El Presupuesto Participativo, Nivel de Aplicación y Gestión en Comunidades Rurales

The weak levels of governance and the growing corruption that char-acterized many local governments in Latin America at the end of the 1980s, encouraged the development of new formulas for the exercise of power that emulated the model of the Paris Commune of 1871, to exercise democracy and give greater strength to social representation and citizen participation in decision-making and the formulation of public policies. In this framework, the first experience of participatory budgets in Latin America was experienced in Brazil in Porto Alegre, one of the most populated cities in the state of Río Grande do Sul, whose popu-lation acquired in 1988 the power to directly define the destiny of a part of budget allocations. Since then, different Latin American governments have implemented this new way of exercising democracy to give greater representation to citizens in decision-making and the formulation of public policies. Various investigations demonstrate that the methodology inaugurat-ed by participatory budgets favors the exercise of active citizenship, increases the levels of transparency in the management of public resources, generates accountability processes and allows achieving higher levels of satisfaction of local needs, they also conclude which is the political will and the capacity for citizen involvement in public affairs, the main factors that determine the success of its application. This research is carried out in Ecuador and analyzes the management capacity of the Decentralized Autonomous Government of the Paute Canton, located in the Province of Azuay, which applies participatory budgets in its eight rural communities. In Ecuador, the Organic Law of Rural Parish Councils, issued in October 2000, establishes that budgets will be a planning instrument that can be made available to the population to activate the participation of women, men, girls, boys, older adults and sectors vulnerable in the analysis, identifica-tion, prioritization, co-management, execution and evaluation of public programs and projects. The Paute Canton has been applying this process since 2019. The results as of 2021 could be classified as incipient given that, despite there being high levels of unsatisfied basic needs, the execution ca-pacity of participatory budgets does not exceed 61%, and there are still marked differences between its eight rural communities and the parish center. These results show shortcomings in capabilities and competencies and call for us to verify the sufficiency of the condi-tions of political will and participation of the population in public affairs, to guarantee efficiency and effectiveness in budget manage-ment and invite us to investigate other conditions necessary to achieve greater significance in the use of public resources and the promotion of local development.