Active Democracy Network gets into the "Meat" of the Work
The month of October represented a significant milestone for the network of 24 civil society organizations across the Americas that are partners in the project "Active Democracy: Citizen Network for the Implementation of Summit Mandates." The hemispheric coordination team (HCT) distributed to the 24 national coordinators the Spanish and English versions of a comprehensive but user-friendly Methodology Manual so that they could start work.
That work is the challenging but important task of supporting and promoting democratic governance throughout the Americas. The Active Democracy Network seeks to measure the level of implementation of mandates emanating from the Summit of the Americas in 4 areas of government actions: access to public information; freedom of expression; local government and decentralization; and support for civil society participation in governance. The HCT continues to welcome feedback and comments from the National Coordinators as to the clarity, organization and scope of activities described in the methodology manual, as a means of ensuring the quality and efficiency of each stage of the execution of national, regional and hemispheric activities. The methodology describes the indicators to be measured, the heuristic methods and the research steps for generating the "meat" of the project: the National Reports for each of the 24 countries.
As a civil society initiative, the project is innovative and ambitious, but it is also pioneering in the sense that coming up with a standard methodology for these reports by government themselves has been a challenge to institutions such as the OAS itself. For this reason, the Network partners are motivated in their application of the rigorous methodology by the knowledge of its potential impact to advance democratic governance in the Americas.
Public Participation as a Fundamental Right and the Inter-American System
The Active Democracy project, represented by the Executive Director of PARTICIPA Andrea Sanhueza, participated in the Inter-American Dialogue on October 12th in Washington DC. In this meeting, Andrea Sanhueza made a presentation on Public Participation in the Inter-American System. During this presentation, it was made clear that public participation is a human right, as well as its importance for strengthening governability in the Inter-American System. Also during the presentation, concrete proposals were made for how to incorporate the participation of civil society organizations into the next Summit of the Americas to be held in Trinidad and Tobago in 2009. This important meeting included the presence of the Secretary General of the OAS, Mr. José Miguel Insulza, and the President of the Bank of Inter-American Development as well as other high ranking officials. Read more
Begins its Governmental evaluation in 24 countries.
In the month of October, the 24 organizations that make up "Active Democracy: Hemispheric Network for Governmental compliance with the Summits" from 24 different countries in the Americas, began the implementation of the methodology that is to be used to evaluate the level of Government compliance with the mandates issued during the Summits of the Americas. The evaluation is based on four different thematic areas related to the general issue of democratic governability: decentralization and local governments, access to public information, freedom of expression and the strengthening of civil society participation. Read more
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Inter-American Dialogue Meeting
The agenda of this meeting, held in Washington on October 12th, revolved around three fundamental subjects. First was the process being developed in preparation for the V Summit of the Americas to be held in Trinidad and Tobago in 2009. On this matter, both the OAS Office of Summit Management and the representatives from the Office of the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago who are in charge of organizing the Summit provided information regarding the progress that has been achieved thus far. In as much as this is concerned, the two principal aspects are the determination of the dates for the Summit, which have yet to be decided, as well as the theme that will guide the debates at this event and its connection to the previous themes that have been developed into the various mandates of the four previous summits. Read more.
