Programmes against poverty implemented in Mexico over the last 30 years have become experimental laboratories for citizen participation in social policy: food programmes in the 1970s and 1980s, implemented through the establishment of committees for rural supply; Solidarity National Programme (Pronasol) in the 1990s, also implemented by establishing thousands of solidarity committees; and the PROGRESA/Oportunidades programme,
implemented between the end of last century and early years of the current one.
All those programmes have different institutional designs in order to boost (but often in fact limiting and guiding) the forms and capacities of people’s real participation in the design, operation, societal control and evaluation of social programmes (Isunza and Hevia 2006).
