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ОглавлениеCHAPTER II. VENEZUELA AND KERALA EXPERIENCES
70. Before going on to develop the theme of decentralized participatory planning (DPP), we would like to pause in order to briefly examine what most caught our attention about the experiences in Venezuela and Kerala.
1) THE ROLE OF ORGANIZED COMMUNITIES IN VENEZUELA
71. In Venezuela, after much debate and studying, it was agreed that the ideal unit for participation was the geographically based community.
a) What do we mean by community?
72. What do we mean by community? A community refers to a group of families that: live in a specific geographical space; know each other and can easily relate to each other; can meet without having to rely on transport; use the same public services and share similar economic, social and town planning concerns. We are therefore dealing with people who live in the same territory but do not necessarily share a common history, cultural traditions and political ideas. Within this geographical space we will find people with different beliefs and cultural traditions
73. The number of people that make up a community can vary a lot from one place to another. It is worth recalling that in Venezuela, after much debate and studying successful experiences in community organization (in particular, the Urban Land Committees, there are made up of 200 families organized to struggle for title deeds for the land they built their houses on, and Health Committees, that encompass 150 families with the aim of supporting local health clinics in heavily disadvantaged areas), it was decided that in densely populated urban areas, such as those with high-rise apartments and slums where tens of thousands of families live, the size of a community should range from 750 to 2000 people, while in remote rural areas, where communities form small villages, they could range from 100 to 250 people, and in indigenous communities, the size would be about 50 people.
74. These figures could be different for other countries depending on their reality. However, in no cases should we have communities in high-rise areas, slums or residential areas made up of 30,000 to 40,000 people.
75. Residents in these high rise areas or slums may share a common history and similar problems, but it is highly unlikely that they would all know each other and it would most likely be very hard to bring them all together for a meeting. Imagine how difficult it would be to organize a meeting of 2000 or more people. By proposing smaller spaces, we are hoping to create better conditions that can facilitate the active participation of residents in meetings dealing with community issues.
76. These smaller spaces are better suited to successfully dealing with problems such as rubbish collection, footpaths or footbridges, school absenteeism, at-risk pregnancies, crime or the lack of sporting, cultural or humanitarian initiatives, and involving residents in their resolution.
77. Now, each community is different from the next. In Venezuela there are some with an important tradition of organization and struggle, and that therefore contain various community organizations and activists. Others only have one or two organizations, and others perhaps have none.
78. The organizations we can find in a community in Venezuela include: urban land committees, social protection committees,8 health committees and community health organizations, cultural groups, sports clubs, neighborhood associations, education missions, water roundtables, energy roundtables, Bolivarian circles, environmental groups, food committees, grandparents clubs, community housing groups, popular defense units, cooperatives, micro-enterprises, popular economy councils, and others.
79. In general, community organizations tends to work on their own, in many cases duplicating efforts and being less productive and effective than they would be if they were to work together in a coordinated manner.
b) Unified plan that brings together all community initiatives
80. President Chavez’s idea was to create an organization that would bring together these diverse groupings into a single organization that could act as a community government. He called this organization the “communal council”, although a more appropriate name would have been “community council” (See Annex V), leaving the name “communal council” for the next level of territorial organization: the commune9.
81. And what is the best instrument for bringing together the different demands and organizational efforts of a community? Chavez had the brilliance to see that the best instrument for this was the creation of a single work plan dedicated to solving the community’s most deeply felt problems. Bringing together all existing community initiatives into a single work plan saves effort and leads to much better results.
82. Chávez also said that the first task of the communal council should be to actively involve residents in the community in coming up with this plan.
83. However, the Venezuelan experience has also shown us that actively involving residents in the community in coming up with a work plan should not be the first task of the communal council; rather this should occur prior to the formation of the council, because it is precisely through this process that a community develops and is able to detect those people who are best suited to running this small community government that is closely tied to the people and is at their service.
84. In cases where conditions are not favorable for such participation, or where a community wants to promote participation but does not know how to, initiating a process of community planning can be a very useful instrument for enticing apathetic residents. Participatory planning is therefore not only valid for places where strong community dynamics already exist; it can be especially useful for creating such dynamics.
c) Promote community supervision
85. Another function of the communal council is to promote community supervision over all projects carried out in the community by state, community or private entities. It should also manage the resources granted to it or raised through its own initiative, via a community-based financial entity or its own system of accountability.
