| dc.description.abstract | With the objective of describing the legal framework that, in the national and local settings, currently establishes the need of counting on citizen participation in the process of law production, to detail the local level implementation of it and to evaluate the adequacy and sufficiency of the mechanisms used to obtain it, this article develops an empirical, exploratory investigation of a mixed nature. The question asked was: what level of citizen participation was achieved by the Decrees published in the institutional website of the Municipality of Medellín, between May 30, 2017 and July 31 of 2018? Answering the question allowed to establish that the level of citizen participation, according to Arnstein’s “A Ladder of Citizen Participation” model (1969), is in the third step, corresponding to “information level”, as the citizens have received information, and even the possibility to express their opinion, regarding future decisions to be made in the form of regulations, but for which the discretion to made the final decision has been reserved exclusively for the Mayor. The subject currently has a special relevance as, with the entrance of Colombia to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development – OECD, many processes and institutional reforms have been set in motion, one of them associated to the “regulations’ governance” component, as a strategy to improve the quality in the law production process by the Executive Power. Additionally, new institutional practices of law creation, derivative from the deliberative model of democracy, have been proven to produce returns not only on the political legitimacy dimension, but also on efficiency. | |
