Colombia

Presentation on a methodological booklet: Working experience with the Charter of Responsibilities in Colombia A path for the exercise of responsibilities – with this title, this publication presents in a straight forward and practical way the road map for those who want to understand or study, promote and build the social utility of exercising human responsibilities in diverse contexts and different places around the world. As noted in the table of contents, the document includes 10 (...)

A municipal-administration and citizens’ commitment. The result of a working process with a group of citizens coordinated by the social organization Foro por Colombia, Valle Chapter, and supported by the CINEP, the Citizens’ Pact to Strengthen Public Management and Active Citizenship is a symbol for the community of Puerto Tejada. For three months (January-March 2006), a group of thirty citizens - the Democratic Leaders’ Network, including councilmen, teachers, municipal officers, (...)

The Charter of Responsibilities must enable civil society to develop its own capacity for organisational and institutional empowerment and change stereotypes of political action that have existed up until now. Civil society must, in fact, contribute to the creation of a new type of governance by, for instance, reinforcing mechanisms of control over the communication media and over the activities of local, regional, national and supranational authorities, private companies and social (...)

The distributed budget. We find ourselves in Colombia in a situation different from that of the other members of the Committee. We, in fact, began the work of disseminating the Charter early, i.e. in July 2003, in response to a call for initiatives and thus received an initial sum to make headway with the work. The debate within the Charter’s Steering Committee over voting methods and budget amounts reveals a heavy dependence on our main financer. It is thus imperative that we find other (...)