Planning from Below. Marta Harnecker
council, because it is precisely through this process that a community develops and is able to detect those people who are best suited to running this small community government that is closely tied to the people and is at their service.
84. In cases where conditions are not favorable for such participation, or where a community wants to promote participation but does not know how to, initiating a process of community planning can be a very useful instrument for enticing apathetic residents. Participatory planning is therefore not only valid for places where strong community dynamics already exist; it can be especially useful for creating such dynamics.
c) Promote community supervision
85. Another function of the communal council is to promote community supervision over all projects carried out in the community by state, community or private entities. It should also manage the resources granted to it or raised through its own initiative, via a community-based financial entity or its own system of accountability.
86. Each communal council should organize topic-oriented workshops for each of the most deeply felt needs of the community, for example: food, health, infrastructure, housing and habitat; education; sports and culture; communication, information and training (alternative media and others); security and defense (defense units).10
e) Ensuring an electoral result that reflects the will of the people
87. Once the number of workshops has been decided upon, residents should elect - in citizen assemblies - those neighbors they believe can best represent the community on the communal councils because of their leadership qualities, knowledge of the area, spirit of community work, willingness to work in a collective manner, honesty, and dynamism. Those elected are called spokespersons because they are the voice of the community. When residents lose confidence in them, they should be recalled, as they can no longer be said to be the voice of the community. Venezuelan activists refuse to use the term “representative” because of the negative connotations this term has acquired historically in the bourgeois representative system. Candidates for representative positions only talked to the community at election time, promising “all the gold in the world,” but were never seen again once they were elected.
88. I think it is important to point out that in Venezuela, they discussed whether this community council should simply be the sum of the leaders of the different organizations that exist within a community or whether it was better to hold a citizen’s assembly and let the assembly elect its spokespersons. The second option was agreed upon because reality dictated that the leaders of many of the existing community organizations had lost their legitimacy because they had lost their connection with the constituents that had elected them. Elections via assemblies allowed the local people to correct this situation. If the sectional leaders are carrying out their duties, then their names will undoubtedly be put forward in the assembly, and if they have popular support, they will be elected.
e) The Community Assembly: the maximum authority
89. While those citizens elected as members of the communal council come to form a kind of informal community leadership body, it is the residents of the area who, in assembly, get to exercise final decision-making power.
90. The citizens’ assembly is the highest decision-making body in the local community. This is where sovereignty and the power of the people reside. Its decisions are binding on the communal council.
f) Giving priority to actions over words and speeches
91. Of course, it is very important to make sure voters elect candidates for the right reasons. The Venezuelan experience is very useful in this regard. It has shown us the importance of ensuring that the elections of spokespeople is properly organized and that people know who the candidates are not simply because of what they say but because what they have done. This is particularly the case for those people who don’t have a prior history of activism and organizing in the community.
92. How can people best get to know their candidates?
93. The Venezuelan experience tell us, for example, that prior to electing members of the communal council, it has been very useful to get candidates to collaborate in the carrying out of the demographic and socio-economic census, as this involves them visiting families door-to-door. This manner of obtaining information not only provides an opportunity to collect data that is not useful found in institutional databases; it also puts candidates in direct contact with families in the community.
94. The Venezuelan experience, and other similar ones around the world, has demonstrated the usefulness of giving these people, together with those people from outside the community who want to help the community organize themselves, the task of drafting a brief history of the community with the people.11 This is particularly helpful for ensuring that external collaborators do not steer activities in a certain direction without taking into prior consideration the reality they are working in.
95. Another activity that has proven itself to be very handy is organizing a participatory diagnosis. Such a diagnosis can help provide a better understand of the needs and most deeply felt desires of the people of a given community. This can also be a very good way for those with little background in organizing to get to better know the community they may become spokespeople for.
96. It is therefore not enough for candidates to simply give good speeches to get elected. It is important that they carry out small practical tasks in the community, such that residents can see for themselves their genuine vocation to serving the people. This is a manner of ensuring that candidates who are simply looking to use these posts as a springboard for a political career will get weeded out.
g) How to ensure a large and broad attendance
97. How can we make sure that the assemblies to elect the communal council involve the majority of residents, are genuinely representative of all the community and cannot be political manipulated?
98. The Venezuelan experience, along with some others, has shown that the way in which the assembly is convoked is very important. Often invitations are not extended to the more remote sectors of the community. On many occasions, it is mainly friends, acquaintances, those with similar politics who were invited, while others were left out. Furthermore, invitations tend to be general, with little effort made to go door-to-door. They are not linked to the concrete problems of a community, those that all or a majority of families face and are therefore easily recognizable.
99. Experience has shown us that the only way to guarantee attendance and avoid political manipulation is to make sure that people from all “spaces” in the community come along to the citizen’s assemblies. No important decision should be made if one of these spaces is not represented in the assembly.
100. What spaces are we referring to here? Every street, pathway, apartment block, building. In each of these there tend to live a small group of families who, due to living so closely together, share a deeper bond and relationship. We propose to refer to these small spaces as neighborhood areas.
101. As such, a community could be made up of various neighborhood areas. Each of these should elect someone that commits to turning up to these assemblies and speaking on behalf of the areas. Achieving this will undoubtedly involve an important amount of work across the whole community.
102. We can call these people neighborhood delegates to differentiate them from the spokespeople on the communal council’s executive committee.
103. Having a delegate for each neighborhood area is very important for the functioning of the community assembly. His or her presence will ensure the election of councils that are representative of all parts of the community and the variety of views that exist within it.
104. To achieve this we propose that quorum not be determined by selecting an arbitrary percentage of the community in attendance. Quorum should take into consideration the presence of delegates from every corner of the community. Consequently, quorum for Citizen’s Assemblies should require a minimum of one representative from at