The different forms of conflict and exclusion have left deep wounds, making it difficult to start communal projects.
Colombia - Development and peace in the Magdalena Medio Region (English) | The World Bank
The participation of all social and political actors is necessary to achieve the development and integration of the region. Putting this principle into practice implies offering a broad invitation, to which only a few actors initially respond, until progressively more become interested and join in greater numbers. Care must be taken not to close the door on nor disqualify any actor.
Each municipality created a municipal nucleus for participation, comprising existing local social organisations. Their tasks include the design of a local development strategy the Municipal Development and Peace Proposal , allocation of resources and execution of projects. In each municipality, development planning processes, project management training, participation and political consensus-building and involvement in local, regional and national markets are established.
Peacebuilding and conflict transformation: Alongside negotiations with the armed actors, the country needs reconstruction: Peace is understood as a process that transcends negotiations, ceasefires and demobilisation, requiring the transformation of the violence in social, economic and political conflicts, by searching for a way to develop peaceful solutions, starting from recognition of the other and dialogue.
A methodology has been established which works from where people are at the moment. The capacity of community organisations is built upwards from this base, so that they can become the subjects of their own development. In the political negotiation processes between the state and the armed actors, just as in the public policymaking for regional and national development, local actors are largely absent.
For the national government, the political class, the guerrilla groups and the paramilitaries, the micro-dimensions of the conflicts do not count or are hidden. Yet in Colombia, an understanding of the configuration of the whole context in a place like Magdalena Medio is essential to generate opportunities for development and coexistence. The PDPMM is not a protagonist in the negotiations between the state and combatant groups, but instead dedicates its energy to promoting dialogue and understanding between the social and political actors at local and regional levels, regardless of their political ideology, party affiliation or religious belief.
The PDPMM recognises that the development of the region and the exercise of political participation depends on pluralism, diversity and tolerance. This does not mean the PDPMM is a political-electoral movement that will supplant the state in its functions or convert into a political party to contest and win local authority.
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The project is a means not an end: The PDPMM promotes project formulation through participation, which allows for progressive growth, so that community organisations achieve concrete results, measurable in the short-term, and can then set more ambitious objectives. The starting point is the ideas the people have for resolving their own problems. This methodology takes groups of participating inhabitants in their current state of development, and seeks to increase the capacity of the involved group to be able to form projects. Local authorities, political parties and armed actors tend to be suspicious and jealous of processes that the PDPMM generates because they break with the dominant clientelist political culture.
A regional peace experience: The Magdalena Medio Peace and Development Programme
The Programme is therefore constantly facing tensions and difficulties, converted into opportunities to spread its principles and seek consensus amongst diverse interests. Since , the PDPMM has received funds from the European Union through the Magdalena Medio Peace Laboratory project, an investment of 34m euros over 8 years, to which matching funds from the national government will be added.
The most important characteristics of the PDPMM are that it is a process built from below, with broad participation by inhabitants, founded on simple, concrete and easily shared ideas. With approximately 15, people working with the same principles and objectives, it has an efficient communication process from and to the population, and from the PDPMM to national and international institutions.
Crucially, it is administered by an organisation that defines itself as a peace promoter, with a time-limited existence, with no pretensions to be a political party, and without creating assets nor a structure that is heavy to sustain. It is also built from the accumulated history of social organisations in the region, with the participation of credible actors especially the Catholic Church and some of its institutions able to form alliances and attract national and international public and private entities The most important achievements include the fact that the poorest communities in the region have developed more than projects.
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They argue with pride that this is the first time that they have been consulted and given responsibility. Further, a methodological model has been constructed, adjusted to the cultural, social and political conditions of the region, rapidly assimilated, simply and economically applied, and accepted without reserve by public and private financers.
The chances of success for a regional development proposal that implies structural change, dialogue and reconciliation are limited in the current Colombian context, characterised as it is by the determination of the state to defeat the guerrillas militarily, by the polarisation of society and by the deepening of the neo-liberal economic model.
But the PDPMM is committed to the long-term, because it represents a contribution to the transformation of the political culture and toward a future constructed participatively, through promoting opportunities for public and democratic decision-making, freeing the discussion from the confines of party politics and groups, and forcing a change in the mentality of administrators and citizens about their role in the construction of a regional future.
It is also an attempt to draw up a new social contract in which the Colombian state will be the guarantor of the general interest, a legitimate structure which regulates conflicts, a valid instrument of social cohesion capable of uniting Colombians, and promoting real economic and social development for all, with emphasis on the poorest.
It is vital that the PDPMM does not end up being co-opted and forming part of a process of legitimisation of the authoritarian and exclusive model that the paramilitaries want to impose on the Magdalena Medio region. It is essential that the dynamic of collective participation and consensus-building begins to introduce change in local power relations, capable of defending a democratic and pluralist social order.
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