Almudena Ocejo

Almudena Ocejo is cultivating a culture of public accountability at all levels of Mexican government through the creation of civic surveillance organizations. By incubating what she calls “citizen-sector comptrollers” as well as pursuing accompanying changes in public policy, Almudena is bolstering civic participation in the decision-making processes of public institutions in a country that has been governed by a single political party for seven of the last eight decades.

Through the Center for Social Control and Democratic Construction Studies (CCS), Almudena is developing and professionalizing citizen-led accountability within the public and citizen sectors. Rather than trying to monitor public institutions herself, Almudena is fomenting a nationwide culture of better and more responsive governance by equipping selected citizen organizations (COs) to hold municipal, state, and federal government agencies accountable for their actions. In this way, she seeks to transform grassroots groups into capable advocates for various citizen constituencies in the public sphere. Her goal is to create a mutually beneficial relationship between the citizenry and the government in which the Mexican people collaborate with their elected representatives to craft public policy.

Beyond simply working with citizen sector groups, Almudena also seeks to create and reinforce a culture of transparency within Mexico’s public sector, for she understands that civic participation can not progress if government actors are not receptive to citizen involvement in public affairs. Almudena works directly with governments to institute regulations that normalize and require government cooperation with COs, thereby protecting civil rights and laying the foundations for public-sector accountability. The idea is that these “rules of the game” will prevail despite changes in political administrations. At the same time, the CCS is implementing an education strategy with schools to teach civic values and the principles of citizen oversight to Mexican students. Ultimately, Almudena hopes to create both the demand for public accountability through the strengthening of oversight organizations and a capable electorate, and transparency and open cooperation within government institutions.

Although currently the CCS works with selected COs whose profiles give them the highest potential to generate lasting impact on local government accountability, Almudena is committed to expanding her work to an increasing number of COs throughout Mexico in the future. She plans to replicate her best practices of public monitoring nationwide, providing medium- and long-term follow-up support to COs that have participated in her incubator program. After integrating their new surveillance tactics into their operations, these COs will collaborate with each other to implement joint projects to increase their influence over governmental actors. This coalition building is fundamental to Almudena’s model for consolidating the citizens’ role in Mexico’s nascent democracy.

Since the arrival of multi-party democracy in 2000, Mexico has tried to overcome the political fraud and rampant corruption that characterized much of the 71-year-long authoritarian regime of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The PRI constructed a supposed electoral democracy that guaranteed its perennial dominance through a client list scheme that rewarded political favors, nepotism, and corruption to the detriment of transparency and accountability to the Mexican public. Although over the past decade Mexico has seen significant advances in its political system due to the increasing strength of parties that were once in the opposition, the vestiges of the PRI days are still so entrenched that responsible governance remains a formidable obstacle to economic and social development. Many public institutions are notoriously unscrupulous, inefficient, and wasteful of public funds, thereby exacerbating social problems like education, health care, and poverty reduction.

A fundamental reason why Mexico remains poorly governed is the lack of citizen participation in public sector oversight, an important element of resilient democracies in other parts of the world. A robust civil society can monitor government institutions, simultaneously supporting and circumscribing the actions of politicians and other government officials to guarantee their compliance with the law and their accountability to the electorate. However, as a young liberal democracy, Mexico is still slowly constructing its citizen sector, which previously had been manipulated and silenced by PRI operatives. The PRI regime actively suppressed any culture of citizen oversight, generating a deep popular apathy that persists today. In spite of legal reforms over the past two decades to bolster democratic institutions and practices, real citizen participation has been slow to arise. Effective mechanisms both inside and outside the government to oversee public institutions and ensure democratic processes are still lacking. This context has frustrated most attempts to establish productive, collaborative relationships between public officials and the citizenry.

Apart from this insufficient legal framework, the public sector in Mexico also lacks the capacity to respond to increasing interest in citizen-based accountability. The state does not have the instruments or procedures to respond to citizen groups that demand redress for their grievances against the government. Moreover, for the most part Mexican COs lack the knowledge and technical skills to monitor public institutions effectively. Without legal backing, these organizations, while active, do not have the necessary resources to serve as reliable agents that can carry out government oversight and influence political decision-making. As a result, government officials continue to disregard the needs of citizens since there is no real structural change between the Mexican people and public authorities.

Almudena has founded the only organization in Mexico dedicated to the creation of what she calls “citizen comptrollers.” She believes that active COs and informal citizen groups have the greatest potential to address government accountability, given the size and complexity of the issue. The CCS serves as an incubator for these organizations, helping them to transform into citizens’ rights advocates on different issues. The center is an autonomous unit within the Center for Research and Higher Education in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), a prestigious public academic institution based in Mexico City. Almudena’s relationship with the CIESAS enables her to have close contact with other public agencies, to take advantage of the center’s researchers to help train the citizen comptroller groups, and to benefit from the CIESAS’s strong reputation. Almudena has sole decision-making power over CCS’s operations, three-person staff, and independent budget; the CIESAS does not play a role in the determination or execution of her strategy. While she currently maintains an advisory board, she is working to formalize this board so that it can be more active in helping her make strategic decisions about CCS’s work.

Strengthening and supporting selected COs to carry out citizen oversight of the public sector is the principle component of Almudena’s strategy. After selecting the organizations, CCS provides them with technical training and guidance to help them develop the core competencies needed to monitor government actors. One example is a non-profit organization in the state of Oaxaca that works on human rights issues and wanted to learn how to lobby state agencies for policy change. Over the course of the three annual requests for proposals that the CCS has launched so far to select participating COs, she has learned to look for the traits that best indicate potential for success in becoming a citizen comptroller group, such as expertise in a specific issue area and narrow geographic focus.

