Networks of Institutional Participation and Local Democratic Governance. The Case of Participatory Budgeting in Chile

The text describes and analyzes the institutional context, the emergency, development and methodology of two cases of Participatory Budgeting (PB) developed in Chile in recent years, highlighting their potentialities and critical points as experiments of democratization of public policy management in local level, and of strengthening citizenship's capacities of incidence and control about the public decisions. The article concludes that the design of such PB, although methodologically participatory, are not strategically decisive for local democratic governance, given (i) the lack of autonomy of the social counterparts on the priorities of the authorities and bureaucracies involved in the policy network; and as a result of (ii) the lack of autonomy of the sub-national agencies to redirect the central's social policies, and then, to process the demands of the local social agenda, under consensual criteria of solidarity and social equity.46213

Public Policy Networks and Social Participation Agendas during the Post-Transition in Chile: Challenging Politics or Recreating its Limitations?

The paper discusses the opportunities available to strengthen citizenship in Chile, within a context marked by the limited spaces for social participation defined by the institutional arrangements prevailing in the country The paper first goes on to describing the main agendas of social participation included within the social policies that have been implemented during the process of transition to democracy Then we examine the public policy networks that have reached incidence at the local and national level. It is argued that despite the fact that these networks have not produced a new political actor, they show novel forms of local political action. However, these networks are still limited in their impacts, which can be explained due to three main issues: endogenous factors, the fact that they are relatively disconnected from the current political practices and the failures of the institutional design of the agendas for social participation that have prevailed in the country.211458