Áurea Carolina de Freitas e Silva, councilor elected through PSOL, Belo Horizonte (Brasil), speaks at the Fearless Cities event in Barcelona, June, 2017. Image: Marc Lozano/Fearless Cities/Flickr. Some rights reserved.

A partnership project examining the power of political innovations

Latin America has become a formidable hub for multiple political transformations, most of them still in an embryonic state, but capable of planting seeds for the future and encouraging changes in the present. The region's civil society dynamics aim, as they do in other regions of the world, to improve political praxis, democratic institutions and the quality of leadership, with a view to democratising power, adding delibaration and participation to representation.

In its area of innovation, AVINA promotes the strengthening of the social rule of law and the further development of democratic quality and effectiveness through social, technological and institutional innovations that guarantee citizens the exercise of their rights..

For its part, democraciaAbierta works to support democratic debate on politics and society, continuously posing questions on the subjects of justice, democracy and freedom. democraciaAbierta contributes to the emergence of a global public sphere in Spanish and Portuguese. In its Political Experimentation section, it opens the field to account for the great amount of political innovation ideas and projects which, through the use of technology, are transforming debate and political action in Latin America.

In the framework of the CLIP Initiative efforts, and together with Avina, we ask ourselves: how do we construct a joint narrative? As each group works to advance their projects, we ask ourselves: how do we communicate them? Faced with this lack of a common narrative, a joint effort between the policy innovators is needed.

It's in this effort to build a joint narrative that, coinciding with Barcelona's holding the city event "Fearless Cities", Avina and DemocraciaAbierta established a special collaboration, taking advantage of some of the memorable experiences that have come after CLIP, such as, among other, Gobierno Abierto de Nariño (The Open Government of Nariño) (Colombia), the legislative mandate of Pedro Kumamoto in Jalisco (Mexico) or the election of councillors in San Pablo (Brazil) through the Bancada Activista (Activist Banking) candidature.

Bringing together relevant actors in the field that are directly involved in political innovation at the local level, we have sought answers to four major issues shared by all the projects: 

• a) Vision of innovation;
• b) National political context and limitations of local power;
• c) Influence of the international political context, and
• d) The question of leadership.

We asked these questions to the following Latin American politicians: 

Javier Orteaga Romero, Gobierno Abierto (Open Government), Nariño (Colombia)

Sâmia Bonfim, Bancada Ativista (Activist Causus), São Paulo (Brazil)

Áurea Carolina de Freitas e Silva, PSOL, Belo Horizonte (Brazil)

Susana Ochoa, Wikipolítica (Wikipolitics), Jalisco (Mexico)

Caio Tendolini, UPDATE politics, São Paulo (Brazil)

Jorge Sharp, Movimiento Valparaíso Ciudadano (Valparaíso Citizens' Movement), Valparaíso (Chile)

Caren Tepp, Ciudad Futura, Rosario (Argentina)

Check out our special website for this project: 
opendemocracy.net/info/avina-interactive-roundtable-english

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