Latin America and the Caribbean | Governance Assessment Portal

Latin America and the Caribbean

Over the past 20 years, Latin America and the Caribbean have seen a great extension of democratic government. However, even now democratic consolidation is faced with challenges rooted in issues of inequality, economic populism, corruption, civilian-military relations and market reforms, amongst others.

In response, the region has become the home of a plethora of innovative and local solutions for measuring governance. Such home-grown solutions have sprung from the needs of governments, think tanks, research institutes and NGOs to strengthen the use of evidence in decision making and to make governance more inclusive.

These pages seek to provide guidance to many of these existing initiatives for measuring democratic governance within Latin America and Caribbean. They do so with a view to offer guidance to existing data, to overcoming particular regional challenges, and to the methodology and process of conducting a governance assessment.

Participatory budgeting constitutes a special case, with the most famous example taking place in Porto Alegre in Brazil. The creation of formal institutional mechanisms to facilitate the participation of ordinary citizens in the allocation of sub-national budgets is now a widespread practice in many Latin American countries.

The guidance on these pages will seek to complement the processes of participatory budgeting and to further strengthen the region's governance measuring initiatives.

UNDP supported initiatives in Latin America and the Carribean

Examples of Regional Initiatives

Saint-Petersburg Center for Humanities and Political Studies-Annual Report

The main activities of the Center are (according to the current programs): Regional Ombudsmen and Human Rights: development of the Ombudsmen and others state and public organizations...

Supervision of the Execution of Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights

The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is the only example at international level where there is a systematic control of the execution by the State concerned of the decisions of the treaty...

Racism and Intolerance

ECRI is an independent human rights monitoring body of the Council of Europe composed of independent experts from all 45 Council of Europe member States. ECRI monitors phenomena of...

Media and Access to Information in Southeast Asia

In its work area on "Culture, democracy and development", and going back to the 'New Information Order' and the struggle for the right to inform and be informed in the 1970s, the...

Latinobarometro

Latinobarómetro nació en 1988 con un estudio piloto en cuatro países del Cono Sur Argentina, Brasil, Uruguay y Chile, sobre las bases sociales de las nuevas democracias. Debido...

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Organizations

Public Eye Newspapers

Public Eye Newspapers consists of print and online publications. The newspaper is founded and exists for the following objectives: - to serve as an independent forum for sharing of opinions; - to...

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

UNDP is the UN's global development network, an organization advocating for change and connecting countries to knowledge, experience and resources to help people build a better life. UNDP is on...

1. National Accountability Group, SL

The Vision is to have a country in which local and national government are accountable to the people, budget allocation, resources management and public expenditure are open and transparent, and...

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