From Communes to Platforms: Venezuela’s Experiment in Digital Territorial Governance
8 June, 2026.
Camila González
CityDiplomacy.org
Introduction
A recurring assumption in the literature on digital governance, smart cities and civic technology is that these instruments empower local actors (Meijer & Bolívar, 2016). Governments present platforms that connect citizens to state services, applications that route complaints to public officials, and digital identification systems tied to welfare programmes as instruments of democratisation. However, Venezuela’s experience over the past two decades invites a more cautious reading of that assumption.
Between 1999 and the present, Venezuela constructed one of Latin America’s most extensive systems of state-community interaction. The process began not with technology, but with a constitutional redesign under President Hugo Chávez that embedded participatory democracy as a foundational principle of the republic (Machado, 2013; Participedia, 2006; Reuters, 2018). It continued through successive institutional experiments in community governance and accelerated, from 2017 onwards, with the introduction of digital platforms linking welfare distribution, local service management and citizen monitoring to a centralised national infrastructure. The result was a governance architecture that simultaneously expanded the points of contact between the state and individual citizens while eroding the institutional role of municipalities and elected local governments.
This article argues that Venezuela’s trajectory illustrates a structural risk in digital governance: that platforms designed to mediate state-community interaction can, under specific institutional conditions, function as instruments of recentralisation rather than devolution. The central question it addresses is the following: what happens to local democratic autonomy when digital infrastructure allows central governments to bypass traditional subnational — that is, regional and municipal — institutions entirely?
The Pre-Digital Foundations: Participatory Governance as Institutional Choice
Understanding what digital transformation did to local governance in Venezuela requires understanding what was already in place before any platform existed.
The 1999 Bolivarian Constitution enshrined participatory and protagonistic democracy as constitutional principles, containing approximately 70 articles dedicated to citizen participation and guaranteeing direct civic engagement beyond the electoral channel (Participedia, 2006). The institutional expression of this commitment arrived progressively: Local Public Planning Councils in 2002, and the Law of Communal Councils in 2006, which established neighbourhood-level bodies that received state funds directly and administered community projects independently of municipal authorities. In his January 2007 address to the National Assembly, President Chávez described this structure as a «new concept of decentralization,» one in which federations of communal councils would eventually organise the territory more rationally than existing municipal governments (Participedia, 2006).
The distinction between this model and conventional decentralisation is analytically important. Conventional decentralisation strengthens existing subnational governments by transferring resources and competences downward through formal institutional channels (Falleti, 2005).
The Bolivarian model bypassed those institutions. Communal councils received funding from the central executive, reported to the central executive and depended structurally on the national government in ways that elected municipalities did not. Research conducted among communal council representatives found that these bodies had lost autonomy, exhibited a low index of political pluralism and contributed to the concentration of power at the executive level rather than dispersing it toward communities (Machado, 2013). The Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Transformation Index confirmed this assessment, finding that communal councils operated as clientelist structures serving government interests rather than the autonomous needs of communities (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2026). Mayors and municipal councils did not gain new interlocutors through the communal system; instead, they gained parallel structures that competed for legitimacy and resources.
The fiscal dimension of this displacement was concrete. Research on Venezuelan sub-national fiscal policy documents the high fiscal dependence of states and municipalities on central government transfers, a dependence that deepened as oil revenues were channelled through executive-controlled national funds rather than constitutional transfer mechanisms (Lazo Cividanes, 2012; Brewer-Carías, 2007), systematically reducing the fiscal base on which effective local government depends.
The 2010 Law of the Communes deepened this logic, granting commune aggregations authority to establish their own development plans and economic structures. The 2021 Law of Communal Cities went further still, establishing a territorial hierarchy that the Bertelsmann Stiftung (2026) assessed as designed to eliminate the powers of mayors and governors by making municipalities and states structurally superfluous.
As the economic crisis accelerated from 2014 onwards, municipal governments lost resources and operational capacity. What remained of their institutional role faced further curtailment by direct political means: from 2017 onwards, the Supreme Court removed at least five opposition mayors from office and ordered several imprisoned, including two Caracas-area mayors, on charges related to failing to suppress anti-government protests (BBC News, 2017). Local government continued to exist as a formal category. In practice, elected municipal officials who did not align with the executive faced removal, prosecution or both. It was into this institutional context that digitally mediated governance entered.
