Via the Hunger Project blog I came across this short documentary on participatory democracy, “People Power”, produced by TV Education Asia Pacific and first broadcast on BBC World in 2004. Below, excerpts from the summary by TV EAP of each of the case studies in four countries (India, Malawi, Brazil and Ireland) and their respective videos:

• Rajasthan, India

It’s state elections in Rajasthan and Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), a local activist group invites the people of Beawar to a public meeting where the affidavits on the local candidates are made available to the people. This process of social accountability and transparency extends beyond the political process to the village level, where the MKSS has successfully lobbied for the right to information legislation to overcome the systemic corruption in the political and bureaucratic organisations.

• Malawi

In Malawi, Africa, people can expect to live only half as long as someone in the Western World. Since most people live in rural communities, the Village Health Service is the life line for most people. But there has been dissatisfaction with the delivery of this service. Care Malawi is piloting a local health initiative program, referred to as the Community Scorecard Project, where the running of the local health services is put back into the hands of the villagers. Here the village people meet and score the delivery of the health services and this is collated by a Village Health Council. At the same time, the Village Health Clinic does a self assessment. Interface meetings between the users of the service and the providers of the service to analyse the information and work out ways of improving the system.

• Porto Alegre, Brazil

Porto Alegre has been acclaimed as the Brazilian city with the best quality of life for four consecutive years. The challenge is how to include the poorer people in this success. Housing is the major challenge for the City as rural people migrate to the city to seek work. The city government has adopted a program where the people participate in prioritising the City Budget. Over a year, from neighbourhood associations to people’s assemblies, up to 20,000 people have a direct say on how the city budget should be allocated. The Porto Alegre experiment is one of the best known worldwide, acclaimed for both the efficient and the highly democratic management of urban resources it has made possible. The “popular administration” of Porto Alegre was selected by the United Nations as one of the 40 urban innovations worldwide to be presented at the Second Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II), held in Istanbul in June 1996.

• Ireland

A social and economic partnership was formed with all the stakeholders: the national government, the trade unions, the employers and the community to develop a national strategy for Ireland. The Northside Partnership was one of 11 partnerships created to translate the national strategy to the local level. This partnership identified the black spots: high local unemployment, youth leaving before they completed school and young children not going to school. Within this community, there has been an increase of over 50 per cent job creation, a series of specialised training programs and an innovate way to get children to go to school.