Civil Society, part 2

Over the Christmas (as we say back home), two environmental activists were assassinated by members of the Honduran police force for their attempts to combat illegal logging. They belonged to the group I visited a few months ago, in this entry. There's a good briefing on the story in English here. That's what was in my inbox when I came back to work in January. I just wanted to mention it.

But here's an insight into how we work in a small donor NGO: everybody wants to do the follow-up on that case. Suddenly, the organisation involved is everybody's partner organisation, the issue falls under everybody's theme (it's human rights; it's civil society activism; it's environmental management; it's livelihood security; no: it's an issue for the director - and you see, it IS all of those things). There's no conflict around this, it's just revealing that everybody finds assasination so sexy. I include myself in that.

Local democratic participation is less sexy. On Friday I headed about 80 kilometers up the road to the municipality of Talanga to chat to the community about their participatory budget. I was taken aback by the mess of the place: it's a decent-sized town by rural Honduran standards, and it was washed by mud thanks to the light drizzle: none of the roads are paved. Only the three main streets of the town - out of the whole municipality - have any sort of a sewage system. The municipality has sod all money, and traditionally, what it has had it's spent on backhanders and pocket-lining. Now, Puerto Alegre style, the citizens are coming to the town hall to write the budget.

There's not much room for them in the town hall, primarily because nobody stays in their office. The place is wide open, wind filing down the corridors behind the rows of shuffling people shaking hands and greeting each other, hanging out on park benches, then shuffling back out again, the important business of hand-shaking being done for the day. I got to interview the mayor, a huge man with a busy politicky attitude, who I swear to god could be from Tipperary with his pale skin and big rosy cheeks. He's thrilled with the whole process, thrilled that the people have a say in their spending, thrilled that he's better than the last mayor (he spent a lot of time convincing me of that, though last time I looked I didn't have a vote in Talanga). I left the mayor - he gave me his card, cualquier cosa, he told me, estoy para servirle - and joined the transparency commission of local volunteers involved in writing and following up on the budget.
This crowd aren't as poor as the ones I met in December. This is far from the poorest place in Honduras. And they're a lot more buzzed. In November, they attended consultations all over the municipality to find out how the locals would spend the pittance the municipality had to spend, given the choice. They gave them the choice. Then they held a great big open assembly, in which everybody came and submitted their projects, and they agreed the criteria, and they voted for the best ones. The result was a budget devised and approved by the citizens of Talanga.

To be honest I don't think this budget is any better - or any more feasible - than the budgets that the mayors of old used to write sitting in their baths full of champagne. But it does make a difference. I think it'll take a few years for people to realise that even when the municipality isn't robbing them blind, they're not much better off. But one day they will realise that, because they're watching closely now. And they'll start to think about spending the money a bit more strategically, and they'll think about the money they have no control over: national spending, the way taxes are charged. At least, I hope that's what'll happen, and I know that there are plenty of local NGOs encouraging them to think that way. Right now, it's their engagement that counts, which is itself a new thing for the sleepy people of Talanga.

You know what they're most exercised about though? About paying taxes. They're obsessed with telling everybody to pay their taxes, so that the municipality can get more money. I found that a bit odd, and a little wrong: I'm a big believer in taxation, but I don't really believe they'd been given reason enough to trust the mayor to spend their money well just yet.

It's a long slow process this participation business. It's not really tested properly anywhere yet. But people are watching. That watching, that can go so far as to inhibit policemen from shooting environmentalists with impunity. And that would be nothing short of sexy.