Datafied Governance: The Carnet de la Patria
Digital tools did not create the displacement of municipal authority in Venezuela; they inherited and extended it. The pivotal moment in that extension was the introduction of the Carnet de la Patria, the Fatherland Card, in 2017. The government presented the Carnet officially as a tool to rationalise social programme delivery. It represented a qualitative shift in the relationship between the state and its citizens: for the first time, the government mediated access to basic goods and welfare transfers through a centralised digital identity system, a single national database linking individual registration to welfare entitlement, with no engagement required from any municipal institution.
The technical infrastructure drew on external expertise. The Venezuelan government contracted the Chinese telecommunications company ZTE for a reported $70 million to build a centralised database of citizens’ personal data, managed by the state telecommunications operator CANTV (Privacy International, 2018; Reuters, 2018). The card’s design encoded political information from the outset: applicants had to answer questions about their socioeconomic status, existing access to state benefits and electoral participation (Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, 2022). Within its first year, more than 17 million citizens had registered (US Department of State, 2018; Catalyst, 2025); by the 2018 electoral cycle, approximately 63 percent of Venezuelans reported relying on the card to access subsidies (Catalyst, 2025).
The Local Committees for Supply and Production, known by the Spanish acronym CLAP, established in 2016 to distribute food boxes during the acute phase of the economic crisis, became the primary territorial mechanism through which the Carnet operated at the community level.
Transparencia Venezuela, the Venezuelan chapter of Transparency International, documented CLAP committees as composed of members aligned with the governing party, managing food distribution at the street and neighbourhood level (Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, 2022). The municipality played no role in this process. The government mediated access to food not through a politically neutral administrative channel but through a structure embedded in the territory and oriented toward the ruling party, bypassing elected local governments as thoroughly as the communal councils had done a decade earlier, but now at a scale made possible only by digital infrastructure.
Platform Governance: VenApp and the Real-Time State
The Carnet established the infrastructure; VenApp extended its logic from distribution to continuous interaction. The 1×10 del Buen Gobierno system, literally «one government representative for every ten households», launched in May 2022 and subsequently integrated into the VenApp mobile application, introduced a mechanism by which citizens could report local service failures directly to the Sala Nacional de Gobierno, the executive body responsible for coordinating national service delivery (VTV, 2023). In February 2025, the government merged the two systems into a single unified platform describing it as creating «a direct connection between citizens and the Sala Nacional del Gobierno» (Presidencia de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela, 2025).
The governance implication is significant. In conventional multilevel governance, the distribution of authority and responsibility across national, regional and local levels of government, citizens report service failures to the relevant municipal authority, which holds administrative and political responsibility for resolution (Hooghe & Marks, 2003). The VenApp model routes those same complaints directly to the national executive. Municipal governments are not formally abolished; they continue to exist, but the operational relationship between citizen demand and government response no longer runs through them, and the institutional redundancy of elected local officials is built into the platform’s architecture. By May 2026, the National Assembly’s Subcommittee on Public Services had formally proposed strengthening VenApp to accelerate response times, framing the application as «an instrument of which our people have taken ownership» (Asamblea Nacional de Venezuela, 2026). The legislature was organising around a centrally managed digital application rather than around elected municipal governments.
In the months following the July 2024 presidential elections, Freedom House (2025) documented that authorities encouraged citizens to use government-backed applications to report individuals who had participated in post-electoral protests (Freedom House, 2025). The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) concluded that post-electoral repression included practices aimed at silencing opposition through systematic state action (IACHR, 2025). The UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission documented at least 25 deaths in the immediate post-electoral period (OHCHR, 2024). These findings are relevant here for a specific and limited reason: they demonstrate that the government used infrastructure built to manage welfare distribution and local service complaints as an instrument of political surveillance under conditions of political crisis. The question of who controls the infrastructure and who defines the purposes for which data may be used is not separable from the question of what digital governance delivers at the local level.
