Administración pública y el presupuesto participativo en los gobiernos municipales de la Provincia de Santo Domingo-Ecuador

La investigación tiene como objetivo determinar si los gobiernos municipales de la provincia de Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas, Ecuador, como parte esencial de la administración pública elaboran el presupuesto anual de manera participativa, como lo determina la Constitución de la República, el Código Orgánico de Organización Territorial, Autonomía y Descentralización, Código Orgánico de planificación y Finanzas Públicas y el código orgánico de Participación Ciudadana. El desarrollo de la metodología se establece a través de un enfoque mixto, con una población de estudio en los cantones de Santo Domingo y La Concordia, se aplicaron 385 encuestas con un cuestionario estructurado y también semiestructurado a hombres y mujeres entre 18 y 69 años, se realizaron entrevistas a líderes de opinión tanto locales como nacionales; la técnica de observación, fue empleada en visitas a las zonas vulnerables, además se realizó una experimentación social. Dentro de los resultados, se evidencian las causas para el deficiente acceso a las necesidades prioritarias y las razones para que los recursos económicos que ingresan a la entidad municipal no son distribuidos de manera adecuada. Existe un marco legal propicio para que los gobiernos locales elaboren su presupuesto de forma participativa, de acuerdo a los datos obtenidos en la encuesta, existe carencia de un modelo de gestión simplificado. The objective of the investigation is to determine whether the municipal governments of the province of Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas, Ecuador, as an essential part of the public administration, prepare the annual budget in a participatory manner, as determined by the Constitution of the Republic, the Organic Code of Territorial Organization, Autonomy and Decentralization, Organic Code of Planning and Public Finance and the Organic Code of Citizen Participation. The development of the methodology is established through a mixed approach, with a study population in the cantons of Santo Domingo and La Concordia, 385 surveys were applied with a structured and semi-structured questionnaire to men and women between 18 and 69 years old. interviews were conducted with local and national opinion leaders; The observation technique was used in visits to vulnerable areas, and a social experimentation was also carried out. Among the results, the causes for the deficient access to the priority needs and the reasons for the economic resources that enter the municipal entity are not distributed adequately. There is a favorable legal framework for local governments to prepare their budget in a participatory way, according to the data obtained in the survey, there is a lack of a simplified management model.

Minor Literature

As they developed their theory of minor literature in the mid-1970s, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari created more than a concept of literary criticism. Articulating minor thought as a theoretical mode of engagement that impels the minor author to evolve into an agent of transformative experimentation and collective awareness, Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka theorizes this radically reassessed function of the writer in terms of marginal subjectivity—the subject position of an “immigrant” whose task is to craft an innovative “minor language” on the margin of the “major language” of mainstream society, along with projecting new visions of diverse collectivities within the traditional nation-state that challenge and transform its identitarian definitions of gender, class, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic “standards.” It is around this paradigmatic conception of the minor subject as perpetual immigrant and “nomadic” other that Gloria Anzaldúa and Kathy Acker develop their own variations on the Deleuze–Guattarian minor mode: narrative presentations of the deterritorialized subjects that inhabit the pluralistic Borderlands (Borderlands/La Frontera) and the transnational Empire (Empire of the Senseless). Seeking to renew standard English in order to develop within it innovative esthetic, social, and global visions, the two authors confront their readers with the experiences of minority existence, endeavoring to develop, through the prototypical narrative agents at the center of their works, emergent modalities of hybrid transnational subjectivity—a new post-statist subject, in sum. By depicting their central narrative agents as transnational nomads confronted with the limitations and potentialities of their minority status, Acker and Anzaldúa engage in highly complex social and ontological explorations of the plural inflections of the minor subject as they are expressed in the hybrid idioms he or she adopts and the sociocultural choices they make. In presenting the reader with narrative agents who dwell on the margin of the general social norm, both authors posit the minor subject as the embodiment of a “borderline” existence in which the Borderlands and the Empire are not conceived as geopolitical spaces but rather as conceptual sites of social experimentation; collective realms governed by a universal desire to supersede all borders, imaginary or geopolitical. A central conclusion emerges from Acker’s and Anzaldúa’s visions of the transnational, hybrid subject and collectivity: the deterritorialized movements of groups and individuals envisioned by both authors are at the heart of the postmodern nomad’s aspirations—an inherently transnational quest for self-fulfillment through which she or he seeks unfamiliar horizons as she or he experiments with various elements of hybridity, allowing him/herself to apprehend the existential conditions of his/her exile as affirmative instruments toward asserting the global in relation to the local and the transnational in relation to the national.

