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Participation as an Essential Element of an Active Civil Society
environment, decentralization, citizen responsibility, public safety,
public administration, economic development and housing. Currently,
the program is implemented in many cities in Colombia, as well as
some municipalities in Brazil.
A Poor Example of Citizen Participation: Failures of the Socialist
Communal Councils in Venezuela
Communal councils are social organizational structures created by the
Venezuelan government in 2006. They were legally institutionalized
that same year through the adoption of the Law of Communal
Councils,
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and defined in the following manner:
“Within the constitutional framework of participatory
and protagonist democracy communal councils are
mechanisms for participation, articulation and integration
for the different communitarian organizations, social
groups and citizens, which allow the organized citizenry to
directly manage the administration of public policies and
projects designed to respond to the needs and aspirations
of communities in the construction of an equitable and
socially just society.”
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Pedro Dávila Fernández warns that “the communal councils, as
new entities of a decentralized system, have risen anarchically since
2006. They burgeoned without a legal base that was adequate to
the magnitude, importance and transcendence they should have.
They spread out throughout the national landscape as experimental
mushrooms. Initially, they crept up from within the confines of
conspiracy. Nuanced with excluding and partisan criteria they violated
constitutional principles.”
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Research carried out by the Venezuelan Economic Legislation Editorial
highlights the following:
