Community Development Journal Advance Access published May 22, 2008
& Oxford University Press and Community Development Journal. 2008 All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org doi:10.1093/cdj/bsn016
Moving up and down the ladder: community-based participation in public dialogue and deliberation in Bolivia and Guatemala Iñigo Retolaza Eguren
Abstract
This article analyses how communities and its representatives have been involved in public dialogue and deliberation processes in Bolivia and Guatemala. It draws on my own experience and personal reflection in supporting and facilitating community participation in public dialogue initiatives in these countries. First, I comment briefly on the origin and current role of dialogue and deliberation in Latin America. Then, I reflect upon my own experience to illustrate two cases where communities and their organizations have been involved in these processes, both at local and national level. On the basis of these cases, I conclude with some key lessons and challenges to consider when supporting multi-stakeholder dialogic processes wherein communities are involved.
Introduction: public dialogue and deliberation processes in Latin America During the last decades, Latin American countries have been struggling to leave behind their post-colonial and dictatorial heritage in their desire to become respected members of the international community. As part of this struggle, they have been eager to embrace the concepts and practices of modern Western democracy. This is not an easy task, however, in those countries where indigenous populations are demographically superior, yet suffer structural social, economic and political exclusion. Adding to this, many of these social groups, as is the case in Bolivia and Guatemala, still preserve and make active and adaptive use of their traditional mechanisms Community Development Journal
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of governance, both at community and supra-community levels. In many of these societies, we find Western-minded representative democracies (parliaments, elections, formal mechanisms for checks and balances, decentralized governments, etc.) co-inhabiting with very active, yet marginalized, traditional and updated Amerindian governance structures and institutions (social and indigenous movements, customary law, informal markets, community justice, land use and tenure traditional practices, etc.). So, at one extreme, we have Western-minded formal institutions with strong public funding as well as funding from international donors and lenders; at the other extreme, self-sustained or underfunded non-formal institutions which strongly condition indigenous and peasant social and political life and hence its interaction with the wider context. In between, there is plenty of room for political manoeuvre, institutional innovation and experiential learning when looking for ways to constructively link both formal and non-formal types of institutions as a means of strengthening democratic governance in Latin America. Alongside this emerging context, the region has gone through a deep democratization process since the early 1990s using public dialogue and deliberation. These processes are considered as a social and political mechanism for deepening and broadening the chances for new and excluded actors to participate in the social, political and economic development of their communities and countries. As part of this vigorous wave of democratic practices, many Latin American countries have made increased use of public dialogues for different purposes. Many of these processes have been strongly supported by international actors (World Bank, OAS1, IDEA International, UNDP, Catholic Church, etc.) and many times have been convened by national governments with different intentions: for example, setting and implementing peace agreements (Guatemala, El Salvador), tackling conflictive issues (violence in Jamaica, institutional debacle in Argentina), visualizing future scenarios (Destino Colombia), dealing with impositions of the donor community (PRSP in Bolivia) and formulating strategic public policies (Agrarian Law in Guatemala, Acuerdo Nacional in Perú). Along with these efforts at national level, a myriad of local dynamics are occurring and in many cases even re-shaping local governance institutions with or without knowledgement or approval from national key actors and authorities. In Latin America, public dialogue and deliberation is understood both as a socio-political process as well as a conflict resolution tool. These two approaches may be used complementarily and do not necessarily clash
1 Organization of American States.
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one with the other. What varies is the extent to which dialogue is understood and used instrumentally and is transient (a conflict resolution tool), or is transformative and enduring (an overarching approach for social learning and institutional change). The multi-stakeholder nature of public dialogue and deliberation processes is another important characteristic. As Woodhill (forthcoming) notes, social learning processes such as those referred to here relate to ‘the idea of bringing together different stakeholders (actors) who have an interest in a problem situation and engaging them in processes of dialogue and collective learning that can improve innovation, decision-making and action”. The intention of this paper is to look closer at how Bolivian and Guatemalan rural and indigenous communities and their representatives participate in these deliberative processes and to what extent these processes are of any benefit to the development of communities. For doing so, I will draw on my own experience and refer to two case studies (Bolivia and Guatemala) in which I was directly involved. The Bolivian case analyses local deliberative dynamics from a long-term perspective, and the Guatemalan experience examines a short-term national dialogue. Both cases offer a rich source of learning on their own; and both together bring to light some recurrent patterns.
Elites and communities in dialogue and deliberation Through my own experience, I have come to understand participatory community development as a cumulative and complex process of political, social and economic empowerment, wherein community members and their organizations struggle to find ways to gain more control over their lives and the institutions ruling them. It is within this framework and context that I locate the practice of public dialogue and deliberation as both a means and an opportunity for bridging the democratic governance gap existing between traditionally excluded rural and indigenous communities and their public authorities, be they local or national. But how does public dialogue and deliberation promote and strengthen community development in the Latin American context? Do communities really develop better when included in public dialogue and deliberation processes concerning issues that affect them? How does this involvement happen? How ‘real’ is this involvement? Who benefits from it? What are the trade-offs? How do public dialogues support the development of new and more inclusive forms of governance in intercultural environments? These, of course, are questions that lack a straightforward answer. I have learnt that it is not easy to assess how, or to what extent, the use of public dialogue and deliberation contributes on its own to the improvement of
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these marginalized sectors of society. These are some of the questions driving my practice as a facilitator of public dialogue and deliberation processes in the Latin American region during the last years. Who am I as the facilitator in question? In hindsight I realize that I, as a male, 39 year old, ‘well educated’ Basque development worker, played a different facilitation role and had different identities in each case. From 1997, I spent three years in Bolivia working and living in the remote North Potosı́ region as an enthusiastic manager of a local NGO directly involved in implementing community development projects with the Quechua and Aymara population. Following this, I moved to La Paz city for another three years as an INGO project officer supporting municipal participatory governance processes in the same mountainous region. Seven years later in Guatemala, I worked as an independent international consultant hired by UNDP to facilitate a National Dialogue on Health and Nutrition convened by the former government led by Oscar Berger. Although each case was very different in nature and scope, and so was my positioning, I was equally confronted with the personal challenge of facilitating complex processes in which rural and indigenous communities were considered to be relevant actors that should be included. The contested question was about whom to engage, what for and how. Looking back at past experiences in the region (Diez Pinto and De León, 2000; Zovatto and Varela-Erasheva, 2002; IDEA, 2004; UNDP, 2004; Retolaza and Diez Pinto, 2007), it is well known that Latin American public dialogues traditionally have engaged mainly national elites, be they part of the public, private or civil society sector. In any case, rural communities have always participated, if so, mediated (or even manipulated) by their representatives. These national dialogues usually happen to be of short duration, often running for three to six months (Acuerdo Nacional in Guatemala) but exceptionally lasting up to two years (Acuerdo Nacional in Perú). They usually focus on a specific issue or complex situation (i.e. conflictive laws, armed and/or socio-political conflicts, peace agreements, constitution making, etc.) requiring an extraordinary institutional mechanism for its resolution. On the other hand, local deliberative processes take place over longer periods of time because of complex and entrenched local dynamics and the need to address a broader purpose. This is the case of our Bolivian story where a long-term effort was made for institutionalizing Municipal Development Councils (MDCs) as a sustainable means of bridging the political long-lasting divide between municipal authorities and communitybased organizations. As we will see in the following sections, it is easy to conclude that supporting local deliberative processes brings greater and faster impact regarding the development of marginalized communities compared with highly political and often abstract national exercises.
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Nevertheless, as seen in the Guatemalan case, national dialogues become crucial when pushing for broader sustainable pro-poor institutional change. The underlying implications of launching and engaging in such processes become clear, therefore. They appear to open, to a greater or lesser degree, windows of opportunity that may result in different outcomes including (i) shifting (asymmetric) power dynamics, (ii) trying out new institutional mechanisms, (iii) challenging new and old paradigms and cultural practices, (iv) re-defining or even expanding the stakeholder constellation, (v) creating more inclusive spaces for grassroots organizations to have a say. They inherently sow the seeds of change in our societies.
Linking dialogic processes with community development: experiences from the field Bolivia: taking time for deep change Bolivia is experiencing major societal transformations led by President Evo Morales. This coca producers’ union leader won the 2005 national elections establishing two historical records. First, he achieved the highest citizen support a Bolivian president ever had with 54 percent of votes; second, he became Bolivia’s first indigenous president. In certain parts of the world, this may sound quite normal knowing Bolivia is a country where 62 percent of citizens above 15 years self-identify themselves as from indigenous origin (INE, 2002a). But as we already know, this is rather unusual in democratically dysfunctional post-colonial states all across the globe. Bolivia is undergoing deep structural changes at local, regional and national level. Paradoxically, one of these major transformations started in 1994 with Sanchez de Lozada’s right wing neo-liberal government launching the Popular Participation Law. This law was part of a bigger state reform process strongly supported by international donors and lenders. At that time, the purpose of this reform was, among others, to make the state and its public administration more inclusive, modern, efficient and responsive to the citizens’ needs. This actually meant legal recognition and political empowerment of long-excluded rural and indigenous communities. For the first time in Bolivian history, peasants and indigenous population could vote and also be elected at municipal level. The law also opened the possibility for rural communities and urban neighbourhoods to access public funds for controlling municipal authorities through the so-called Vigilance Committees. Many NGOs including the one in which I was working, supported this process of deep democratization by accompanying grassroots organizations in taking over municipal governments. In the process of doing so, we all (myself along with my NGO staff, local community leaders, municipal
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authorities and other local progressive organizations and actors) became part of a nationwide societal learning and change process advocating for municipalization and devolution of power to lower levels of the state. We believed that a decentralized state would give more room for citizens to engage in public life. The MDCs described in this paper were part of this effort (Retolaza, 2003). In plain words, the early MDCs were an initiative launched by a platform of organizations2 and their main objective was to open a public space for intercultural dialogue and deliberation at municipal level. These spaces allowed a range of diverse actors who had never met publicly before (i.e. community leaders, indigenous women, (I)NGO development workers, rural teachers, health workers, municipal authorities, etc.) to do so in order to learn and work together for the development of their municipality. This road taken was not easy and it took several years before two of these MDCs were established in the municipalities of Sacaca and Caripuyo.3 Although the initial years of functioning were full of mistrust and misinformation, the main stakeholders in these municipalities learnt to work together despite historical divides. The effort mainly succeeded because highly committed community leaders worked in alliance with progressive majors, who supported the idea against the resistance of some municipal councillors. Later on, these spaces were slowly adopted and further developed by several progressive municipal governments in the region. Other municipal governments run by conservative hardliners actively rejected the possibility of opening spaces for public deliberation and engagement. When our community development project came to an end in September 1999, many of the project staff and other community-based actors related to the project and the MDCs were appointed by community-based organizations to represent them in the municipal elections to be held in December 1999. With great joy on our side, many of them became majors, municipal councillors and legal community representatives leading the Vigilance Committees put in place by the Popular Participation Law. This fact, along with the ever increasing awareness and active participation of indigenous and peasant organizations in public life, allowed for the institutionalization of these spaces in several municipalities of the northern Potosı́ department. Gradually, municipal governments started to allocate funds for the implementation of these meetings where more than 150 people
2 This ad hoc working group initially comprised Medicus Mundi (funding Spanish INGO), FAO Community Forest Development Project, PROCLADE (local NGO in which I was working) and the omnipresent indigenous and peasant union of north Potosı́ region. 3 These two municipalities are among the poorest of Bolivia with as much as 95 percent of their population living below poverty line (INE, 2002).
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would deliberate for two days. These MDCs had never been implemented before in Bolivia and hence lacked any formal institutional base or legal framework for their functioning. The municipal actors developed this new institutional frame by learning and doing. The current MDCs are supported by five commissions (gender, production, health, education, and transport and infrastructure ) and led by municipal authorities in which a wide range of stakeholders come together once every two to three months to deliberate about their communities’ proposals and demands, share information about the municipal expenditure and investments done in the communities, accept or reject new organizations requesting to work in the municipality, develop five-year municipal development plans and hold each other accountable in relation to the commitments each actor has made regarding this development plan. Consequently, what initially was launched as a legitimate but strongly contested public space demanding greater interaction and information exchange between social actors and elected officials, years later has become a well articulated and institutionalized decision-making space through which the municipal government (along with local NGOs, donors, peasant and indigenous organizations, civic committees and other social actors) coordinates, co-funds and co-implements municipal planning, implementation and monitoring processes. This participatory municipal development process has opened the possibility for communities not only to channel more public funds for their direct benefit but also to influence and even determine municipal policies. Nowadays, it is reported that some adjacent municipalities are implementing their own MDCs after seeking advice from original MDCs. Guatemala: window dressing or a window of opportunity? During the second half of the last century, many Latin American countries suffered from dictatorial ultra-conservative regimes backed up by the US government. The American public administration actively supported these right wing governments as a violent means of isolating Latin America from Cuban and Russian influence. Latin America, due to the effect its colonial past had in society (unresolved agrarian reforms, political exclusion of indigenous and rural population, unequal distribution of wealth, discriminatory state controlled by oligarchy, etc.), became a very hot spot during the Cold War with many leftist guerrilla movements fighting these regimes. Guatemala was not an exemption. The country suffered almost 40 years of internal armed conflict which ended with the endorsement of the Peace Agreements in 1996. Throughout all those years, rural and indigenous populations suffered dramatically from this conflict, their communities
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and families being massacred by a ferocious army obsessed with bringing to an end rural support to guerrilla organizations. More than 200,000 people were killed and 250,000 are still ‘missing’. Sad to say, and after more than ten years, many of the problems intended to be tackled by the Peace Agreements still have not been properly addressed or not addressed at all. So after the Peace Agreements were signed, public dialogues have become a common mechanism to deal with policy making in Guatemala. Mainly, they have been used to frame public policies for implementing the Peace Agreements as well as for gaining greater social cohesion after a traumatic armed conflict. Recently, the Guatemalan government launched the National Accord4 and within it the Roundtable on Health and Nutrition. From the very beginning, it suffered from lack of legitimacy and insufficient national representation since many of the main national stakeholders on Health and Nutrition-related issues decided not to join the dialogue.5 This was a decision taken due to the dialogue fatigue many organizations had after attending many dialogues and later on perceiving the government did not enforce the agreements derived from such dialogues. So this was a dialogue convened by a weak government and set for re-definition and legitimization of public policies on health and nutrition for the following two years (until completion of the government period). This public dialogue was implemented during June–September 2006 and supported by UNDP and its Regional Program on Democratic Dialogue. My role in it, as a UNDP consultant, comprised the design and facilitation of an intense multi-stakeholder dialogue based on a sequence of activities (workshops, expert panels and other learning events) held every fortnight. While I was immersed in the process, I learnt from a PHO6 expert invited to one of the panels that Guatemala is a country where malnutrition rates are among the highest in all Latin America. Along with this, the public health budget is among the lowest, if not the lowest, in the entire region, with less than 1 percent of the GNP being allocated to the public health sector. Paradoxically, health and nutrition did not seem to be a priority for the government led by Oscar Berger, but it was a main issue in the Peace Agreements. Since the themes discussed in the RHN did not attain
4 Three other roundtables were set: Transparency and Social Audit, Indigenous Populations and Rural Development. 5 Stakeholders actively involved in the four month dialogue process: Panamerican Health Organization, Government officials (Vice-Minister of Public Health and his policy-planning team), health workers unions, national network of women organizations, indigenous organizations, academia, NGOs and community-based organizations providing health services, networks of health NGOs, thematic experts, governmental agencies working on nutrition issues. 6 Pan-American Health Organization.
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as much public and political attention as the other roundtables, ours was able to move forward even in the midst of medical staff strikes, health workers’ union demonstrations and other social conflicts derived from the unbearable institutional crisis the country was undergoing at that time. After completion of the dialogue process, the agreements were quite successful in relation to other roundtables, where the latter seemed to be too diffuse and broad in their final conclusions. Our process focused on three policy areas: (i) sexually transmitted infections (mainly VIH-AIDS), reproductive health (special focus on maternal mortality and mother–child care) and nutrition (mainly chronic malnutrition). The main agreements included the following: (i) the government agreed to increase considerably (US $150 million for 2007) the budget allocated to the public health sector, (ii) central government agreed to push for greater engagement of municipal authorities in implementing the agenda of the National Accord (Gobierno de Guatemala, 2006) by advocating for a 15 percent of municipal budget to be spent in health and nutrition, (iii) 111 municipalities were prioritized7 for intensive public intervention based on ethnicity, poverty, health and malnutrition criteria, (iv) specific actions would be taken on behalf of government and other social actors to strengthen community participation and public auditing of health services by implementing existing participatory mechanisms (Community Development Councils) and putting in place some new arrangements (social auditing of health services at community and municipal levels) and (v) acknowledge and strengthen the role of traditional medicine in community health by supporting a locally based intercultural public health system. The facilitated public dialogue that participants underwent allowed them to know and trust each other enough to propose and further implement a technical commission with representatives of the different sectors present in the group. The commission met every other week in between dialogue events to monitor the process, identify experts as resource persons to be present in the events, give feedback to facilitators and even drafted the official document to be handed over to the president. These were great agreements, and a big achievement! Unfortunately, the weak and biased political management of the National Accord by the government had tremendous consequences. For example, although the government was aware of the financial implications from the dialogue, no representatives from the Ministry of Finance attended the process event, even though the UNDP and the Vice-Minister himself repeatedly demanded this; it was only during the last meeting that one Vice-Minister 7 A first stage will focus on 41 municipalities, to be followed by a second stage covering the remaining 70 municipalities.
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from the Ministry of Finance came to negotiate with the whole dialogue group (public servants included) how much money they could spare for this matter. Once the RHN was over, a new Ministry of Finance was assigned, and unfortunately he cut by 10 percent the whole of the public budget due to lack of fiscal resources. Again, as part of the same cabinet renewal process, the Minister of Health and one of his Vice-Ministers were removed. The Vice-Minister of Health, who had attended and convened the whole process, was the only minister remaining. Fortunately, his position became stronger within the cabinet, which gave hope for the implementation of the National Accord. In addition, the union leaders who attended the dialogue achieved greater legitimacy among their grassroots after showing some of the results they accomplished thanks to the dialogue process and thus displaced an internal rival faction advocating for deepening the conflict. This suggests that public dialogues also bring about personal and political benefits to those involved. Despite this mediated, elite-based participation, UNDP, as the facilitator of the process, found a way to make communities present in the dialogue process. Right in the middle of the process, the group visited the municipality of San Pedro Pinula, with 89.72 percent population living under the poverty line (INE, 2002b). The dialogue group accepted a visit to the site proposed by one of the participating NGOs which happened to be managing a municipal health district. This learning trip immersed the group in a local setting over two days, giving them the chance to interact directly with local stakeholders and know more about the local health system. The group split up into smaller groups and visited several communities and health centres and interviewed community leaders, local staff and health system users (pregnant women, elders, youth, health promoters, etc.). Direct contact with this distant reality gave dialogue practitioners the opportunity to listen, observe, reflect and learn about people’s perceptions and the ideas they held for improving the local health system. Some of these new ideas were incorporated afterwards into the group conversations when the latter revisited the public policies concerning health (VIH-AIDS, mother mortality, mother–child care) and nutrition (chronic malnutrition). To what extent this visit influenced the policy making is not easy to assess. However, every dialogue participant interviewed after the completion of the public dialogue acknowledged the importance the visit had in the sense that (i) it enabled a learning space for them to have a clear picture of the local health system, (ii) it became a turning point for improving personal relationships among polarized dialogue practitioners and (iii) it exposed and challenged the inaccurate and biased stereotypes, discourses and mindsets many participants had about the local health system, communities’ role in their own health care, working conditions of local staff, etc.
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It was only after the learning trip that the group committed to the process and different stakeholders (mainly the Ministry of Health and health worker unions) had to compromise and come to a consensus for moving forward to the final National Accord. An evidence of this commitment was the final document presented to the president, which included the formation of a follow-up commission to monitor the fulfilment of the agreements. Later on, I was informed the commission met now and then, with many dialogue practitioners staying involved in it. As we see, when it comes to (participatory) policy making, communities engage in many different ways. They move up and down the ladder of participation. Sometimes they are invited (or manipulated?) by the powerful to become high-quality informants for innovative multi-stakeholder decisionmaking processes and sometimes they have no choice but to fight for their right to become decision makers on their own. Both cases are embedded in quite different contexts showing just a few of the many possibilities at hand for promoting greater inclusion of communities in issues affecting their development. I will now draw on some key lessons learnt from these experiences of community engagement in dialogic change processes.
Lessons learnt and challenges ahead Multi-stakeholder public dialogues: new conversational networks creating new realities On the basis of these experiences, public dialogue and deliberation seems to open the door to unknown territory as it did in North Potosı́ and Guatemala, convening and facilitating inclusive spaces for personal and continuous dialogical interaction between stakeholders who are not like-minded, and thus providing many possibilities for new realities to unfold. The spaces commented in this paper nurtured new conversational networks, and hence amplified the chances for out-of-the-box thinking when it came to address complex issues such as rural and indigenous community development in Bolivia and Guatemala. During these last years, I found out that participatory processes are not just a matter of bringing people together on more or less equal ground, or creating spaces for holding everyone accountable for their duties and obligations. It also has to do with the quality of the conversation these actors hold and the self-awareness stakeholders have when listening and talking to each other. This means openly listening to what others have to say and then observing and holding back our own beliefs and mental models in order to achieve a generative momentum. Here, new ideas may emerge as a result of this multi-stakeholder dialogical interaction (the so-called generative dialogue that facilitators of dialogic processes look for so
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eagerly). Once we understand and accept we may not be the only beholders of ‘the Truth’, then it becomes easier to accept what others have to say about the issue at stake. Mastering good skills for improving conversational dynamics, I found, requires training. We should not take it for granted that people will assemble together to talk about sensitive or conflictive issues and have a constructive conversation immediately. It takes time and effort to raise awareness and develop skills in improving our ways of talking and listening to each other (that is to say enhancing the quality of our conversations), and therefore understanding the effect that the creation of new conversational networks has in our relationship with others. Professional practice and personal development: moving beyond the modern divide Throughout these experiences, I have also learnt the importance of considering explicitly and actively exploring the personal dimension (mine and others’) in these social learning and change processes. I find it quite impossible for myself to split my professional being from my personal being. Obviously, they both interplay since they both are foundational parts of my greater Self. Most of the highly qualified development professionals conditioning (or even determining) the limits of the possible in the communities of Bolivia and Guatemala still believe personal development has nothing to do with professional practice, social justice, sustainable development, climate change or poverty elimination. They advocate for keeping these realms separate. Therefore, we must be cautious when dealing with social learning processes such as those described in this paper, which are supported by these professionals and their organizations. There is too great a chance that social change will fail to occur. Deepening democracy: recognition of difference as an added value for participatory governance Many academic publications relating to participatory governance that appear in northern-based development literature (there are many examples, including Blair, 1998; Fung and Wright, 2001; Gaventa, 2004; Gaventa, 2006; Schneider, 1999) appear to ignore or address rather shallowly the ethnic dimension in relation to local governance. A lack of familiarity by many northern authors with traditional indigenous political practices may explain their reluctance to explore how these practices merge with more formal democratic institutional arrangements for achieving (local and national) participatory governance in intercultural contexts. This issue is important, since many of the participatory local governance exercises supported by development agencies are implemented in countries with a high occurrence of exclusion of indigenous populations.
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In our Bolivian case, the fact that MDC commissions met every two to three months gave room for indigenous organizations to articulate their discourse and demands through their own institutions. By doing so, these community-based autonomous spaces gained new relevance and strength adapting their socio-political role and functioning to the new institutional context. These became iterative and interactive spaces where (i) indigenous representatives were accountable to their grassroots about the deliberations occurring in the MDC8 and in return received guidelines for coming negotiations, (ii) new progressive, gender-sensitive and young leaderships were born among the MDC representatives, (iii) an intense awareness raising regarding the new legal framework was happening among the communities and (iv) communities articulated municipal planning and project implementation among themselves and with the municipal government and NGOs. In contrast, in Guatemala, the scope of the public dialogue was quite different but here again a sustained deliberative process gave opportunity for representatives of indigenous and womens’ organizations to consult and get feedback from their own constituencies before the next event took place. In this case, these interactions became critical when managing the ongoing conflict between national government on one side, and social movements, health NGOs and workers unions on the other. From a public dialogue facilitator perspective, the recognition and nurturing of different endogenous political practices and spaces within and between the many stakeholders involved becomes essential in terms of achieving sustainable multi-stakeholder collective action. Change is permanent: the need for new institutional arrangements From a change process perspective, community development is directly linked to participatory local governance since it has to do with actively linking communities with the institutions, the latter understood as the rules of the game that affect their lives. Of course, making this linkage sustainable often implies changing some formal and non-formal institutional configurations. Regarding the ‘degree of formality’ of institutions, in Latin America there is a quite common assumption that formal institutionalization is key for success. But there are also many other voices claiming persuasively that the secret for success lays not in ‘formalizing’ all institutions, usually under fixed standards set by the powerful, but in juggling with both type of institutions. From this perspective, acknowledging indigenous and rural non-formal institutions (values, customary law, traditional ways of decision making, social habits and beliefs, culture, etc.) 8 Of course, these spaces for accountability did not fully uprooted prebendalism and clientelism from community leaders’ political practices.
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is of paramount importance when successfully engaging these communities in the broader and more formal governance context. Neither of the exercises described in this paper was linked to previously existing formal institutional arrangements. Both of them were collateral and organic consequences of ongoing social and political processes. In the Bolivian case, the whole MDC exercise was inspired by the Popular Participation Law. In Guatemala the public dialogue was part of an extra-legal dialogical social habitus derived from or imposed by the Peace Agreements. Both spaces thrived thanks to a legal void; this becoming both their strength and weakness. On one hand, the possibility for community representatives to meet other stakeholders in a safe space gave room for new innovative and inclusive ways of dealing with both emergent and historically controversial issues. On the other hand, the lack of a legal institutional anchorage compromised the further implementation of these initiatives. Decision-making spaces and learning places: bridging the gap In the Bolivian and Guatemalan context, policy has been made traditionally by oligarchy in closed spaces away from the scrutiny of the general public. Post-colonial social and political practices have shaped historically how politics are done for the benefit of the few and the disgrace of the many. The Washington Consensus and its disastrous consequences for poor people everywhere is just an example of these practices. In many cases, the applications of Western-type representative democracies have not done anything but reinforce and legitimate this obscure use of power. Related to this exercise of power is the body of knowledge policy makers have or may access in deciding what policies are best to tackle distant and ‘uncomfortable’ issues such as poverty, community development and political and social exclusion. Accessing this knowledge is even more critical when excluded populations are of indigenous origin. The cases in this paper share in common the gap between policy-making spaces and the places where experiential learning can be acquired, and which better defines what policies may work or not. In Bolivia, these places and spaces co-inhabited very close to each other, and even embedded one within the other. Nonetheless the gap between them was enormous due to the still existing longstanding divide between indigenous communities and local elites. In the Guatemalan case, the divide between places and spaces was even bigger since communities were physically much farther away from the comfortable venues where the public dialogue was held in Guatemala City. In Bolivia, it was relatively easy to bring together both spaces and places through the platform offered by the MDC; this made it easier for both communities and local authorities to learn from each other in a familiar context. Community members were
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able to gain direct access to information related to municipal public administration and national legal frames; local authorities acquired a new interpretation and perspective of how communities were struggling with old and emerging issues in the light of the new context. The MDC gave an institutional structure for this gap to be bridged in a sustained and constructive way. On the other hand, the Guatemalan public dialogue, due to time, political and financial constraints, could not do anything other than facilitate a two-day learning trip for the participants to visit and reflect in the company of local stakeholders. Different national, regional and local significant stakeholders also participated in several of the workshops and learning events held in the capital city. In Bolivia, community participation seemed to be based more on the idea of inclusive citizenship, compared with the more traditional user/beneficiary approach that drove the learning trip in Guatemala. Nevertheless, both strategies were driven by the need to create spaces for policy makers and community-based citizens/beneficiaries to come together and listen and learn form each other. Elites’ manipulation of deliberative democracy Many times we see how deliberative spaces for citizen engagement become spaces for political manipulation. They may be proposed as invited spaces in which the powerful invite the less powerful to take part on decision making. But many times they become buffer spaces; spaces for diffusion of social conflict and hence legitimization of the status quo. The cases described in this paper were not an exemption. In Guatemala, the government used the space to diffuse social conflict and gain some credibility and room for manoeuvre to peacefully end the government period. The fact that the government cut down the budget right after the dialogue was over presumes that powerful and hidden forces were taking decisions without considering what initially was publicly agreed. In Bolivia, although communities took part actively in the municipal planning process, the budgeting was done afterwards by municipal technical staff with no consultation whatsoever. This allowed for budget re-allocation and political trade-offs between the major, local elites and communities; but also within the municipal council between members of the municipal council and the major. The manipulation elites make of public dialogues is permanent and pervasive in those situations where governments do not provide public spaces for citizen engagement, and where citizens lack sufficient information, knowledge, political skills and strong enough organizations for strategic networking and collective action. This is even more true in those countries such as Bolivia and Guatemala where excluded indigenous populations still maintain attitudes and behaviours internalized in their minds, thus maintaining their condition as oppressed subjects.
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Iñigo Retolaza Eguren
In conclusion I believe, we must understand deliberative democracy and participatory governance as cumulative and complex change processes for broader and deeper community empowerment and state responsiveness. Inclusive approaches such as the ones described in this paper may deepen democracy but yet again open new paths for further institutional and societal change directed towards real and true democracy.
Acknowledgements I am deeply grateful to Peter Taylor (IDS) for inviting me to write this article and for his long-lasting patience and support. Iñigo Retolaza Eguren works as a freelance consultant on facilitating multi-stakeholder dialogic change processes in Latin America, especially in Bolivia and Guatemala. He is also engaged in long-term process advisory work with the Regional Project on Democratic Dialogue (UNDP-LA). He supports governments, civil society organizations, private sector and UNDP Country Offices in developing more dialogic and inclusive approaches to their work. Currently he lives in La Paz, Bolivia. Address for correspondence: Calle Vincenti 989 (casi esquina Jaimes Freyre), Sopocachi La Paz, Bolivia. Tel: þ591 22415223; email: iretolaza@hotmail.com; inigo.retolaza@undp.org
Funding None.
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