Foto: LATINNO.
Francesc Badia: Thank you, Thamy, for having us. Let's start with the idea behind the LATINNO Project.
Thamy Pogrebinschi: The idea behind the LATINNO Project is to call attention to the vast experimentation that has been happening in Latin America over the last two decades. There is a lot of talk about democratic innovation and participatory government in Latin America, and the only example is always the participatory budget in Porto Alegre. Perhaps one or two more participatory processes have been studied recently, but still after so many years it is always the participatory budgeting in Brazil the main example of participatory governance. With the LATINNO Project I want to show that there is much more going on in Latin America, not only the participatory budget and not only Brazil or Porto Alegre. So, the idea was providing such information, providing data on different innovations that exist across eighteen countries in Latin America. My decision to collect this data and open it immediately seeks to allow more research on all those innovations and on all those countries. It has also a practical aim, which is enabling policy makers, civil society organizations, governments and international organizations alike to get information on what exists and to compare what works and what does not work, and see how things can work in different ways and how democracy has been experimented in different contexts and different settings. This concern to enable comparisons and assessments is one aspect that distinguishes LATINNO from other projects that map innovations: we do not simply map innovations, we try to make a large number of them comparable and measurable. We do not crowdsource information, all cases from our database are assessed and coded by a rigorously trained team of research assistants following a specific analytical framework, codebook, procedure and method that we have evolved. In sum, the idea behind LATINNO was to build this dataset which will be online and accessible to all, but also to provide understanding and knowledge about this vast experimentation with innovative ways of doing politics. That’s why LATINNO is not only the dataset, it is not only about mapping innovations. It is a research project, mainly. Besides the dataset we have other outcomes, like the first democratic innovations index and our own publications containing our findings.
