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Asociación Ciudades Kyosei releases a provocative report on Citizen Participation28. February 2010 – 22:29 by Asociacion Ciudades Kyosei / Pedro Prieto-Martin |
For those of you that read Spanish, the report that the Asociación Ciudades Kyosei just released (which can be downloaded from its website) could interest you much, as understanding “Citizen Participation” continues to be the basis to developing any “e-Participation” initiative.
The text “(e)Participación en el ámbito local. Caminando hacia una democracia colaborativa” deals with citizen participation as it was known during the XX Century.
It analyses its strengths, potential and problems from a critical, irreverent, but nevertheless thoughtful perspective. To illustrate the characteristics of citizen participation, the report provides a comprehensive and original analysis of Participatory Budgeting Experiences of the big brazilian cities (with special emphasis on Porto Alegre and Fortaleza).
Vicious cycle of participation
This text was prizewinner in the last CLAD Congress (the most important Latin-American congress on State Reform and Public Administration Modernization), which took place in Salvador de Bahia (Brazil).
We really expect you will find this report refreshing, and actually hope it will foster interesting reflections from your side.
Tags: civic participation, inenglish, inspanish, participatory budgeting, report
3 Responses to “Asociación Ciudades Kyosei releases a provocative report on Citizen Participation”
By Rolf Luehrs on Mar 1, 2010
What a pity that it is only available in Spanish - any plans to translate it? Would be really keen to read it….
By Tim Bonnemann on Mar 1, 2010
Time to brush up my (close to non-existent) Spanish, I guess…
By Asociacion Ciudades Kyosei / Pedro Prieto-Martin on Mar 1, 2010
Hi Rolf and Tim,
Thanks for expressing your interest.
We would really like to get the text translated, but the resources of our association are really limited. In its three and a half years of existence our total expenditures (not considering the value of the voluntary work we’ve received and some direct grants we got) were aroung 2100 EUR.
We are actually investing now in a translation the text to Portuguese (so it can be throughly read in Brazil), but for other languages (Basque, English, Catalan, German, etc.) we depend on voluntary work. We would welcome if any (official) institution would like to translate the text. They would be fully credited for it and, since the text is licensed under Creative Commons, there would be no problem if they want to edit an (slightly modified) edition of the text.
Anyway, to your question. We started a translation to English when we wrote the first chapter. It’s a partial translation (at the middle of the chapter it’s just Google Translate doing its best, because we decided to concentrate in writing rather than in translating), but it could serve you as an “appetizer”, to get an idea of the flavor it has.
The most interesting and innovative part is, however, the second chapter (specially, the analysis of the Participatory Budgeting experiences), and there is no translation for this.
This partially translated version of the first chapter can be downloaded HERE