Planning from Below. Marta Harnecker

in these local assemblies, the State Planning Board decided to devolve 35 to 40% of development funds to the local levels to be allocated as they chose within certain broad limitations. This devolved fund was divided into two parts: 85% was for the local, block and district panchayats and 15% was for the urban areas, made up of smaller cities or municipalities and the 3 (currently 6) large cities called "municipal corporations" in the administrative English used in Kerala.

      142. Of this sum of money, in the rural areas, the local village government^23[3] -- the Grama Panchayat (the lowest level of the decentralized structure) -- received around 70%; the following level, the Block Panchayat (rural municipality) 15%; and the District Panchayat, of which there are 14 within the state of Kerala, the remaining 15%²⁴. As you can see, there was an evident decision on the part of the authorities to decentralize the bulk of the resources to the level of government closest to the people.

      143. The urban area projects ran generally parallel to those of the rural panchayats -- including first starting at the ward level-(about 500 families). In the published literature on the People's Campaign, most of the detailed attention has been on the rural Grama Panchayats with less description of the urban planning process.²⁵

      144. Within the urban area allotment, 75% was weighted purely by population numbers, 5% by geographical area and 20% by an index of underdevelopment that included characteristics such as percent of former untouchable caste members, percent of houses without sanitary latrines and percent of houses without electricity. The emphasis was thus on delivering resources to bring up the quality of life of the most deprived groups.

e) Principles that govern the process

      145. As part of the Kerala experiment, elected members of the statewide legislative assembly and the State Planning Board commissioned a study of the essential features and prerequisites of DPP. They engaged Dr. Satya Brata Sen, an academic who had played a role in a decentralization campaign in the Indian State of West Bengal earlier. Dr. Sen’s Committee was officially called “The Committee on Decentralization of Powers.”

      148. This committee came up with the following essential components of a genuine process of Democratic Participatory Planning in its 1997 report to the elected state level Ministry:

      ■ Autonomy. The different tiers of local government should be autonomous: functionally, financially and administratively.

      ■ Subsidiarity. What can be done best at a particular level should be done at that level and not at higher levels. All that can be optimally done at the lowest level should be reserved to that level. (Note: we shall discuss subsidiarity in some detail later in this chapter). It is also referenced and described in part in Paragraphs 40 and 132.

      ■ Clarity of roles. There should be conceptual and operational clarity regarding the role of each tier in the development process and a clear division of functions among the tiers.

      ■ Complementarity. The functions of the different tiers should not overlap, but be complementary to each other.

      ■ Uniformity. There should be uniformity of norms and criteria for the pattern of assistance or selection of beneficiaries for all the programs implemented in a local area irrespective of the sponsoring agency.

      ■ People’s Participation. Local self-government should facilitate the maximum direct participation of the people in development.

      ■ Accountability. There should be continuous social auditing of the performance of the elected representatives.

      ■ Transparency. People should have the right to information regarding every detail of the administration.

f) The contributions of the experiences of Kerala and Venezuela

      147. The experience of Kerala is a valuable guide for understanding how decentralized structures for participatory planning function and the importance of the principle of subsidiarity for organizing the decentralization of functions and resources, along with the importance of making special effort to raise awareness and train up the population to ensure full participation in the process. When carrying out this experience, it was shown that people’s participation was greater in smaller spaces, the wards, and more so when dealing with small groups of neighbors, in what Venezuelans refer to as “neighborhood areas”.

      148. The participation of communities is the most specific contribution from the Venezuelan experience. This has enriched the process of participatory budgeting carried out in municipalities governed by Workers’ Party mayors in Brazil and the experience of DPP in Kerala, India.

      149. Venezuela’s experience have demonstrated that the more positive impacts have come not from people participating in decisions over what public works projects should be carried out or what initiative should be included in the plans at higher levels but from people developing their own plan at the community level, those small territorial spaces of no more than 2000 inhabitants in urban areas and less in rural areas.

      150. When such an organization does not exist in a municipality, the decentralized participatory planning process should act to stimulate its emergence and be a mechanism for promoting community organization. When people see that they can improve their living conditions, they feel more motivated to participate. We therefore need to identify these areas and create planning teams there.

      151. Therefore, the ideal space for peoples’ participation does not necessarily seem to be the ideal space for self-government, if we accept the classic definition of self-government as a “system of territorial units of administration that have autonomy to administer themselves.”

      152. Now then, to have this capacity to administered your self doesn't mean to ignore the necessary interrelation that should exist among the diverse government, and it is also necessary to clarify and we also need to clarify that not every form of self-government implies participation. There could be local governments that have administrative autonomy but are run undemocratically. When we use the term self-government, we are referring to people’s self-government, that is, where the people govern themselves. In this sense, there is no self-government without full citizens participation, which means that we are talking about a process that can always be improved.

      8. Committees that attend to the most vulnerable sectors of society: the elderly and sick, people living in extreme poverty, etc.

      9. The most appropriate name would be “Community Council”, while leaving the name “Communal Council” for the level of territorial organization immediately above it: the Commune. The Sub commission for Education of the Presidential National Popular Power Commission, at the time headed by Marta Harnecker, has published some useful material explaining what a Communal Council is, how it is formed and the task it should carry out. It was published as Serie ABC Consejos Comunales, Comisión Presidencial Nacional del Poder Popular, Caracas, 2006. It involved a series of 11 short pedagogical pamphlets. Appendix V outlines some of current thinking of how a Community Council should be organized.

      10. The tasks of each working group should be undertaken in a collective manner by the different organisations that identify with a specific issue. For example, the group dedicated to social issues can involve the social welfare committee, the health committee, the food roundtable and other organisations within the community that support the struggle for healthcare and quality of life for all people, especially those living in extreme poverty.

      11. The documentary Forging the future shows how in a community experience in Pinar del Rio, Cuba, children were given the task of constructing this history by interviewing local residents that had the most knowledge about the community. Readers can view the material at: https://videosmeplaen.wordpress.com/participation-documentary/video-debate-cyclelearning-about-participation-without-an-instructor/ English subtitles.

      12.