Around the world, the common response to rising homicides is more police and tougher punishments.

But two communities in Colombia decided to take a different approach: bring people together to better understand (and respond to) the root causes.

Welcome back to Beyond Elections, Proximate’s newsletter featuring original reporting and news from the world of participatory democracy.

For our Big Idea story, I spoke with two members of the Fundación Corona team in Colombia about their use of a technique called "territorial dialogue" to tackle perhaps one of the most challenging – and significant – problems faced by communities today: violent crime.

Their approach could, and should, be adapted elsewhere –including my home, Washington, DC, where homicides have triggered an escalation in brutal law enforcement.

And keep reading for Field Notes, where I invite you to reflect on the relevance of nation states in a world where autocracy seems to be on the rise, and think deeply about who gets to decide what participation means, and the forms it takes.

- Pam Bailey, Editor, Beyond Elections

Violence is a Community Problem That Must Be Solved by the Community

Right along with food and shelter, safety is basic human need. So rising homicides, mostly by youths against youths, were prioritized as the number one problem when two Colombian municipalities conducted what is called a "territorial dialogue" to identify and brainstorm solutions to improve community life.  

"There is a lack of legitimacy in Colombian public decision-making, due both to poor citizen engagement and a deficient government response to social challenges," Diana Dajer, manager of citizen participation for Fundación Corona, told me. "As a result, the gap between people’s expectations and government actions keeps broadening.

That's why the NGO looked for a better way to address the the municipalities' crisis. Read our conversation to learn about their participatory approach.

Each month, we share a roundup of news from the field of participatory and deliberative democracy. Send any suggestions to hello@proximate.press.

‘Nation states’ are no longer the engines of progress

I live in the United States. I am also fairly highly educated and live on the East Coast – which means I am in one of those small blobs of blue (“progressive”) on an otherwise deep red map. And after the leader of the Deep Red World won the U.S. presidential election, a lot of people like me have been looking for both an explanation and a source of motivation to keep working toward a more equitable, inclusive community. 

I found both in a recent essay by Joe Matthews. He says that, “Democracy is not in decline. The nation-state is.” Think tanks such as International IDEA, Varieties of Democracy and Freedom House focus on the level of the nation, and regularly show steady and discouraging declines in the health of “people power” (mostly via elections). It’s clear that “nation-states have proven incapable of solving planetary problems and addressing planetary threats — climate change, technological advances, disease terrorism. And, at the same time, nation-states can no longer unify their people.” In other words, nations have become impediments to change rather than catalysts. 

Instead, Matthews concludes, most real democracy (read: not just elections) takes place at the level where people actually live, in local communities.

I recently moderated a panel on “Civic Engagement Beyond the Ballot” for Next City, an online magazine and nonprofit organization focused on urban affairs in the United States, and the wealth of examples of public participation in municipal decision-making was just the inspiration I needed at this time.

I particularly loved the example of CivicLex, an organization that takes a truly holistic approach to nurturing civic health in one Kentucky county – starting with education about how local institutions work and extending to an online platform for soliciting public input into county challenges. 

CivicLex isn’t alone. Democracy Local just launched, billing itself as a “planetary publication and learning community of, by and for everyday people governing themselves.” (No surprise: Joe Matthews is the publisher!) Proximate welcomes this growing ecosystem; we too exist to spread the word.

Thanks to our partner People Powered for supporting Beyond Elections

The ultimate in participatory democracy is people governing themselves.

The concept of people governing themselves is beginning to take root in an exciting way in Myanmar, as documented recently in Noema magazine by Charles Petrie, a former UN assistant secretary general and representative in the country.  

In Myanmar, as Petrie writes, the national government and its Tatmandaw (its armed forces) are no longer able to control the people. And in the vacuum, Petrie found that various elements in the communities are organizing to govern themselves.

“The struggle against the Tatmadaw has morphed from a fight by ethnic groups to control territory into the emergence of a new form of participatory governance,” writes Petrie. 

Led by young activists in their 20s and early 30s, are earning broad acceptance by respecting local traditions, remaining polite and, over time, providing services that had not previously existed in their communities. 

