"The force of free people resides in the municipality" - Alexis de Tocqueville

Constitution Making and Strengthening Local Governance - II

By Laksiri Fernando-February 9, 2016, 

(Part I appeared yesterday)

In today’s politics, people usually look up to their leaders, representatives and the centers of power for solutions. As we have seen in the first part of this article ("Constitution Making and Strengthening Horizontal Democracy"), this thinking ruptures during progressive revolutionary upheavals or movements. However, this has not really been the case in Sri Lanka.

For example, the leaders of the two rebellions or insurgencies, the JVP and the LTTE, in the South and in the North, wanted to create similar vertical structures instead of moving in the direction of more democratic horizontal structures. The political structures that the LTTE created were one good example. It is not clear yet, whether the incipient democracy movements that emerged last year are going in a different or the right direction. I am also not clear whether they are already dead or not!

New Ways

There are, however, new ways of communities and people looking at themselves and working together in finding solutions to their problems without necessarily neglecting or rejecting the usefulness of the vertical structures that are existing. I am in fact proposing a Middle Path. It is in this context that the importance of the local government system is important to our discussion.

To reiterate, horizontal democracy and vertical democracy are not diametrically opposed to each other. Even in respect of local governance, there are strong elements of vertical structures which can be reformed and changed. Moreover, they are much closer to the people. To give a ‘quantified’ example, the distance between the people and Parliament in Sri Lanka is more than ‘300 times higher’ than the distance between the people and a local council. There is one parliament, but 336 local councils. It may be a crude calculation, but the essence nevertheless is true. But in respect of capacity or power, the difference is quite the opposite given the existing legislation. This is why both horizontal and vertical structures are important in democracy and why horizontal structures should be strengthened with necessary capacity and ‘power.’              Read More...