66. Perhaps one of the most significant achievements of participatory planning is having been able to motivate citizens’ participation in the tasks of government, and to facilitate their initiative and creativity. Citizens knowing about and deciding upon public issues in face-to-face meetings is one of the most concrete ways to create spaces for participation and strengthening grassroots organization.
67. Carried out properly, this process has nothing in common with the co-optation of popular organizations by the state or their dissolution into the state. On the contrary, through it other powers are created outside of the traditional institutions of the state, making it a highly revolutionary experience.
68. Lastly, as we said in the Preface, this form of planning is more than just the ideal instrument to achieve the full participation of citizens in the management of public matters. When people are involved in the process of planning, they no longer feel like beggars demanding solutions from the state. They feel themselves to be the builders of their own destiny.
69. In short, this process not only facilitates the creation of a plan, something that is tangible and visible for all to see, but also helps transform the people who participate in it. Those who involve themselves are transformed; they are no longer the same persons they were at the start of the process. They begin to not only worry about themselves, their self-interests; instead they think about their community, their territorial area, and finally, their municipality as a whole. They learn to express solidarity with those most in need.
4. A quechua word.
5. Paragraphs 8 to 13 are taken from Flavio Carucci T, Agendas sociales. Construyendo acuerdos para el desarrollo local (Caracas: GTZ, Escuela de gerencia social, ILDIS, 2009), 14.
6. In November 2004, at a meeting of 800 high-level cadres from the government of President Chavez, it was recommended to put participatory planning into practice across the country. However, despite this clear directive from the president, this method was implemented by very few mayoralties and in many cases it was limited to a merely participatory consultation.
7. In this regards see Marta Harnecker, Delegando poder en la gente: presupuesto participativo en Porto Alegre, Brasil (Habana: MEPLA, 1999).
CHAPTER 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