Diversity, toleration and recent social contract theory

Ryan Muldoon has recently advanced an interesting and original bargaining model of the social contract as an alternative to Rawlsian social contract theory and political liberalism. This model is said to provide a more plausible account of social stability and the acceptance of diversity, at least as compared to those approaches that emphasize the traditional liberal idea of toleration. I challenge this claim by pursuing three criticisms of Muldoon’s new social contract theory. First, the principle of distribution that he proposes is likely to be rejected by some (or even many) members of the public, due to its indeterminacy or highly inegalitarian implications. Second, Muldoon tends to reduce the benefits of cooperation to gains from trade, ignoring other cooperative benefits that complicate his call for small-scale social experimentation. Finally, while motivating the acceptance of diversity is a commendable goal, distinguishing more defensible conceptions of toleration from less defensible conceptions requires attending to those elements of political liberalism that Muldoon seems to abandon, namely, standards of public reason and public justification.

Normative, organization and legal support for the local civil and criminal courts in Reichcommissariat “Ukraine” (1941-1943)

World War II and the period of Nazi occupation of Ukraine became the period of severe Nazi social experimentation, the transformation of local society into the subject of pumping of raw materials and human resources. At the same time, in order to achieve the goal and objectives of the occupation, humiliation and neutralization of the resistance movement participants, the German administration had to create a certain appearance of law and order. An important role in this segment of occupation policy was played by the system of local civil and criminal courts that arose in mid-1942. The central government of the Reichcommissariat “Ukraine” succeeded in issuing several completed legal acts that regulated this sphere of functioning of the local society. Occupation topic has already become the central subject of research of contemporary Ukrainian historians. Thus, some aspects of local judicial institutions functioning in the RCU are covered in publications of O. Goncharenko, M. Kunitsky, and Y. Levchenko. But the legal lawmaking of the regional administrative units of the RCU, represented by the general commissariats, has actually remained out of their scientific attention. This is the subject of following study. The lawmaking process of the occupation administration of the RCU in the field of creating a system of civil and criminal justice envisaged the creation of normative acts of primary and regional (local) levels. The normative acts, adopted by the central department of the RCU, received the highest legal status. Normative acts adopted by the general commissariats received the status of sub-legal acts. With a few exceptions, the regulations of the general commissioners did not detail competently the specific provisions of the articles of the Reichcommissioner. Mainly, normative acts of the general commissioners contained technical details to the regulations of the Reichcommissioner. Other prescriptions of the Reichcommissar normative acts were simply repeated. The peculiarity of the normative acts of all levels, and especially of the heads of the general districts of “Zhytomyr”, “Volyn and Podillya”, was their extremely unsatisfactory translation from German into Ukrainian. Some specific legal instructions of normative acts, even those published in the official collections of documents, are difficult to understand. Therefore, one of the tasks of those representatives of the central and regional occupation administration of the RCU, who were responsible for creating the system of local justice, was to interpret the texts of the necessary normative acts.

The Last Utopians

For readers reared on the dystopian visions of Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid's Tale, the idea of a perfect society may sound more sinister than enticing. This literary history of a time before “Orwellian” entered the cultural lexicon reintroduces us to a vital strain of utopianism that seized the imaginations of late-nineteenth-century American and British writers. The book delves into the biographies of four key figures—Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—who lived during an extraordinary period of literary and social experimentation. The publication of Bellamy's Looking Backward in 1888 opened the floodgates of an unprecedented wave of utopian literature. Morris, the Arts and Crafts pioneer, was a committed socialist whose News from Nowhere envisions a workers' Arcadia. Carpenter boldly argued that homosexuals constitute a utopian vanguard. Gilman, a women's rights activist and the author of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” wrote numerous utopian fictions. These writers, this book shows, shared a belief in radical equality, imagining an end to class and gender hierarchies and envisioning new forms of familial and romantic relationships. They held liberal religious beliefs about a universal spirit uniting humanity. They believed in social transformation through nonviolent means and were committed to living a simple life rooted in a restored natural world. And their legacy remains with us today, as the book describes in entertaining first-hand accounts of contemporary utopianism, ranging from Occupy Wall Street to a Radical Faerie retreat.

Radical Politics in Practice: The Self-organising and Self-managing Kurdish Confederalism

Today, looking at the Middle East, through and beyond the dust and smoke of war, it is apparent that new forms of politics and democracy are being shaped in social practices and by social experimentation. We are referring to the people's councils that have been established in various places in the Kurdistan region, and through which people are taking greater responsibility for and control of their daily lives and the places where they live. Those involved refer to these councils in the context of ‘democratic autonomy’ and ‘democratic confederalism’, which indicates that they are not simply to be considered as just local initiatives, but also contribute to a larger project or idea and way of thinking about and doing politics. We may not fully comprehend this form of politics, yet this should challenge academics and those interested in developing new forms of democracy to take a closer look.

