2023 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"

17th Edition

Phase 6 of 7

Publication Preparation 18/09/2023 - 06/11/2023

Process phases

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Quintana Roo: Citizen Initiative to reform the State Citizen Participation Law

Official proposal

06/06/2023 18:28

The state of Quintana Roo, in the southeast of Mexico, has a Citizen Participation Law that limits the possibility of participating to the inhabitants of the state, since it does not allow everyone to make use of this right and makes it practically impossible to activate some participation mechanisms due to the large number of requirements requested to make use of these.

In this context, Bios: Participación Politica y Desarrollo A.C, together with 23 other organizations, triggered a co-creation process to write a new citizen participation law, from the citizenry, that would expand the citizen participation mechanisms recognized in the law ( going from 8 mechanisms to 14) and simplifying their requirements to be activated (analyzing the participation laws of all the states of the country and taking as a reference good practices of the most progressive laws at the national level, such as that of Mexico City and Chihuahua, For example). Likewise, it is proposed to recognize as subjects of rights girls, boys, adolescents, residents and people in transit, who before could not activate any mechanism provided for in the law as long as they are not considered citizens.

This process included efforts from the private sector, academia and civil society organizations, who presented the initiative in the state congress thanks to an existing mechanism called "Citizen Initiative", for which the congress will be obliged to discuss it in the following months.

The citizen alliance that generated this participation law proposal continues to grow more and more, being a historic event in the state of Quintana Roo, since there are no precedents for so many people and organizations to collaborate in a single advocacy process. Currently, weekly sessions continue to be held to share progress in legislative monitoring of the discussion and subsequent approval of the law; generate communication through social networks through conversations, infographics and audiovisual materials and; trigger political pedagogy processes through talks and workshops in public and private universities.