AN EXERCISE IN WORLDMAKING 2009 - ISS

34 JONATHAN CONNOR
for channeling external development efforts toward a more coordinated,
endogenous development agenda. As a result, the indigenous-led municipal
government has begun to shift resources and investment from
the urban center to the canton’s poorer rural communities.
Initiatives such as the Indigenous and Popular Parliament reflect a
growing awareness among Guamote’s indigenous leaders of “the importance
of designing local institutions in accord with local capacities”
(Cameron, 2003: 172). In addition to these types of regulatory and coordinating
mechanisms, the government of Guamote has also made considerable
efforts to include community members, as well as a host of development
actors, in the canton’s development plans. This commitment
to public participation was evident in a series of “development roundtables,”
organized by Guamote’s indigenous leaders. These discussions
provided a forum for both community members and outside agents to
discuss the implementation of various development initiatives in the canton.
During the negotiations, efforts were also made to ensure that
voices in the community were not overshadowed by more formally educated
external actors. These forms of direct participation have been extended
beyond development planning to other governance areas, such as
government auditing and public budgeting (Bebbington, 2007: 59). There
has therefore been a noticeable change in the composition of Guamote’s
local governance structures. Power over local development has shifted
from an exclusive group of white-mestizo landowners to communities and
federations, of which indigenous Quechua citizens are an integral part.
Long excluded from formal and informal criteria of citizenship (Radcliffe
et al., 2002: 290), indigenous and low-income residents are now treated
as local citizens in a much more inclusive and participatory system of
local politics and decision-making. In the following section, I briefly review
the factors underlying Guamote’s transformation before turning to
limitations in the canton’s democratization and development process.
BEHIND GUAMOTE’S SUCCESS, BEYOND ITS REACH
One of the most significant factors supporting the emergence of participatory
municipal institutions in Guamote was a relatively high degree of
indigenous-peasant organization. As noted earlier, social protest was a
driving factor behind Ecuador’s land reform and helped to consolidate
the region’s intercommunity federations. The OSGs, in turn, played a
decisive role in scaling-up collective action, empowering communities