Public consultations on land-use in Panama district
The Public Consultations on land use in Panama district have been convened in local newspapers by the City Hall of Panama since 2016. Their purpose is to put to vote projects that modify the land-use permits in different sectors of the district. Participation is open to any citizen willing to take part. The process takes place as follows: initially the project is presented, then there is a round of questions and answers around it, citizens express their opinion about the project and finally the latter is voted on. The vote is by show of hands, with the possibility of voting in favor of the project, against it or abstaining from voting. Additionally, the participants register themselves in a form provided by the Directorate of Citizen Participation of the municipality, which in turn publishes on the website of the City Hall a record that contains the interventions of the participants, the list of participants, the result of the voting and photographs of the event. From 2016 to mid-2020 there were around 100 public consultations on land-use in the district. On average, 33 citizens participated in each one. The result was frequently the approval of the projects, except for around 15% of them, which were rejected by the residents. Almost half of the projects submitted sought to modify land-use permits to allow commercial activities to take place in the territories. Frequently requests were also made to enable residential use on lands registered for another purpose, or to modify the categories of residential use (which enables different types of constructions). About 10% of the projects aimed at changing the permits to the category ?Neighborhood Institutional Service?, which enables the construction of buildings for health, education, security, administrative and religious purposes at the neighborhood level. To a lesser extent, projects that changed the land-use permits to the categories industrial, public or mixed urban-commercial were also voted on.
Institutional design
Formalization: is the innovation embedded in the constitution or legislation, in an administrative act, or not formalized at all?
Frequency: how often does the innovation take place: only once, sporadically, or is it permanent or regular?
Mode of Selection of Participants: is the innovation open to all participants, access is restricted to some kind of condition, or both methods apply?
Type of participants: those who participate are individual citizens, civil society organizations, private stakeholders or a combination of those?
Decisiveness: does the innovation takes binding, non-binding or no decision at all?
Co-governance: is there involvement of the government in the process or not?
- Formalization
- embedded in the constitution/legislation
- Frequency
- regular
- Mode of selection of participants
- open
- Type of participants
- citizens
- Decisiveness
- democratic innovation yields a binding decision
- Co-Governance
- yes
Means
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Ends
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