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have been working quite a lot on organizing the Adwanpur, organizing the urban poor
to resist eviction, the informal settlement, the slums which are, in a way, the risk of
eviction every day. So, organizing them, providing them, creating their own knowledge
and then facilitating interfaces with the local administration and the municipalities.
A lot of self-help groups. a lot of intermediate civil society organization facilitating
both men and women server group. It’s a kind of solidarity economy principle which
have been used to create those spaces. And then round issues like in urban spaces,
particularly drinking water or sanitation or air pollution. Around those issues, many,
many citizen organizations are coming and putting pressure on the State and
government to have better legislation, better regulation and better enforcement.
That’s the kind of claim spaces by citizens participation.
So, it’s just to sort of conclude couple of points. These are challenges. These
are also. On the other hand, we welcome this. Then, this could also be enabling facts
for citizens, participation, and therefore citizen enforcement.
The one first point is facilitating access to information. I strongly believe that
the quality of information would very much depend, would very much influence the
quality of participation. As a citizen, I need to know, what is my role? I need to
know, what project is there? What resources are there? And therefore, deciding about
the priorities and the application of those resources. So, access to information is
extremely important. I call it universalize institutional spaces. The mechanism is like
Gram Sabha or village assembly. Those are universal spaces where it does not make
a distinction between rich and poor. It’s a universal space where rich can participate,
poor can participate, men can participate, women can participate. But the catch is in
can. Those what practitioners, those who research on participation would definitely
know that universalized space, most of the time does not work for the marginalize
and those who do not have access to power. Therefore, you also need particularize
space, which means women organizations, which means Urban Poor Organization, and
which mean rural poor organization. In order to make even those universalized spaces
work. So, we need to make a distinction between this… just creating universalized
space might not be helpful. It is necessary, but might not guarantee the participation
of the most marginalized.
One thing that is absolutely important is the building capacity of the local
governance institutions. In many times, the participation is better facilitated at the
local level. Therefore, the proximity of the local government institutions by the citizen
is absolutely could crucial. But it also depended on how much capacity local
government institutions have in order to organize citizens, provide information, and
then facilitate their participation. And in a way, sort of, handing over power to the
citizen to decide for the development priorities.
And the last point is the promoting mechanism for transparency, accountability
and responsiveness. For my 20, 25 years of facilitating citizen participation, the most
challenging part has been that we have mobilized people. Then when we facilitated ª£¸²£ª±¡¡²¥¸h¡¢h¢µÈ
between the governance institutions and the citizen institutions. Many times, the
