Debates on Participatory Governance in Latin America

ENRIQUE PERUZZOTTI

Seminario; Democratic Governance in Latin America; 2011

The article reviews recent developments on social accountability politics and participatory governance in Latin America and the arguments that such processes have generated within the field of democratic studies. Section I briefly presents the central tenant of initial debates on democratic deficits in the region. Those discussions introduced an issue –governmental accountability—that was largely foreign to the political tradition of the region. At first, the debate replicated conventional conceptual frameworks for analyzing accountability; its central focus being the performance of traditional state agencies of governmental oversight on the one hand, and that of electoral institutions on the other. The narrow conception of conventional approaches was soon challenged by a heterogeneous set of initiatives that arose with the intention to address legal and political deficits of accountability by promoting processes of democratic deepening. The latter supposed not simply the improving of conventional accountability mechanisms but the creation of novel ones as well. The article concentrates on a specific set of those innovations: those ones that involve the participation of civil society as an active agent of accountability. Section II focuses on the contribution of social participation to the agenda of legal accountability analyzing two distinctive forms of social oversight of governmental wrongdoing: social accountability politics and experiences of articulated oversight. Section III analyzes institutionalized arenas of participation and their contribution to a more deliberative and public process of policy-making. Finally, section IV briefly reflects on the challenges that analyzed processes of democratic innovation pose for democratic theory, particularly to election-centered ways of understanding the practice of democratic representation and governmental accountability.