Colombia

Popular Legislative and Regulatory Initiative

The Popular Legislative and Regulatory Initiative is a citizen participation mechanism created by Colombian Law in 1994, in which citizens have the right to present a normative project before a public corporation, such as the Congress of the Republic, the Departmental Assemblies, the Municipal or District Councils or The Local Administrative Boards. The normative projects presented must be debated and then approved, modified or denied by the corresponding public corporation. In order to present a normative initiative, citizens must first collect signatures of support of 0.5% of the citizens registered in the respective electoral census, constitute a committee of promoters and choose a spokesperson. If this is achieved, the initiative can be registered with the Registrar of the Civil Status to review the application and submit a form that serves to collect the signatures of at least 5% of the citizens enrolled in the respective electoral roll. For the latter it has a term of 6 months. In Colombia there have been 11 attempts at popular legislative and regulatory initiatives, 3 in 2002, 2 in 2004, 1 in 2005, 1 in 2006, 2 in 2010, 1 in 2012 and 1 in 2013; of which 3 reached the respective public corporation, but all were rejected during the debates.

Institutional design

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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
sporadic
Mode of selection of participants
open 
Type of participants
citizens  
Decisiveness
democratic innovation yields a non-binding decision  
Co-Governance
yes 

Means


  • Deliberation
  • Direct Voting
  • E-Participation
  • Citizen Representation

Ends


  • Accountability
  • Responsiveness
  • Rule of Law
  • Political Inclusion
  • Social Equality

Policy cycle

Agenda setting
Formulation and decision-making
Implementation
Policy Evaluation

Sources

How to quote

Do you want to use the data from this website? Here’s how to cite:

Pogrebinschi, Thamy. (2017). LATINNO Dataset. Berlin: WZB.

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