Giving Voice to Community: Rural Parliaments on Local and National Levels

Created on 11 December 2014 Hits: 6600

Project aims to support rural areas of Georgia to organize themselves and to take ownership of their own development. It aims to promote a dialogue and cooperation among communities, local municipalities and the central government regarding rural issues. Project has two objectives:

To promote a dialogue and partnership among rural communities, local municipalities and the central government in a decision-making processes on a local and central levels by means of initiating Rural Parliaments, in the context of agricultural reforms targeting the agricultural resources allocation and management;
To establish functioning district-level open forums, Rural Parliaments, in 5 pilot districts; to initiate nationwide Rural Parliament and to spread the initiative to other districts; to strengthen capacity of village action groups and local authorities in effective, open and participatory decision-making regarding sustainable agricultural economic development; to support rural areas to organise themselves and to take ownership of their own development.

The dialogue and cooperation will be institutionalized and promoted at two levels of decision-making: district level of municipalities and the national level of agricultural policy-making. 5 district level Rural Parliaments will be established and the Nation-level Rural Parliament launched as permanent non-governmental bodies, providing open platforms for rural opinion-formation, information exchange, expression of interests and advocacy. These new institutional bodies will (i) give voice to the rural population, which is now broadly excluded from the decision-making and policy making process; (ii) increase capacity of rural action groups and local government by providing expertise, training and resources for better collective participation in developmental policies elaboration; (iii) initiate a sustainable nationwide platform for vertical and horizontal communication among stakeholders (farmers, municipalities, government and donor organizations) in a context of agricultural reforms and policies, envisaged by the DCFTA and other initiatives relevant to the EU-Georgia cooperation.

Project targets 5 municipalities - Senaki, Lanchkhuti, Chokhatauri, Khvareli and Khashuri. The proposed activity is envisaged as a pilot project, targeting part of rural population with the perspective of broadening in a time run to all villages of Georgia. Target districts, envisaged at this pilot stage, are selected on the basis of the diversity of conditions and feasibility of project implementation.

The project in funded by EU comission in Georgia and is implemented by partnership of three organizations - Civitas Georgica, Center for Social Studies and Agora CE (Czech Republic).