Mechanisms of civil society participation in the Conferences UN habitat II and UN habitat III

Abstract

In 2016, the Third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development took place in Quito, Ecuador. It continues a program that occurs every 20 years since 1976, when the first conference was organized in Vancouver, Canada. Since the decade of 1990, with the changes in the international scenario emerged from the end of the Cold War, two new features arose from the conferences promoted by UN: 1. The inclusion of new subjects, concerning social matters, into the international agenda; 2. The inclusion of new actors into the conferences, coming from local governments and civil society. Within this context, in 1996 UN Habitat II finished the cycle of the socalled “social conferences decade” and introduced the official participation of non-state actors within the national delegations of the conference. Therefore, considering the relevance of civil society participation in the public policy planning, and assuming that foreign policy can be regarded as public policy, the present article intents to identify and analyze the mechanisms that enabled the participation of the civil society of the member States within the Conferences UN Habitat II and UN Habitat III.