Democratic Governance of Media and Public Communication: Latin American Participatory Institutions Created in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, unprecedented state and social activism was targeted at Latin American communication policies. Many laws that were reformed with citizen participation and by civil society achieved the creation of new participatory institutions. These entities implicated that there was a new model of media governance in the region. In this chapter, the authors argue that these new institutions were based on a participatory model that is different from the multi-stakeholder governance model. The participatory institutions created between 2000 and 2015 in Mexico, Ecuador, Argentina, and Uruguay are analyzed. This analysis answers the question about the success of these agencies in enabling the impact of civic organizations on the policy-making processes and in avoiding or limiting their capture by political and economic elites. The theoretical framework is based on communication as a human rights paradigm that includes participation as a key principle and on the Latin American theoretical developments regarding this topic. The methodological approach is based on the concept of citizen participation, and the methods used are a bibliography and document review and analysis. Based on the ongoing research carried out by the authors, the chapter concludes that the participatory agencies—where they had strong supportive social mobilization and when they had been designed based on human rights standards—contributed toward limiting the elite capture of communication policies. Nevertheless, the functioning and impact of participatory institutions have been restricted by the same obstacles they aimed to curb: Political and business power.