Citizen Participation for compliance with the DR-CAFTA I + II Environmental Chapter
The Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTa) was signed in 2004 with the United States. Chapter 17, on the environment, carried specific provisions for the involvement and participation of civil society in the strengthening of local and national protection of the environment. Aiming to comply with those provisions, Alianza ONG, a multi-sectorial network of nonprofit organizations with the financing of USAID, organized a series of outreach activities with the aim of promoting citizen participation in the implementation of the agreement. Target groups were private sector representatives as well as civil society organizations, targeted with the aim of strengthening their role as multipliers in the support or public participation. 103 people participated in the training sessions, more than 2000 key actors of CSOs were contacted and many more reached through 5 essays published in national papers. A photo contest was organized with the aim of actively including youth in the process of designing their participation in the implementation of the environmental chapter.
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
- single
- Mode of selection of participants
- open
- Type of participants
- citizens civil society
- Decisiveness
- democratic innovation yields no decision
- Co-Governance
- no
Means
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Ends
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