86. Each communal council should organize topic-oriented workshops for each of the most deeply felt needs of the community, for example: food, health, infrastructure, housing and habitat; education; sports and culture; communication, information and training (alternative media and others); security and defense (defense units).10
e) Ensuring an electoral result that reflects the will of the people
87. Once the number of workshops has been decided upon, residents should elect - in citizen assemblies - those neighbors they believe can best represent the community on the communal councils because of their leadership qualities, knowledge of the area, spirit of community work, willingness to work in a collective manner, honesty, and dynamism. Those elected are called spokespersons because they are the voice of the community. When residents lose confidence in them, they should be recalled, as they can no longer be said to be the voice of the community. Venezuelan activists refuse to use the term “representative” because of the negative connotations this term has acquired historically in the bourgeois representative system. Candidates for representative positions only talked to the community at election time, promising “all the gold in the world,” but were never seen again once they were elected.
88. I think it is important to point out that in Venezuela, they discussed whether this community council should simply be the sum of the leaders of the different organizations that exist within a community or whether it was better to hold a citizen’s assembly and let the assembly elect its spokespersons. The second option was agreed upon because reality dictated that the leaders of many of the existing community organizations had lost their legitimacy because they had lost their connection with the constituents that had elected them. Elections via assemblies allowed the local people to correct this situation. If the sectional leaders are carrying out their duties, then their names will undoubtedly be put forward in the assembly, and if they have popular support, they will be elected.
e) The Community Assembly: the maximum authority
89. While those citizens elected as members of the communal council come to form a kind of informal community leadership body, it is the residents of the area who, in assembly, get to exercise final decision-making power.
90. The citizens’ assembly is the highest decision-making body in the local community. This is where sovereignty and the power of the people reside. Its decisions are binding on the communal council.
f) Giving priority to actions over words and speeches
91. Of course, it is very important to make sure voters elect candidates for the right reasons. The Venezuelan experience is very useful in this regard. It has shown us the importance of ensuring that the elections of spokespeople is properly organized and that people know who the candidates are not simply because of what they say but because what they have done. This is particularly the case for those people who don’t have a prior history of activism and organizing in the community.
92. How can people best get to know their candidates?
93. The Venezuelan experience tell us, for example, that prior to electing members of the communal council, it has been very useful to get candidates to collaborate in the carrying out of the demographic and socio-economic census, as this involves them visiting families door-to-door. This manner of obtaining information not only provides an opportunity to collect data that is not useful found in institutional databases; it also puts candidates in direct contact with families in the community.
94. The Venezuelan experience, and other similar ones around the world, has demonstrated the usefulness of giving these people, together with those people from outside the community who want to help the community organize themselves, the task of drafting a brief history of the community with the people.11 This is particularly helpful for ensuring that external collaborators do not steer activities in a certain direction without taking into prior consideration the reality they are working in.
95. Another activity that has proven itself to be very handy is organizing a participatory diagnosis. Such a diagnosis can help provide a better understand of the needs and most deeply felt desires of the people of a given community. This can also be a very good way for those with little background in organizing to get to better know the community they may become spokespeople for.
96. It is therefore not enough for candidates to simply give good speeches to get elected. It is important that they carry out small practical tasks in the community, such that residents can see for themselves their genuine vocation to serving the people. This is a manner of ensuring that candidates who are simply looking to use these posts as a springboard for a political career will get weeded out.
g) How to ensure a large and broad attendance
97. How can we make sure that the assemblies to elect the communal council involve the majority of residents, are genuinely representative of all the community and cannot be political manipulated?
98. The Venezuelan experience, along with some others, has shown that the way in which the assembly is convoked is very important. Often invitations are not extended to the more remote sectors of the community. On many occasions, it is mainly friends, acquaintances, those with similar politics who were invited, while others were left out. Furthermore, invitations tend to be general, with little effort made to go door-to-door. They are not linked to the concrete problems of a community, those that all or a majority of families face and are therefore easily recognizable.
99. Experience has shown us that the only way to guarantee attendance and avoid political manipulation is to make sure that people from all “spaces” in the community come along to the citizen’s assemblies. No important decision should be made if one of these spaces is not represented in the assembly.
100. What spaces are we referring to here? Every street, pathway, apartment block, building. In each of these there tend to live a small group of families who, due to living so closely together, share a deeper bond and relationship. We propose to refer to these small spaces as neighborhood areas.
