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 this process 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 at 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.
 

Examples of Regional Initiatives

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Areas of Governance

Country Initiatives

Regional Initatives

Global Initiatives

UNDP Support