Citizen Mobilization for Higher Education
Citizen Mobilization for Higher Education was a deliberative exercise developed in 1999 in order to respond to the concerns about the quality of education in the country and with the awareness that in Colombia the university plays a particularly important role in the development of citizens who are able to live together in democracy. The former government of President Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) saw the need to give legitimacy to their policies, for which he called on the participation of citizens, especially teachers, students and university directives for contribution and to build agendas around what they themselves considered the priorities requiring a solution. To achieve this, in January 1999, the leadership of the Colombian Institute for the Evaluation of Education (ICFES) of the Ministry of Education proposed a project to collect citizen proposals as input to generate a new state policy in higher education. In order to carry out this project, the ICFES and the Department of Political Science at the University of the Andes jointly agreed on the methodology to be used, based on deliberative forums to form proposals and in the construction of a citizen agenda to propose solutions and strategies. Thus, as a final product the development of a new Higher Education System and its regulatory framework, through the work and participation of different social sectors, mainly belonging to the Colombian educational field was conceived. Although initially only 10 cities had agreed, the demands by other regions to be included in the process and the importance of the exercise portrayed by the ICFES to make it as representative as possible led to the need to carry out working days in 13 cities in total, with participants in some of them from other cities and nearby municipalities. In total, there were 28 cities in the country that had representatives in the workdays held.
Institutional design
Formalization: is the innovation embedded in the constitution or legislation, in an administrative act, or not formalized at all?
Frequency: how often does the innovation take place: only once, sporadically, or is it permanent or regular?
Mode of Selection of Participants: is the innovation open to all participants, access is restricted to some kind of condition, or both methods apply?
Type of participants: those who participate are individual citizens, civil society organizations, private stakeholders or a combination of those?
Decisiveness: does the innovation takes binding, non-binding or no decision at all?
Co-governance: is there involvement of the government in the process or not?
- Formalization
- only backed by a governmental program or policy
- Frequency
- sporadic
- Mode of selection of participants
- restricted
- Type of participants
- citizens
- Decisiveness
- democratic innovation yields a non-binding decision
- Co-Governance
- yes
Means
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Ends
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