101. As such, a community could be made up of various neighborhood areas. Each of these should elect someone that commits to turning up to these assemblies and speaking on behalf of the areas. Achieving this will undoubtedly involve an important amount of work across the whole community.
102. We can call these people neighborhood delegates to differentiate them from the spokespeople on the communal council’s executive committee.
103. Having a delegate for each neighborhood area is very important for the functioning of the community assembly. His or her presence will ensure the election of councils that are representative of all parts of the community and the variety of views that exist within it.
104. To achieve this we propose that quorum not be determined by selecting an arbitrary percentage of the community in attendance. Quorum should take into consideration the presence of delegates from every corner of the community. Consequently, quorum for Citizen’s Assemblies should require a minimum of one representative from at least 75% of families living in small communities, and at least one delegate from two-thirds of the neighborhood areas in large communities.
105. Achieving the presence of at least one person from each family living in the community would represent a complete success.
106. Moreover, the different experiences we have studied have taught us that it is very important to involve children, given they are generally more willing to collaborate in community tasks. They tend to not be weighed down by the apathy present among those older than them as a result of years of unfulfilled promises. They are also the social sector that, once they return home from school, tends to spend the most time out in the community. As such, we feel that it would be a good idea to set the minimum age for voting in citizen’s assemblies at 12, rather than 16 or 18 as generally set out in existing voting laws.
107. One of the main problems this process of communitarian organization might face in places where it is carried out is that many people may fear that the government or political parties will manipulate the process, a fear often stoked up by interested factors. We have insisted on the need to avoid any political or other type of manipulation during the process of forming communal councils.
108. This is not about creating communal councils that involve only supporters of the government. All community institutions should be open to all citizens, no matter their political stripes. We can expect that many of those currently fooled by the media, seeing in practice the support they receive from higher levels of the government to resolve their community’s problems will discover the reality of the revolutionary process through their struggle.
h) A team to help initiate the process
109. The Venezuelan process has also shown that popular protagonism cannot be decreed from above, but neither can it appear simply as a result of willing it from below. Nor does it emerge from one day to the next. It requires a process of learning that brings together the willingness to achieve popular protagonism through a conscious process to build it.
110. This process will occur more quickly if the people receive support from a group of individuals, whether from the community or belonging to outside institutions that are trained in the area and have a broader perspective of the world.
111. These people could be members of a social, political or religious organization (we are thinking here of the grassroots Christian communities – comunidades cristianas de base – that played such an important role in Latin America) or a local government or institution willing to promote popular participation. However, regardless of their origin, their role should never be to substitute for the community. Instead they should facilitate the participation process, helping people discover their own potentialities. They should guide, point people in the right direction, save learning time by helping them avoid having to go through the process of trial and error, and learn together with the people by working with them.
i) Handing over financial resources to small projects
112. The participatory planning process12 can take a while to be implemented at the municipal and territorial levels, particularly as time is needed to train the various participants and to create a database, both of which are essential for planning. This delay could lead to demoralization as people begin to think that the process will ultimately go nowhere, and that it represents just another broken promise. That is why we believe it is important to take on board Chavez’s idea of handing over resources to communities so that they can carry out small projects. This should not be done in a populist manner in which funds are dispersed mainly to try to win political support for an upcoming election. Instead, communities should have to first organize themselves, come up with a community plan and, as part of this process, prioritize a project that could potentially be funded.
j) Small public works that had a big impact in Santa Tecla, San Salvador
113. A similar initiative, though this time at the municipal level, was implemented in the Salvadoran municipality of Santa Tecla13. While the participatory strategic municipal plan was being prepared, and faced with the need to provide concrete results, a decision was made to assign part of the funds designated to public works to projects the community was demanding (asphalt a street, fix up a school, provide adequate street lighting in a public square, etc.) These projects were referred to as “small projects with great impact” (POGI14). The idea emerged as a result of the need to demonstrate concrete results once the strategic plan had been developed and deal with the hundreds of demands emanating from residents.
114. Given that these small projects were of great interest to the population, and had been chosen by them, the community immediately began to identify with the larger project, involving itself in its execution and attempting to obtain resources over and above those it received from the mayor’s office, whether by digging into its own funds or seeking international aid. We should recall that during their heroic revolutionary war, the Salvadoran people won the sympathy and support of an enormous number of NGOs, many of which continue to provide support today.
