Democratic Residencies to Strengthen Democratic Governance in the Global South
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“”I am very happy to have the privilege to share with colleagues from Latin America, and now particularly in Buenos Aires, to share the great challenges we have in terms of democratic innovation, city building, co-creation, mutual learning, collective intelligence in order to improve our cities in Latin America”. This is what Sofia Castillo from Instituto Sur (Mexico) and the first resident of Asuntos del Sur in Buenos Aires (Argentina) told us.
During April and May, CILA hosted the democratic residencies created by People Powered in partnership with Demo.Reset. Through collaborative work, host organisations, residents and other stakeholders tested or developed a priority project for practitioners of participatory and deliberative democracy. By testing the initiatives, they assessed whether the idea is effective, understood the main opportunities and risks of the initial idea, and determined the next steps for future implementation.
Some of the projects were prototypes proposed through Demo.Reset, a lab organised in Bogotá, Colombia by Extituto de Política Abierta which CILA helped to empower. The other projects were proposals prioritised by People Powered members during their 2023 planning process. Members first discussed the challenges to work on and ideas to address them.
The themes were wide-ranging. From participatory spaces with rural farming communities, interactive platforms to include youth in decision-making, to creating low-cost participatory technologies and generating content on deliberative democracy. To see the rest of the projects, click here!
At CILA, we support this type of initiative to improve the institutional framework for Democratic Governance throughout the Global South and to work towards greater Deliberative Democracy. This is why, during the last month and a half, CILA hosted the project “Development of Regional HUBs” in order to generate a Toolkit for the construction of HUBs in different parts of the world and a preliminary test in the Latin American region, with the aim of connecting participatory democracy advocates from different countries to better address the specific challenges and opportunities of each region.
The novelty of the CILA case was that the residency took place simultaneously in three cities of the consortium: Buenos Aires (Argentina), Santiago (Chile) and Santos (Brazil). In Buenos Aires the host was Asuntos del Sur and received Sofía Castillo from Instituto Sur, in Santiago the host was Ciudadanía Inteligente and received Karla Luna from Ollin and in Santos the host was Instituto Pro Comum and received Viviana Villa from Extituto de Política Abierta.
The simultaneous presence in several cities allowed for a better diagnosis and knowledge of the realities of the South. In this way, through a series of interviews, we were able to get to know in depth how Latin American organisations in the 4 cities work in a network and in a collaborative way in the region. In addition, we conducted a regional mapping of democratic innovation to obtain more quantitative data on networking experiences in order to diagnose, evaluate and understand what works and what does not.
Stay tuned for the publication of the results of our mapping to understand the do’s and don’ts of regional networking!
