Participatory Democracy? Exploring Peru’s Efforts to Engage Civil Society in Local Governance

As institutions are created to engage citizens and civil society organizations more directly, who participates, and what effect does participation have? This article explores two of Peru’s participatory institutions, the Regional Coordination Councils and the participatory budgets, created in 2002. Specifically it asks, once these institutions are set up, do organizations participate in them? and what effect does this participation have on the organizations? The data show that the participatory processes in Peru are including new voices in decisionmaking, but this inclusion has limits. Limited inclusion has, in turn, led to limited changes specifically in nongovernmental organizations. As a result, the democratizing potential of the participatory institutions is evident yet not fully realized. A institutions are created around Latin America to engage citizens and civil society organizations directly, who participates? What effect does this participation have? Increasingly, local, regional, and national governments around Latin America are designing new institutions that allow citizens and civil society organizations (CSOs) to participate directly in policy decisionmaking with voice and vote. Participatory institutions (or PIs), such as development councils, participatory performance monitoring, and participatory budgets, have been implemented around the region in countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Peru.1 Often, these institutions are created to complement existing representative democratic institutions that are failing to meet the needs and demands of citizens. Reformers hope to increase transparency and accountability, as well as to encourage a more active and engaged civil society. However, we do not yet know how “participatory” these institutions really are. As a result of this trend, there is a growing scholarly literature on participatory governance. Yet the nature of participation remains understudied, and several questions remain unanswered. Who is invited and who comes to the meetings? Do design decisions about what kinds of actors are invited to participate—civil society organizations or individual citizens—affect the nature of participation? Do participants represent the same powerful groups that dominate political decisions, or are © 2013 University of Miami DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-2456.2013.00203.x Stephanie McNulty is an assistant professor in the Department of Government at Franklin and Marshall College. [email protected] new actors engaged in these processes? How does participation change the actors involved? This article explores the nature and impact of one particular design option: the decision to invite representatives from CSOs, and not individual citizens, to participate in subnational decisionmaking. CSOs are part of the organizational sphere that is distinct from both market and state and includes a range of associational actors, such as religious groups, grassroots organizations, professional associations, social movements, labor unions, and nongovernmental organizations. This article discusses two subnational institutions in Peru, Regional Coordination Councils and the participatory budget process, and applies those questions to these two settings. By documenting the case of Peru, the article adds a new case to the literature on participation and pushes us to think about the voices that are truly represented in participatory democratic experiments in Latin America. Examining these issues allows us to increase our understanding of the effect of participatory institutions on democratizing political systems. Can they help bridge the gap between weak or broken representative institutions, such as political parties, elections, and different branches of government, and the disenfranchised public? Can PIs engage those who have been excluded from the political system? Or do they give more power to the actors who already have political power in subnational politics? Does the decision to invite CSOs change the nature of participation? Does participation, in turn, change the agents who commit to attending meetings and workshops year after year? These questions are important to explore because if PIs do effectively engage previously disempowered actors, and if that engagement leads to changes in the participants, then we have an indicator that PIs do affect some aspects of democratic governance at the subnational level. PERU’S CORPORATE PARTICIPATORY INSTITUTIONS In 2002, Peru’s Congress passed a sweeping constitutional reform (Law 27680) that strengthened regional (or state), provincial (or county), and district (or municipal) governments and created several institutions that directly engage civil society. The reform emerged due to a general consensus among political elites that drastic measures were needed to attack the problems that had plagued the country in the second half of the twentieth century and were exacerbated by the decadelong rule of Alberto Fujimori. These problems included centralized rule, widespread corruption, lack of political accountability, manipulation of subnational authorities, lack of transparency of public budgets, and distant relations between the state and society. The reform stressed and even mandated participation, setting up several institutions that formalized civil society participation at the regional and local levels, including a mandatory participatory budget process and councils that engaged civil society.2 Generally, policymakers can design participatory institutions based on one of two models: the individual model, which opens up spaces for individual citizens to participate; and the corporate model, in which participants represent civil society organizations (World Bank 2008). This aspect of the design is codified in national legislation 70 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 55: 3