What kind of legal framework best enables citizen participation in local governance? What contextual factors constrain or enable citizen participation? This report from the Learning Initiative on Citizen Participation and Local Governance (LogoLink) synthesises the findings of a research project on frameworks for citizen participation in East Africa, Latin America, South and South-East Asia and the North.
A legal framework can be understood as a ‘bundle’ embracing the constitution, national participation laws and policies, accompanying guidelines and other laws which impinge on participation. An effective legal framework can contribute to promoting citizen participation in local governance, but is not in itself a sufficient condition to ensure effective participation. This depends on contextual factors and the extent to which the legal framework attempts to enhance representative democracy with participatory measures. The question of how necessary a framework is requires further research.
Contextual factors including history, politics, socio-cultural structures economics and configurations of social actors significantly influence which legal frameworks emerge and how they function in practice. Enabling factors include:
- Legal frameworks promulgated in response to demand from below and that seek to improve representation
- Mechanisms of participatory democracy and accountability
- Provision for fiscal decentralisation and participation in fiscal processes and recognition of rights to participate in governance
- Guidelines and capacity-strengthening measures accompanying laws
- Commitment to participation from above and below, trusting relationships between citizen and state and advanced processes of decentralisation
- Locally derived participation discourses, political parties committed to participation and representativeness, bureaucratic transparency and other laws supportive of participation
- Commitment to movement towards participatory democracy and opportunities for experimentation within and outside spaces provided by legal frameworks
Analysis of the many existing frameworks provides a basis for designing a ‘good’ framework which is most likely to be effective.
- Countries with weak, incomplete or no legal frameworks can draw on existing effective frameworks to promote enabling – and avoid constraining – characteristics of legal frameworks.
- Legal framework design and related expectations must be based on a solid and realistic analysis of context.
- Legal frameworks should be designed and applied with accompanying measures, particularly in regard to capacity-building, transparency and information provision. These contextual factors are the most amenable to short-term improvement.
- Further research is needed into how frameworks are experienced in practice and the roles of various actors in introducing and influencing frameworks.
- Two additional areas which require further research are: participation which occurs despite, not because of, legal frameworks and fiscal decentralisation; and civil society’s relationship to citizen participation.