115. This initiative helped break down the existing paternalistic culture. Its success lay in combining high levels of community participation with the decentralization of funds and their administration by organized residents. The municipal council at the time gave the community $1000, which they used to pay for inputs, contract labor and to administer the project overall. Once the project was completed, the community had to submit invoices and receipts to the major’s office in order to be able to participate in future projects.
116. The implementation of the project involved a cycle that began with the organization of a project committee, elected in a neighborhood assembly, which was to come up with a design for the project. Then it would make a formal request for funds from the mayor’s office, sign an agreement, get it approved and receive the funds. The next step was contracting the help required for carrying out the project, and then an evaluation of the project including its design and implementation.
117. While such a project was carried out, assemblies of neighbors were held to observe how the project was advancing and to continue raising funds. For its part, the mayor’s office provided technical support via the heads of its territorial, infrastructure and citizen’s participation departments. A regulation sets out the basic rules of the game for participants who are part of carrying out the project.
118. What is interesting is that there is no legal foundation for the decentralization of funds to citizens, yet this has not held back the government of Santa Tecla. Their argument has been that the municipal code does not contemplate this type of action, nor does it prohibit it. It is what we could call an “a-legal” initiative (neither legal nor illegal).
119. In Ecuador’s case, in municipalities such as Pedro Carbo, in the Guayas region, communities in the rural parishes have received funds for small projects via the participatory budgetary process. In the case of Santa Ana parish, in the Cuenca Canton, the parish board, headed by Julio Álvarez (2009-2014), decided to hand over between $3000 and $7000 to each community that made up the parish for community projects that local residents deemed to be a priority.15
k) If there is a shortage of resources, hold a community project-ideas competition
120. It may turn out that so many communities express their desire to organize themselves in order to receive resources that the mayor’s office will not have enough funds to cover them all. In this case, we propose organizing a competition in which the best project-ideas are granted the funds the mayor’s office has available.
121. Some have pointed out that this manner of distributing resources to communities could lead to injustices as resources will tend to end up in the hands of better organized communities with greater capacity to come up with projects, and not those that most need them. Without denying that this could happen in the short term, in the medium and long term the possible negative effect of granting resources this way should be offset by the positive impetus that this will give to the unorganized communities to become organized. Those that are not organized will have an incentive to overcome their situation, with the aim of obtaining resources in order to deal with their most pressing needs. This will be reinforced if the organized communities that receive resources express their solidarity with those non-organized. As soon as a community expresses their desire to organize themselves, they should receive external support to help them carry out their project (volunteers, activists, workshops, etc.).
2) THE EXPERIENCE OF DECENTRALIZED PARTICIPATORY PLANNING IN KERALA
a) Three levels of local rural self-government
122. In India, there exists legislation regarding participatory decentralized planning.16
123. Article 40 of the 1950 Constitution into practice establishes the need to organize “Grama Panchayats” (village or rural town governments) with as much power as is necessary to allow them to function as units of self-government. En 1992, amendments 73 and 74 were introduced into the Indian Constitution, giving the Panchayats constitutional status and laying the national basis for a process of decentralization. These amendments proposed the decentralization of administration via the creation of three levels of local rural self-government: the lowest level of self-government is the Grama Panchayats, that is, the village government, this is followed by the Block Panchayats, groups of villages organized into “blocks” or administrative units to carry out certain nationally funded development projects and lastly, the District Panchayats.
124. This legislation was strengthened due to the vision of certain political leaders such as the Prime Minister Rajiv Ratna Gandhi17, who said that rather than using intellectuals that are not aware of the needs of the people to design development plans in capital cities and reducing citizens to mere beneficiaries of development, it was necessary to involve people in the process.18
125. However, this legislation has been applied in very few states. One of them is Kerala, one of India’s most populous states. In Kerala, after much thought and research it was decided that the geographic and demographic unit for self-government most closely tied to the people in Kerala would be the rural village or town called “Grama”, which is why the rural government is called Grama Panchayat (government of the town or village). Alongside the three levels of self-government in more rural zones, urban municipalities and municipal corporations exist in the big cities. Later on we will deal with how competencies, financial resources, equipment and personnel were transferred to these levels of self-governments.
b) Transfer of resources and competencies
126. In 1994, the government of Kerala passed the Panchayat Raj Act, thereby providing a solid legal basis for the system of local government and unifying the transference of institutions and personnel to local self-governments along the lines of the principle that everything that could be carried out at a lower level should be decentralized to that level, leaving for higher-up levels only those competencies that cannot be carried out at a lower level. This meant that the Grama Panchayats, the lowest level of self-government, had to assume many of the functions that were previously carried out at a higher level. This constituted an attempt to implement the concept of subsidiarity that we briefly described in paragraph 40 and that is considered in greater detail below in paragraph 148.
