NDI began its engagement in Ecuador in 2002 by working to help several Ecuadorian civil society organizations to form Citizen Participation-Ecuador (Participación Ciudadana-Ecuador, PCE), a national organization that aims to engage citizens in the electoral process and was the first domestic group to monitor presidential elections in the country.
NDI re-opened its field office in Ecuador in 2006 to work on strengthening the linkages and collaboration between civil society and political organizations and to assist political organizations to do more to incorporate citizen concerns into their platforms and to undertake reforms. During the 2006 elections, Ecuadorians expressed dissatisfaction with the traditional political party system by electing political independent Rafael Correa as president. True to his campaign promises, President Correa has led a process of major institutional reform, including approval of a new constitution and new laws regulating political parties and elections.
Throughout its engagement in Ecuador, NDI has worked with elected leaders and political parties and movements across the ideological spectrum as well as with civil society organizations on measures to improve citizen representation, internal governance and transparency. Currently, NDI is working to encourage political organizations to build more responsive and effective internal structures, to follow through on electoral platforms and to adopt mechanisms to foster constructive debate on public policy
Political Context
Ecuador's political system has traditionally been one of South America’s most unstable. For many years, Ecuadorians have expressed strong dissatisfaction with the performance of their democratic system, including the legislature, as bitter disputes took place between the executive and legislature, political and economic issues remained unaddressed, and a series of presidents failed to complete their terms in office.
In 2006, Ecuadorian citizens expressed their impatience with the inability of political parties to implement broad social and political reform by electing independent candidate Rafael Correa of Country Movement (Movimiento País, MP) as president. As promised in his campaign, President Correa convened a Constituent Assembly via referendum to implement political reforms through the development of a new constitution. In 2007, President Correa declared the Congress in “permanent recess,” and the newly elected Constituent Assembly assumed its mandate. Following April 2009 elections implemented under the new constitution, the current National Assembly, a unicameral legislative body, began its term in July 2009.
According to the constitution, the Ecuadoran National Assembly is mandated to include citizen input in the process of developing legislation. While the new constitution includes other mechanisms to encourage broad citizen participation, policy design and implementation in Ecuador remains a top down process as citizens are uninformed of means for engaging and contributing to policy-making and not exercising their right to participate in the legislative process. Legislators are often inexperienced with mechanisms for actively engaging citizens and civil society organizations in the legislative process. In this context, public dialogue on national issues is often sharply politicized, focusing on personalities rather than substance or policy alternatives, inhibiting citizens’ understanding of political actors’ actions within or outside government.
