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The objetive of this paper is to determine the enabling conditions for exercising participatory budgets in Bogotá. An analysis of the citizen participation regulatory framework in Colombia is introduced in order to understand the existent conditions for the execution of democratic budgets. After, a diagnostic of the main national and international citizen participation programs is completed using Arnstein’s “participatory ladder”, highlighting the failures in promoting citizen participation and in the development of participatory budgets. Finally, the last chapter presents a proposal to synthetize conditions that will enable the development of citizen budgets as well as the lessons learnt from international and national cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, significant changes in the forms of Government have occurred in Colombia, as a consequence of many different institution related factors, inter alia the availability of new tools for civil society's participation, decentralization and political parties' reform. These factors have redefined activities and relationships of local Government's actors, among themselves, the councilpersons. From the governance standpoint, this paper aims to lead to a better understanding of councilpersons and their relationships with other stakeholders that are also people's representatives: public and private organizations. Availability of empirical data on this subject is very limited in this country, and the city of Medellin is a case in point. Based on the identified trends (cooperation, mediation, competition and lack of relationship), the article highlights the prevalence of cooperative relations and concludes that the principles of "positive" governance (plurality, interdependence and cooperation in management), are tempered by several factors, including political and institutional changes and the characteristics, motivations and strategies of the actors involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]