For example, these volunteers set up a significant number of hospitals and clinics, and  rebuilt them every time they were bombed. “I met one group of activists called Spring Hope that, after each bombing run or mortar attack that destroyed one of their hospitals, metaphorically and physically shook the dust off their clothes, collected the patients who had survived and went further into the jungle to build a new one,” he recounts.

Eventually, they formalized themselves. In one community called Karenni, the activists joined civil society leaders to create a State Consultative Council, founded on principles of inclusivity, dignity and unity. Efforts have been made to ensure that the council’s executive body is representative of the different forces active in Karenni: political, popular defense forces and civil society (with a particular focus on the participation of women).

Petrie ends with a call to international aid organizations to engage with these new local governance structures, and be willing to support open-ended, formative work (such as the development of methods of community consultation) rather than well-defined outcomes (such as schools, hospitals and food distribution). It also would necessitate a willingness to let the people themselves decide who they trust, including nascent movements rather than established entities – a blind spot for many nonprofits, not just iNGOs. (To explore this idea further, read the interview I did with Iain Walker about the possibility of a type of citizens’ governance in the Gaza Strip.)

Who’s defining participation?

The people-driven form of governance in Myanmar reminds me of a provocative book I recently read, called “The Participation Paradox: Between Bottom-Up and Top-Down Development in South Africa,” by Luke Sinwell. He describes how the ~22,500 residents of Thembelihle, an informal settlement south of Johannesburg, took governance into their own hands when the local representative of the party in power (the African National Congress) failed to respond to their repeated requests for better service (such as connection to the formal power grid). The result was first a community crisis committee, followed by a People’s Parliament that has operated for more than two decades.  

Sinwell calls the mechanisms created by the people in both Karenni (Myanmar) and Thembelihle “invented participatory spaces” – in other words, created by the people themselves, not the entity with power, such as a government or international NGO. Why are people-created spaces better? Because, says Sinwell, the former too often set the rules: dictating the topic, the range of options, the forum for discussion, etc. 

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to allow lively debate, while at the same time strictly limiting the spectrum of dialogue,” explains Sinwell. “That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

So, in reality, people’s participation often is intended to simply determine the specific form of projects already sanctioned by a government or development agency. At this point in Sinwell’s book, I recalled a World Bank project in Kyrgyzstan that I wrote about when working for People Powered. A massive new power line was being installed across the country as part of CASA-1000, an international initiative designed to link the energy systems of Central and South Asia — Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan with Afghanistan and Pakistan — and enable trading of electricity. In conjunction with that project, the World Bank offered community-improvement grants to the municipalities located along the power line. And it mandated that residents in those towns decide for themselves how to spend the grants, within three categories of projects: electricity supply, social “infrastructure” and livelihood generation.

But was that real participation? The residents didn’t get to weigh in on whether the power line should cut through their area to begin with. And they also could only choose to to allocate the funds to one of the three specified purposes. 

“In part as a response to Marxist tendencies within anti-colonial movements across the world, but also because of the perceived need for the development establishment to be seen as uplifting nations in the Global South, participation has become mainstreamed, watered down and depoliticized,” writes Sinwell. “The theory and practice of radical, popular participation have been essentially decapitated in a long-term, calculated strategy by neoliberal institutions such as the World Bank to give a more human face to an inhumane market-driven or economistic development agenda.”

Despite the most progressive intentions, concludes Sinwell, “without a formidable counter-power capable of intervention into state affairs, participation more often than not becomes a pawn in the hands of authorities bent on maintaining the status quo.” That’s why, he says, the residents of Thembelihle consider protest – both blocking of major streets and occupation of government offices – to be important tactics in their public participation. Sometimes, it’s necessary to go outside of the channels chosen by the powers-that-be and challenge the status quo. 

Maybe we need to focus on the social and political context in which the idea and practice of participation emerges. Do they emerge from government, development agency boardrooms or the experiences of the dispossessed? 

Food for thought. 

Thanks for reading Beyond Elections!

Proximate is a movement-led media platform advancing conversations participatory solutions. Reach out to hello@proximate.press to learn more.