2010

Minga citizen

The context

After years of economic, political and social crisis in Ecuador, the present Government proposed a reform in all of these areas; for example that the National Constitutional Assembly has broader citizen participation. At these moments we could redefine the role of the State, the development model, instances of participation or the powers of local governments, for example.

Ecuador has seen how have recently activated processes of social and citizen participation at the local level, both in a participatory way as well as the formation of Assembly plans. However, a preliminary analysis of various experiences in this field notes that in many cases, the participatory schemes do not have a high level of compliance, and stay as guidelines without indicators to measure compliance. In the majority of cases there is no participatory budget, or is very small in relation to the municipal budget. On the other hand, accountability and social control mechanisms are generally emerging or non-existent.

The project to evaluate

The project citizen Minga. Democracy, participation and social change: towards a network of active citizenship in various localities of the Ecuador aims to strengthen, systematize and coordinate the existing experiences of local participation through a nationwide network. It is intended, that this network develop an agenda of priority issues, an advocacy strategy and actions that make visible the network and priorities for action. This will make easier the political impact of the network on the definition of a new architecture of the Ecuadorian State, which bets on decentralization, and promotes the participation of the population and their sectors organised at the local level.

Through evaluation, we will analyse the methodology and the results of the activities carried out, as well as the systematization of the process, in order to draw conclusions about the results and make recommendations.