Citizen Oversight Committees
The Citizen Oversight Committees are understood by Colombian law as a mechanism that allows citizens or civil organizations to exercise vigilance over the public management carried out by administrative, political, judicial, electoral, legislative and monitoring authorities, as well as public or private entities, national or international NGOs operating in the country, responsible for the execution of a program, project, contract or the provision of a public service. The Citizen Oversight Committees exercise preventive and subsequent monitoring by submitting written recommendations to the supervised entities and to the State control agencies. The creation of the Committees was ruled in in 1994 based on the Political Constitution of 1991 and was definitively regulated in 2003. Any citizen group or civil organizations such as community, professional, youth, trade union, charitable or of common utility, non-governmental and non-profit, may be constituted as Citizen Oversight Committees. Such citizen vigilance can be exercised at any territorial level and in those cases in which total or partial public resources are used and public functions are performed in the matter that the Citizen Oversight Committee is interested in. The legal representatives of public or private entities with these responsibilities have the duty to inform the public, by means of wide dissemination at the respective territorial level, of their programs, projects, contracts and services to allow the exercise of the corresponding vigilance. Any citizen or organization has the right to establish the Citizen Oversight Committee, indicating the objective of the monitoring and the terms of the surveillance, and the entities in charge must allow them to act freely and provide them with the information they require. Monitoring objectives can be related to the correct application and allocation of public resources, proper approval of plans, programs and projects, fulfillment of the assignment, effective coverage of beneficiaries, quality, timeliness and effectiveness of public interventions, public procurement and the diligence of the authorities in guaranteeing the objectives of the State.
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
- embedded in the constitution/legislation
- Frequency
- regular
- Mode of selection of participants
- both
- Type of participants
- citizens civil society
- Decisiveness
- democratic innovation yields a non-binding decision
- Co-Governance
- no
Means
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Ends
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