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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]

One of the press means to distinguish or delay a piece of news, whether because of liking or disliking, is to deliberately display it in a better or worse place on the issues' pages. Neither objectivity nor neutrality are usually present when the piece of news to be edited is somehow against the interests of the publishing company. Subjectivity is at its height. From that remark, the author has created a method to take into account neutrality deviation in the cases of controversy between two characters, a "duel" which becomes a mass media one as it's on the papers for various weeks, with obvious sympathies favouring one of the contenders and manifest antipathies against the other participant in the controversy, with expressions of mass media preferences. The devised methodology has been applied to the analysis of the message originated between 23rd November 2007 and 10th January 2008, with the controversy between the Presidents of the Republics of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe, and Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, because of the steps given by the latter in favour of the release of hostages of the Colombian FARCs. The units of analyses have been the 43 texts published by El País (Madrid), a newspaper in open belligerence against the Bolivarian government of Caracas and with great investments in Bogotá, whose president decorated the owner of the paper's publishing company. The rehearsed method is applicable to any treatment which a newspaper may give during weeks to any other "mass media duel". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To assure the territorial governability in Colombia is to combine the government of territory and the governance of the territories, that is to say, primacy of the sovereign State and recognition of multiple actors in the public action. In the perspective of the "territorialization of public action", this paper shows results of the analytical use of a scheme of analysis of public policies in the territory developed by the author in previous works, for the case of social housing- VIS- public policy - in Colombia, illustrating the speech proposed with two cases. Taking as it bases the characterization of VIS public policy as a dual and hybrid policy and a typical case of "indispensable territoriality", of "secterritoriality" (combination of sectoriality and territoriality) and of "governmance" in the territories (combination of government of the territory and governance of the territories), reflections appear on the use of the "Metrovivienda instrument" during the three last administrations of Enrique Peñalosa, Antanas Mockus and Luis Eduardo Garzón like part of the VIS public policy in the Capital District of Bogotá (almost 7,000 000 of inhabitants). Also, the analysis of "successful projects" of new VIS as the one of Nuestra Señora del Rosario in provincial center of Chiquinquirá (50,000 inhabitants) allows to raise the public policy of VIS in Chiquinquirá like the example of the construction of "networks of project" and of combination of government of the territory and discretionary sectoriality. Both illustrations allow concluding on the challenge of the territorialización of the public action "bottom up". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]