127. In the Kerala experiment a third of all financial resources dedicated to development, as well as a large number of competencies, were transferred from that state level to the Grama Panchayats (governments in rural villages with an average of 25 thousand inhabitants), the lowest level governments.
128. A similar Kerala Municipalities Act was also passed in 1994 to cover the smaller cities.
129. This led to the emergence of two different administrative structures of local self-government: those in rural zones and those in urban areas. Currently, in the rural area there are 14 District Panchayats (the largest unit below the state level), 152 Block Panchayats (groups of Grama Panchayats set up by the central government for administration of centrally sponsored development programs) and 941 Grama Panchayats (rural villages) and in urban areas there are 87 Municipalities and 6 Municipal Corporations. Below is a diagram illustrating this situation.19
130. In 1996 the Communist Party of India – Marxist (CPI-M) led a coalition of progressive forces that won a majority in the statewide assembly elections and that year launched the “People's Campaign” for decentralized planning. This campaign brought a fundamental change in the roles that the different levels of local and regional government would play from then on.
c) From the rural village to meetings in smaller areas: wards and neighborhood areas
131. The starting point for the People’s Campaign was a full afternoon assembly of citizens charged with expressing the felt needs of their communities. During the entire afternoon, residents expressed their most deeply felt needs.
132. Once the lowest level of self-government had been decided upon, those responsible for the planning process in Kerala realized that convening an assembly of all residents in a densely-populated territory or town, implied having to hold assemblies of more than 1000 people, something that did not facilitate meaningful participation.
133. That is why they decided to hold popular assemblies (grama sabhas) not at the level of the village but instead at the lower level of the electoral wards they were divided into. Urban municipalities and municipal corporations (6 big cities in the state of Kerala in those years) also conducted assemblies in wards or electoral circumscriptions.
134. Meetings in the wards involved plenaries in which all those present and the smaller working groups dedicated to discussing different issues contributed, with the aim of ensuring the best possible level of participation. However, even these spaces turned out to be too large; accordingly in the third and fourth years of the campaign for some tasks they set up neighborhood areass (40-50 families) that began to carry out many of the functions of the grama sabha or ward assembly, such as discussing the local plan, revising the plan’s implementation and selecting which people or entities should receive resources.20
135. Throughout the process it is made clear to people that they were making decisions about real investments in their communities and not just approving decisions already taken from above.21[5]
136. Subsequent stages of the campaign included additional assemblies, election of delegates to various specialized seminars, recruitment of volunteer technical staff from among retirees, prioritization of projects by the elected village or urban councils, and public monitoring and evaluation procedures.
137. Higher levels of administration were instructed in ways to fit local projects into regional plans and a massive education and experience sharing program was launched for activists at all levels. It was a very ambitious initiative that demanded the mobilization of the energies and resources of large sections of the society.
138. One of the strongest points of the PP process in Kerala was precisely the emphasis the organizers placed on training various participants: residents, technicians, representatives and volunteers. Different levels of training programs were created, each with its own respective manual, training camps, meetings and, later on, seminars where participants could exchange experiences.
139. There is a Kerala Institute of Local Administration (KILA) where, twice a year, elected representatives from different parts of the state come to participate in training sessions that last several days. One piece of information demonstrates the emphasis they have placed on training cadres: in just one year (2004-2005), 249 programs were run with 29,000 participants.
140. A lot of importance has also been placed on what they call “training trainers”, that is, those people that go on to train residents in their own communities,22 and training through practical experience. KILA also publishes a journal on local decentralized administration in English. It can be accessed at: http://kila.ac.in/node/61.
d) Decentralization of important financial resources to the lower levels
141. To inspire meaningful participation of ordinary people in these local assemblies, the State Planning Board decided to devolve 35 to 40% of development funds to the local levels to be allocated as they chose within certain broad limitations. This devolved fund was divided into two parts: 85% was for the local, block and district panchayats and 15% was for the urban areas, made up of smaller cities or municipalities and the 3 (currently 6) large cities called "municipal corporations" in the administrative English used in Kerala.
