Democratic Control and Local Consultation Sample Clauses

Democratic Control and Local Consultation. Conceptualizing concession agreements as traditional matters of public policy provides a frame for interested parties to persuade executive government officials and concessionaires to enhance democratic control over the agreements’ creation. Specifically, they can use this new understanding of concession agreements to pressure government officials to increase openness and deliberation in their creation and to pressure concessionaires to increase local consultation—and thus to treat concession agreements as the public policy measures that they truly are. Recognizing concessions as traditional matters of public policy exposes a disjuncture in their method of enactment. As Part I explains, the typical creation of concession agreements as traditional bilateral contracts—in an opaque method and insular, nondeliberative venue—directly conflicts with the usual formation of public policy. Governments usually create measures of public policy through a more publicly open and deliberative process, most often in a democratically accountable legislative body,135 in order to realize the benefits that stem from this method of creation.136 Most simply, parties should not treat concession agreements so differently from other measures of public 134. It should be noted that in doing so, this Note expressly does not evaluate the merits of many of the large-scale substantive changes to concession agreements suggested by scholars and advocates. See supra notes 15-17 and accompanying text.