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According to Article 1 of Decree No. 11, the Development Council system is “the main means of participation of the Maya, Xinca, Garifuna and non-indigenous populations in public administration in the conduct of democratic development planning processes”. -2002, Development Councils Law Rural and Urban Development Councils. In the more than 20 years that this law has been in force, SISCODE has represented a very different reality in Guatemalan society, as civil society has been empowered to different degrees around these mechanisms of citizen participation in public affairs. Policy.
The positive thing about development councils is that they open up an important deliberative mechanism. If used properly, this mechanism can promote dialogue between different political, economic and social actors, so that public investments can be focused on development projects that truly meet the goals of common interest stipulated in the political constitution of the Republic. In this way, projects that effectively contribute to the progress of the country’s various communities can be promoted. For example, during the 2023 campaign, I had the opportunity to meet members of the sector coordinators of the Chimaltenango Development Council, and I was pleasantly surprised by the energy and enthusiasm of its participants. The level of commitment and civic awareness that they tried to convey to the various communities in the sector caught my attention. The sector coordinator seemed to truly fulfill her role of mediation, raising awareness and proposing suggestions for the development of the sector, a process that, of course, was not without problems and conflicts.
(frasepzp1)
This year’s elections for the governors, driven by the willingness of the Arevalo government to change the direction of the governorship’s work, attracted an unusual amount of attention: more than 1,500 people applied to fill one of the 22 vacancies, an average of nearly 70 candidates per governor of the province. Unfortunately, this huge interest also led to a painful awakening for many representatives of communities in the sectors. The elections of the sectoral councils have generated a lot of divisions, since few social actors care about strengthening themselves through this mechanism of participation. As a result, in practice, many councils are elected based on specific sectarian interests.
In the months following the elections, the Executive Coordination Secretariat of the President of the Republic of Guatemala (SCEP) developed a participatory diagnostic process and consulted with various experts. This process aimed to propose legal and institutional reforms to improve the functioning of SISCODE, focusing on three fundamental issues: genuine representation, effective development planning capacity, and monitoring mechanisms to combat corruption-related bad practices.
In practice, the challenge is threefold: to seek legal and institutional reforms to strengthen and democratize the system, to dismantle the clientelistic networks that have built up in the various development committees, and to encourage active citizen monitoring to correct identified errors and abuses.
If SISCODE is reformed so that it meets the objectives set out in Decree No. 11-2002, the Bernardo Arevalo government can claim to have made a real contribution to our country’s democracy. Because one of the most serious flaws of Guatemala’s development model is the concentration of public investment in the country’s wealthiest and most prosperous regions. Therefore, proper development planning can help reverse the country’s historical debt to rural communities.
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