Goicoechea

Local governments are essentially the closest level of governance to the people—addressing the immediate development needs of communities. As administrative units, they understand, regulate, and engage with local social dynamics, highlighting their vital role in promoting, upholding, and protecting human rights.

In this approach, governance refers to how local governments interact with development models. It is from this interaction that practices and procedures for distributing and allocating available resources are defined. Consequently, governance models must reflect optimal administrative management—simplifying procedures, prioritizing, and resolving people’s needs based on technical criteria—as a localized state response to building civic capacities and constructing societal well-being.

Such actions are embedded in operational and financial planning processes. To ensure transparency, equality, and accessibility, they must be supported by clearly defined administrative procedures. This requires a multilevel and multi-stakeholder political and technical commitment for clear rule application regarding human rights protection in managing collective resources.

Human rights and development essentials guarantee accessibility, social inclusion, and non-discrimination—rights that everyone must access in a context of equity, social justice, and human development. Through its understanding of local needs, the local government will be better positioned to identify the types and dimensions of actions necessary to strengthen promotion and protection mechanisms for the rights of disadvantaged groups, facilitating human development in a context conducive to building social well‑being.

A major advantage for local governments lies in their ability to design public policies that address accumulated social tensions, reflect the specificities of society, and highlight major civic issues as structural gaps. Some of these are contingent and can be addressed with interventions aimed at shifting cultural practices and behaviors that threaten the rights due to their exclusionary or violent nature.

Hence, the critical importance of the local government as the articulating agent of change—attending to social needs based on equality, non-discrimination, accountability, citizen participation, respectful co-creation with community knowledge, and the transparency of public agendas—transforming commitments into tangible results through rights-based public policies.

In conclusion, it is essential to ground actions led by local governments in a rights-based approach to eliminate the main sources of freedom deprivation—particularly those tied to the conditions necessary for development. Freedoms depend fundamentally on social and economic institutions; therefore, investment priorities must guarantee minimum access to education, health, culture, social protection, and employment—through institutional and social mechanisms that foster access to these opportunities.