Through its Incubator of Oversight Organizations, the CCS offers financial and technical support to selected COs to expand their capacity for monitoring public sector activity and engaging in collaborative dialogue with government actors. The CCS takes COs through a series of thematic modules, each of which provides new knowledge of concrete techniques for citizen-based oversight of the public sector. Almudena invites external experts to speak on a variety of relevant subjects that include diagnostics and evaluation of political activities, crafting public policy, and using negotiation tactics. She sees herself as a conduit to link the COs with specialists over the course of seventy-six hours of in-person training.

In the subsequent stage of its model, the CCS accompanies the participating organizations as they implement citizen comptroller initiatives the organizations have designed. Through monthly follow-up, Almudena regularly reviews the ongoing impact of the initiatives and provides guidance in their execution. Originally this follow-up process lasted one year, but Almudena is now transitioning the CCS to a multi-year model to better reinforce the core competencies that the COs learn in the CCS incubator. The follow-up includes impact evaluation for each of the participating COs. To further bolster the incubator’s work, Almudena is implementing even more hands-on accompaniment by assigning each CO a mentor from outside the CCS with specialized expertise. This close relationship with an external partner will empower the civic surveillance organizations to continue their work even after funding from the CCS—which in turn is financed primarily by private foundations and fee-for-service consulting contracts with Mexican public agencies—ends.

While the reinforcement and accompaniment of civic surveillance organizations is the key component of Almudena’s work, she also understands that working with the citizen sector alone is insufficient to bring about systemic change in this field. Accordingly, she recently expanded the CCS’s activities to include influencing public policy with regard to citizen oversight. For example, the CCS is piloting a project with the municipal governments of Puebla and Querétaro to integrate citizen participation into public policy decision-making. These new norms that demand government transparency raise the political costs for officials who deny or reject citizen accountability. Furthermore, the need to raise general awareness of the importance of transparency has motivated Almudena to integrate an educational component into her overall strategy. She is also developing curricula for public and private schools with the objective of instilling civic values in Mexican youth. She has established preliminary contacts with the high schools associated with the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM), and piloted an educational program about accountability in a university-level UNAM class. Although these programs are still in an early stage, they have become an indispensable part of Almudena’s strategies to construct an entire ecosystem of citizen-based public-sector accountability.

Almudena understands that the change that she seeks is nothing short of transformative, given that an active civil society is still in its infancy in Mexico and that the notion of government responsiveness to the citizenry is still novel. As a result, she expects that the impact of the CCS will need to be measured over the course of years. Specifically, within the next two years Almudena expects to have developed various tools—many of which will be available on the Internet—to help a broader range of Mexican COs to design their own projects of citizen surveillance. She also expects to have implemented CCS’s innovative civic education curriculum in two high schools and two public universities. In four to five years, her goal is to have completed at least four successful cases in which COs have accomplished tangible public policy results through monitoring and collaborating with municipal or state governments with the help of proper legal mechanisms for productive dialogue between the public and citizen sectors.

Originally from Ixtepec, Oaxaca, Almudena grew up in a family environment that placed her in close contact with Mexican political realities. Her father, a businessman who worked at a factory, was very dedicated to the well-being of his employees, and he taught his children to develop social consciousness from an early age. He later became involved in politics, and Almudena’s entire family participated in his campaigns and activism to rectify the economic inequalities in Mexican society. In spite of the nearly daily frustration that he felt in organized politics, Almudena’s father showed her that civic participation would always achieve positive results for the community. Thanks to her father, Almudena developed a strong commitment to democracy early on, with a focus on the rights and duties of the citizenry.

Almudena dedicated her undergraduate studies to history and the arts, although she still felt a responsibility to address the poor social conditions that were prevalent in Mexico and many other countries around the world. After completing graduate work in museum studies in Italy, she worked at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, organizing exhibitions on Latin American art and establishing relationships with galleries across the region. In response to an urge to address social problems without abandoning her expertise in the arts, she established a collective that brought together small-scale artisans and helped them to commercialize their goods.

In 1997 Almudena moved to the U.S., where she completed a master’s degree in non-profit and public management and policy at New York University. Her engagement with other students involved in advocacy work led her to an interest in social policy. She spent a year at the Inter-American Development Bank to work on development issues, although she often felt that her work at the Bank’s Poverty Analysis Unit did not provide her with the opportunity to make real change. After leaving the Bank, Almudena joined the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), an organization which investigates philanthropic giving and seeks to make philanthropy more accountable to the general public. Her time at the NCRP proved to be a watershed in her career; as Director of Research and Analysis, she administered projects to survey the size of the philanthropic sector in the U.S. and to promote transparency in corporate giving. She attributes much of her inspiration for the CCS to the NCRP and her mentor Rick Cohen, who guided her in developing her ability to think critically and incorporate social responsibility into all aspects of her work.

Returning to her native Mexico in 2003, Almudena sought to support the nascent citizen sector and insert herself directly into the country’s process of democratic transition. She established a series of projects to equip citizens with effective tools for civic participation and implemented a citizen oversight program for the government while working for the Federal Secretary for Public Functions. Meanwhile, she co-founded the Pro-Accountability Social Network, a working group with diverse members that coordinates surveillance initiatives, and Amigos de los Viveros, a CO that supports a large botanical nursery located south of Mexico City. In 2007 Almudena channeled all of her experience in citizen surveillance and founding entrepreneurial initiatives to establish the CCS with the goal of generating a new political environment in Mexico that is directly accountable to the Mexican people.