142. Of this sum of money, in the rural areas, the local village government23[3] -- the Grama Panchayat (the lowest level of the decentralized structure) -- received around 70%; the following level, the Block Panchayat (rural municipality) 15%; and the District Panchayat, of which there are 14 within the state of Kerala, the remaining 15%24. As you can see, there was an evident decision on the part of the authorities to decentralize the bulk of the resources to the level of government closest to the people.
143. The urban area projects ran generally parallel to those of the rural panchayats -- including first starting at the ward level-(about 500 families). In the published literature on the People's Campaign, most of the detailed attention has been on the rural Grama Panchayats with less description of the urban planning process.25
144. Within the urban area allotment, 75% was weighted purely by population numbers, 5% by geographical area and 20% by an index of underdevelopment that included characteristics such as percent of former untouchable caste members, percent of houses without sanitary latrines and percent of houses without electricity. The emphasis was thus on delivering resources to bring up the quality of life of the most deprived groups.
e) Principles that govern the process
145. As part of the Kerala experiment, elected members of the statewide legislative assembly and the State Planning Board commissioned a study of the essential features and prerequisites of DPP. They engaged Dr. Satya Brata Sen, an academic who had played a role in a decentralization campaign in the Indian State of West Bengal earlier. Dr. Sen’s Committee was officially called “The Committee on Decentralization of Powers.”
148. This committee came up with the following essential components of a genuine process of Democratic Participatory Planning in its 1997 report to the elected state level Ministry:
■ Autonomy. The different tiers of local government should be autonomous: functionally, financially and administratively.
■ Subsidiarity. What can be done best at a particular level should be done at that level and not at higher levels. All that can be optimally done at the lowest level should be reserved to that level. (Note: we shall discuss subsidiarity in some detail later in this chapter). It is also referenced and described in part in Paragraphs 40 and 132.
■ Clarity of roles. There should be conceptual and operational clarity regarding the role of each tier in the development process and a clear division of functions among the tiers.
■ Complementarity. The functions of the different tiers should not overlap, but be complementary to each other.
■ Uniformity. There should be uniformity of norms and criteria for the pattern of assistance or selection of beneficiaries for all the programs implemented in a local area irrespective of the sponsoring agency.
■ People’s Participation. Local self-government should facilitate the maximum direct participation of the people in development.
■ Accountability. There should be continuous social auditing of the performance of the elected representatives.
■ Transparency. People should have the right to information regarding every detail of the administration.
f) The contributions of the experiences of Kerala and Venezuela
147. The experience of Kerala is a valuable guide for understanding how decentralized structures for participatory planning function and the importance of the principle of subsidiarity for organizing the decentralization of functions and resources, along with the importance of making special effort to raise awareness and train up the population to ensure full participation in the process. When carrying out this experience, it was shown that people’s participation was greater in smaller spaces, the wards, and more so when dealing with small groups of neighbors, in what Venezuelans refer to as “neighborhood areas”.
148. The participation of communities is the most specific contribution from the Venezuelan experience. This has enriched the process of participatory budgeting carried out in municipalities governed by Workers’ Party mayors in Brazil and the experience of DPP in Kerala, India.
149. Venezuela’s experience have demonstrated that the more positive impacts have come not from people participating in decisions over what public works projects should be carried out or what initiative should be included in the plans at higher levels but from people developing their own plan at the community level, those small territorial spaces of no more than 2000 inhabitants in urban areas and less in rural areas.
150. When such an organization does not exist in a municipality, the decentralized participatory planning process should act to stimulate its emergence and be a mechanism for promoting community organization. When people see that they can improve their living conditions, they feel more motivated to participate. We therefore need to identify these areas and create planning teams there.
151. Therefore, the ideal space for peoples’ participation does not necessarily seem to be the ideal space for self-government, if we accept the classic definition of self-government as a “system of territorial units of administration that have autonomy to administer themselves.”
152. Now then, to have this capacity to administered your self doesn't mean to ignore the necessary interrelation that should exist among the diverse government, and it is also necessary to clarify and we also need to clarify that not every form of self-government implies participation. There could be local governments that have administrative autonomy but are run undemocratically. When we use the term self-government, we are referring to people’s self-government, that is, where the people govern themselves. In this sense, there is no self-government without full citizens participation, which means that we are talking about a process that can always be improved.
