdensome.
The first step in the process of building an engaged citizenry is to
educate them on the roles of government. It is often surprising to see
that the roles and responsibilities of the various levels of government
are unclear to most people. This causes people to reward the central
government for any small benefit in their lives, while showering blame
upon local government for everything that goes wrong. This plays
directly into the hands of populists and is largely responsible for
propping up authoritarian leaders in Latin America. For this reason,
good civic education programs such as those carried out by Costa
Rica’s Inter-American Institute for Human Rights (among others) have
been able to change perception as to the role of government and the
responsibility of citizens.
When the local government’s role is clear to the citizens, they are
then able to participate with a realistic understanding of what this
participation can achieve. In few other areas is citizen participation as
critical as in that of personal security. In Mexico, IRI worked with civil
society organizations and local partner
Movimiento Pro-Vecino
(MPV)
to develop strategies to address the key issue of public safety, engaging
citizens and government alike in the design and implementation of
new initiatives aimed at addressing this challenge. IRI worked with
MPV to hold community safety seminars with the theme of Together
for our CommUNITY in the three most crime-ridden districts of the
municipality of San Jacinto Amilpas in Oaxaca state. Over the course
of three months, localized action in a block-by-block strategy resulted
in local buy-in of the program with citizens implementing community
safety activities that included enrolling members of every street into a
neighborhood safety committee which focused on cleaning streets and
painting over graffiti, and maintaining contact with members of the
police force. Through the civil society activities, the citizens actively
advocated on behalf of their needs before the municipality. Citizens
