The 8th Conference of the International Observatory on Participatory Democracy (IOPD) will be held on 19, 20 and 21 November 2008 in La Paz (Bolivia). The main theme of the Conference will be “Interculturality and Citizen Participation: Inclusion and Coexistence Models for Peoples”.

One of the main challenges facing current-day societies is to democratize people’s access to opportunities while respecting their differences in terms of cultural values, language, race, colour, sex, ways of thinking, etc. The democratization of opportunities is directly related to cultural plurality. In other words, the more plural a society, the more demands it will have for the creation of plural mechanisms to ensure its democratization. At the same time, participatory-democracy processes form part of a culture of liberties, rights and obligations undergoing permanent evolution and change. In Bolivia, the intercultural process achieved through citizen participation in public administration is part of a new institutional culture that deserves to be taken advantage of more efficiently and inclusively.

Citizen participation is a principle of democracy, in that citizens are working for the common well-being. It is also the only way for democratic institutionality to be capable of assimilating the needs stemming from the reality of broad cultural diversity, given that no sectors can express the requirements of other sectors with different identities. And this can only be achieved through exchange and deep interrelationship, i.e. interculturality.

The aim of the Conference is to afford all national and international participants a scenario that is propitious for debate, analysis and exchange of experiences on processes of interculturality and the importance of citizen participation as models based on which to achieve forms of administration that give priority to including citizens in the drafting of public policies, and as forms of peaceful coexistence among peoples, bearing in mind that the processes of cultural interaction in the world are becoming more and more intensive and dynamic.