8. Committees that attend to the most vulnerable sectors of society: the elderly and sick, people living in extreme poverty, etc.
9. The most appropriate name would be “Community Council”, while leaving the name “Communal Council” for the level of territorial organization immediately above it: the Commune. The Sub commission for Education of the Presidential National Popular Power Commission, at the time headed by Marta Harnecker, has published some useful material explaining what a Communal Council is, how it is formed and the task it should carry out. It was published as Serie ABC Consejos Comunales, Comisión Presidencial Nacional del Poder Popular, Caracas, 2006. It involved a series of 11 short pedagogical pamphlets. Appendix V outlines some of current thinking of how a Community Council should be organized.
10. The tasks of each working group should be undertaken in a collective manner by the different organisations that identify with a specific issue. For example, the group dedicated to social issues can involve the social welfare committee, the health committee, the food roundtable and other organisations within the community that support the struggle for healthcare and quality of life for all people, especially those living in extreme poverty.
11. The documentary Forging the future shows how in a community experience in Pinar del Rio, Cuba, children were given the task of constructing this history by interviewing local residents that had the most knowledge about the community. Readers can view the material at: https://videosmeplaen.wordpress.com/participation-documentary/video-debate-cyclelearning-about-participation-without-an-instructor/ English subtitles.
12. See Chapter V. Phases in the planning process.
13. For more information on the experience in this municipality, see the excellent book by Alberto Enríquez Villacorta & Marcos Rodríguez, Santa Tecla. Gestión participativa y transformación del territorio, Afán Centroamericana, San Salvador, 2009.
14. “Pequeñas Obras de Gran Impacto” pp. 193-196.
15. Those communities that were located closer to the local rubbish dump were compensated by the fact they received more money.
16. Information taken from: Rosa Pinto Berbel y Tomás Rodríguez Villasante: Kerala. La democracia en marcha. Los retos de la planificación participativa, El Viejo Topo, España, 2011, pp. 70-73.
17. Prime Minister between 1984-1989.
18. This information and what follows in the next few paragraphs have been taken from Rosa Pinto & Tomás Villasante, Democracia participativa en Kerala, 71-73.
19. Richard Franke contribute to clarify some concepts. We have taken this diagram from Rosa Pinto and Tomás Villasante, Op.cit. p. 110, and made some modifications to it.
20. “Many neighborhood groups (NHGs) became involved in settlement of family disputes, educational programs for children, health programs, cultural activities and rotating credit associations…. The representatives of NHGs often constitute a ward committee, which acts as an executive committee of the grama sabhas.” T.M. Isaac & Richard Franke, Op.cit. p. 185. The issue of the neighborhood groups is more fully developed in M.P. Parameswaran, Democracy by the People, The Elusive Kerala Experience (India: Alternatives Asia, 2008), pp. 121-144. It is impressive seeing just how many similarities exist between what Chavez proposed regarding the communal councils and the ideas of this Indian intellectual.
21[5]. See Richard Franke, Marta Harnecker, Andrés Sanz Mulas & Carmen Pineda Nebot, Estado Kerala, India, Una experiencia de planificación participativa descentralizada (Caracas: Centro Internacional Miranda, 2009) http://www.rebelion.org/docs/97086.pdf). Regarding this issue I would recommend reading T.M. Thomas Isaac & Richard W. Franke, Local Democracy and Development: The Kerala People's Campaign for Decentralized Planning (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) and Rosa Pinto & Tomás Villasante Democracia participativa en Kerala: Planificación descentralizada desde la base (Madrid, El Viejo Topo, 2011).
22. “In the first year of the campaign, 373 trainers at the state level taught 10,497 people at the district level, who in turn ran one-day workshops for more than 100,000 local community activists who became the backbone of the initial stage of the campaign. In 1998, 4,195 district educators received specialised training from 545 educators at the statewide level, and then ran workshops for 93,000 participants. In 1999-2000 there was more mass training, including a series of three-day workshops for women activists and elected representatives.” (Richard W. Franke, Marta Harnecker et. al., Estado Kerala, India: una experiencia de planificación participativa descentralizada (Caracas: C.I.M., 2009).
23[3]. What we have referred to as the territorial area.
24. Rosa Pinto & Tomás Villasante, p. 127.
25. Thomas Isaac and Franke, Op.cit. 2002, p. 91 y pp. 160-161.
