Democracy and Citizenship Participation in Chile: Factors and Conditions for Participatory Municipal Management

The article describes and analyzes the experiences of citizen participation developed in a systematical and sustained manner by four municipalities in Chile. The objective of this work is to identify the context and conditions under which this citizen participation experiences have managed to endure, influenced municipal planning and set up a model of participatory municipal management, inspired by the principles of participatory governance and democracy. The democratic governance approach and the citizen participation literature on factors that influence its development are used for this analysis. As main result of this study, such a situation would occur to the extent that the mechanisms of citizen participation overcome political will as a fundamental condition for its development, they manage to empower organized civil society and articulate themselves in a framework of citizen participation policies in the municipality. The mechanisms of citizen participation that trigger processes of participatory municipal management processes would be mostly informal and prior to the Law N degrees 20.500, but effective in solving the problems that citizens demand in these spaces.