Lomas de Zamora: Community Congress

The Community Congress is a large-scale citizen participation initiative organized by the Municipality of Lomas de Zamora, where public officials, institutions, organizations, and residents come together to debate ideas and develop the main proposals for the local government program.

In this way, the practice is consolidated as a space for democratic deliberation, interinstitutional coordination, and participatory planning, where the community’s territorial knowledge is integrated with the management capacity of the local government. This process contributes to strengthening democracy, enhancing transparency, building consensus, and fostering shared responsibility in the co-creation of more inclusive, sustainable, and collective well-being-oriented public policies.

It represents an innovative governance model in one of the largest peripheral municipalities of the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina (approximately 700,000 inhabitants), characterized by significant social and territorial inequalities within a context of economic crisis affecting large segments of the population.

The Community Congress is organized into 17 thematic committees, which in turn expand and reinforce the territorial work carried out through 14 Participation Boards across all localities of the district. It is structured around an annual large-scale central event (the Congress, which gathered more than 5,000 participants in its latest edition) and is continuously supported by decentralized preparatory and follow-up activities through thematic pre-congresses, involving approximately 1,000 participants.

The agreements reached in each committee are translated into proposals that are prioritized for inclusion in the Community Government Agenda and the municipal budget. The local Chief of Staff’s Office and the Subsecretariat of Citizen Participation ensure ongoing monitoring to guarantee implementation. In 2024, 105 proposals were identified, of which 75 were implemented. In 2025, 178 proposals were generated and are being prioritized for execution in 2026.

This policy has institutionalized binding mechanisms in planning, budgeting, and local regulation by democratizing the public agenda within a horizontal space that brings together thousands of people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, ages, genders, nationalities, religions, and abilities, who coexist and collaborate peacefully in pursuit of the common good.

More information:
https://lomasdezamora.gov.ar/gestion/participacion-ciudadana
https://lomasdezamora.gov.ar/congreso-comunidad
https://www.oidp.net/docs/repo/doc1945.pdf