Adventurous Upcrafting Venture

Since 2015, the Research Institute of Organic Treasures (R.I.O.T.) has combined fermentation practices and social experimentation in Hong Kong to give biological by-products from human and urban metabolisms a regenerative purpose. Here putrescible wastes emitted from our kitchens, toilets, and bodies are considered our most foundational design material that contributes to a “world of eaters” (DuPuis 2015). In this applied design work, the concept of upcycling is socio-materially extended into shared forms of upskilling, and therefore referred to as up-crafting. In an effort to combine practical outcomes with long-term welfare creation, R.I.O.T. brings together laypersons, natural scientists, and artists, into open-ended explorations of alternative knowledge and change making, or what Melanie DuPuis calls “extended peer communities” (ibid. 155).

Company Towns in the United States

Company towns can be defined as communities dominated by a single company, typically focused on one industry. Beyond that very basic definition, company towns varied in their essentials. Some were purpose-built by companies, often in remote areas convenient to needed natural resources. There, workers were often required to live in company-owned housing as a condition of employment. Others began as small towns with privately owned housing, usually expanding alongside a growing hometown corporation. Residences were shoddy in some company towns. In others, company-built housing may have been excellent, with indoor plumbing and central heating, and located close to such amenities as schools, libraries, perhaps even theaters. Company towns played a key role in US economic and social development. Such places can be found across the globe, but America’s vast expanse of undeveloped land, generous stock of natural resources, tradition of social experimentation, and laissez-faire attitude toward business provided singular opportunities for the emergence of such towns, large and small, in many regions of the United States. Historians have identified as many as 2,500 such places. A tour of company towns can serve as a survey of the country’s industrial development, from the first large-scale planned industrial community—the textile town of Lowell, Massachusetts—to Appalachian mining villages, Western lumber towns, and steelmaking principalities such as the mammoth development at Gary, Indiana. More recent office-park and high-tech industrial-park complexes probably do not qualify as company towns, although they have some similar attributes. Nor do such planned towns as Disney Corporation’s Celebration, Florida, qualify, despite close ties to a single corporation, because its residents do not necessarily work for Disney. Company towns have generally tended toward one of two models. First, and perhaps most familiar, are total institutions—communities where one business exerts a Big Brother–ish grip over the population, controlling or even taking the place of government, collecting rent on company-owned housing, dictating buying habits (possibly at the company store), and even directing where people worship and how they may spend their leisure time. A second form consists of model towns—planned, ideal communities backed by companies that promised to share their bounty with workers and families. Several such places were carefully put together by experienced architects and urban planners. Such model company towns were marked by a paternalistic, watchful attitude toward the citizenry on the part of the company overlords.

The United States in the 1920s

Americans grappled with the implications of industrialization, technological progress, urbanization, and mass immigration with startling vigor and creativity in the 1920s even as wide numbers kept their eyes as much on the past as on the future. American industrial engineers and managers were global leaders in mass production, and millions of citizens consumed factory-made products, including electric refrigerators and vacuum cleaners, technological marvels like radios and phonographs, and that most revolutionary of mass-produced durables, the automobile. They flocked to commercial amusements (movies, sporting events, amusement parks) and absorbed mass culture in their homes, through the radio and commercial recordings. In the major cities, skyscrapers drew Americans upward while thousands of new miles of roads scattered them across the country. Even while embracing the dynamism of modernity, Americans repudiated many of the progressive impulses of the preceding era. The transition from war to peace in 1919 and 1920 was tumultuous, marked by class conflict, a massive strike wave, economic crisis, and political repression. Exhausted by reform, war, and social experimentation, millions of Americans recoiled from central planning and federal power and sought determinedly to bypass traditional politics in the 1920s. This did not mean a retreat from active and engaged citizenship; Americans fought bitterly over racial equality, immigration, religion, morals, Prohibition, economic justice, and politics. In a greatly divided nation, citizens experimented with new forms of nationalism, cultural identity, and social order that could be alternatively exclusive and pluralistic. Whether repressive or tolerant, such efforts held the promise of unity amid diversity; even those in the throes of reaction sought new ways of integration. The result was a nation at odds with itself, embracing modernity, sometimes heedlessly, while seeking desperately to retain a grip on the past.