PARTICIPATORY
GOVERNANCE IN EUROPE, CAN IT BE REPLICATED IN LEBANON?
On 08/24/14 9:39 AM, Borja M. Iglesias Alvarez wrote
First of all, thanks for your interest;
on participatory governance is essential to discover the
natural mechanisms of citizen participation in local development, especially in
the most vulnerable urban communities; one of the first objectives must be to
build consensus in making decisions that affect the strictest scope of
proximity, so that eventually it can start generating a participatory ecosystem
in taking responsibility for public action that does not generate tensions with
the Administration.
In any case, from my point of view, participatory governance
is a process of re-education of both civil society and the public sector, which
is starting strongly in recent years, but should be matured over time and a
radical change collective mentality. An effort, that in Europe, is
consolidating now after years and in areas like Lebanon can be them extremely
fragile by the context of the geopolitical uncertainty in the region.
Thanks to you, all the best
Lot of encouragement with this great project
My reply on the 8/27/2014
Dear Mr. Alvarez,
I have read and reread your message of the 24th
of August before replying to it. I had to think about the subject deeply enough
if I wanted to comment intelligently about it.
I certainly agree with you that “participatory governance” may
be the purest and the neatest form of democracy that one can think of. It is
the true practice of “government by the people, for the people, and with the
people”.
However, the fact that it is an ideal does not necessarily
entail that we must resign ourselves to wait for decades until we get hold of
it, just because it took Europe the same time to go through the process.
All the countries do not need to go necessarily through the
same evolutionary steps in order to progress. What has taken Europe decades,
even centuries to achieve, has become now “public property”. The approach, that
has taken them so long to discover and later to adopt, can be taken advantage
of by countries which are presently well below on the advancement scale. I believe that these countries can use the
gains of the European countries to lift themselves up in a comparatively
shorter time period.
Some of the countries that are
currently devastated by the effects of the “Arab Spring” which is, in my opinion,
nothing less than an effort to reach toward “participatory governance” and away
from dictatorships of all kinds, are beginning to understand the problems they
are faced with. Tunisia is probably one of them. Let us sincerely hope that the
others, and particularly Lebanon, will follow on the same path to solve their
governance problems and reach toward true “participatory governance”.
What took Europe decades or centuries may now be realized in
years by other nations, provided, of course, that the people are willing to
adopt the new systems and conform to the new rules of engagement.
This is why I believe that Lebanon whose citizens are the
descendants of the Phenicians who gave the alphabet to the world, can reach up,
in a comparatively short time, to introduce participation in their system of
governance, PROVIDED THEY WANT IT SERIOUSLY ENOUGH. It all depends on the
people, after all, does’nt it?
George Sabat (ACMA)
