Plebiscite for peace
The Plebiscite for peace was a mechanism of citizen participation based on direct democracy, with which the President of the Republic Juan Manuel Santos called the citizens to approve or reject the peace agreement that was negotiated between the Colombian Government and the largest guerrilla group in the country, the FARC. This agreement was negotiated between 2012 and 2016, with the aim of ending the internal armed conflict that lasted 52 years. In August 2016, when the two parties announced they had reached a final agreement, the President, who had already mentioned at different times during the process that citizens would make the final decision on the agreement, called a plebiscite for October 2 of the same year. In Colombia, the plebiscite is a mechanism mandated by Law since 1994, which is convened by the President and allows people to support or reject a certain decision of the Executive. When President Santos called the plebiscite, disputes arose over whether the direct voting mechanism should actually be a plebiscite, which allows only "yes" or "no" votes to approve or reject the agreement, or if it should be a referendum, that it would give the citizens the possibility to approve some of the agreement and reject others. Since the final draft of the agreement was published, citizens and civil society organizations have been involved in various campaigns, debates, conferences and mobilizations, among others. Some showed their approval of the whole Agreement in order to end the war, others showed their disapproval of some of the concessions the government made to the guerrillas within the negotiation. As a result of the peace plebiscite, 12 783 898 people voted and the "no" vote won by a narrow margin of 0.42%. The highest percentage of voters abstained, which was 62.57%.
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
- single
- Mode of selection of participants
- open
- Type of participants
- citizens
- Decisiveness
- democratic innovation yields a binding decision
- Co-Governance
- yes
Means
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Ends
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