Policy Implications
Venezuela’s case is exceptional in its political conditions and severity. It is not, however, exceptional in the structural questions it raises. Dominant frameworks for evaluating digital governance tend to treat institutional design as a secondary variable, focusing instead on technological functionality: does the platform work? Does it reach users? Does it resolve complaints? Venezuela’s trajectory suggests that the institutional design questions are primary. Four implications follow for scholars and practitioners working on subnational governance.
The first concerns data governance. The Venezuelan model concentrated population data in a centrally managed infrastructure with no independent oversight, enabling the same database to serve welfare distribution and political monitoring simultaneously. Governance frameworks for digital identification systems require clear legal boundaries around data use, independent oversight mechanisms and meaningful separation between welfare administration and political monitoring functions, conditions that are not automatically present even in formally democratic settings.
The second concerns the institutional positioning of digital platforms relative to elected governments. When platforms route citizen-state interaction through the central executive rather than through subnational authorities, they structurally disadvantage local government even when no formal authority has been removed. The difference between a platform that empowers municipalities and one that renders them redundant is a design choice and it does not resolve itself. Multilevel governance frameworks for digital transformation need to address this explicitly, ensuring that digital architecture reinforces rather than circumvents the institutional roles of subnational actors.
The third concerns how international organisations and city networks engage with local governance. Such bodies typically identify municipalities as the relevant interlocutors in subnational affairs. Venezuela’s experience complicates that assumption directly. When local service delivery, welfare distribution and citizen engagement occur through structures that operate in parallel to or above municipal governments, external actors must first identify who actually governs at the local level before designing any meaningful engagement. Channelling resources or partnerships toward formal municipal institutions may have limited impact when those institutions have been functionally bypassed by a digitally mediated governance architecture. This challenge is not confined to authoritarian contexts. Any governance system in which digital platforms concentrate citizen-state interaction at the national level while formally preserving subnational structures creates the same analytical problem for external actors.
The fourth concerns the distinction between participation and autonomy, two concepts the Venezuelan case demonstrates are not equivalent. Venezuela expanded participatory mechanisms across multiple decades and multiple institutional formats. What it consistently avoided was the transfer of genuine decision-making authority to locally accountable institutions. Digital governance frameworks that optimise for participation without protecting autonomy risk producing proximity without accountability. The state becomes everywhere present and nowhere answerable at the local level.
Beyond Venezuela: A Structural Question for Digital Governance
Venezuela is an extreme case, shaped by an ideological project with explicit centralising ambitions and by an economic collapse that hollowed out the institutional alternatives. Few governments will replicate its political trajectory. But the structural tensions its experience surfaces are not confined to it.
Governments across the world are deploying national digital identity systems, centralised service-delivery platforms and AI-enabled public administration at an accelerating pace. In many cases, these systems are designed and managed at the national level while their effects are felt at the local one. The efficiency gains are real. So is the risk that design choices embedded in digital infrastructure may gradually alter the balance of power between national and local institutions in ways policymakers do not initially anticipate. A platform that resolves local service complaints faster than any municipal authority could is also a platform that makes that municipal authority structurally unnecessary. A digital identity system that delivers welfare more efficiently than any local bureaucracy can also, under different political conditions, become a mechanism for monitoring and managing the population it serves. The Venezuelan experience does not resolve this tension. It makes it visible.
Conclusion
Venezuela developed, over roughly two decades, a governance architecture that progressively replaced elected local government with institutions designed to connect citizens directly to the central executive. The process preceded the digital era, beginning with a constitutional project that established participatory governance as an alternative to, rather than a complement of, representative municipal institutions. Digital tools — the Carnet de la Patria, the CLAP distribution network, VenApp — accelerated and deepened that trajectory by providing the infrastructure to manage state-community interaction at scale without functioning subnational authorities as intermediaries.
The result was a system that expanded state reach into local life while contracting the institutional space available for locally accountable governance. The significance of this for the global debate on digital governance lies not in the particularity of Venezuela’s conditions but in the structural question those conditions make visible. Governments are making choices about digital infrastructure whose institutional consequences extend well beyond their technical specifications. Whether those choices reinforce or displace elected local institutions is not a technical question. It is a political one, and it calls for deliberate responses: robust data governance frameworks, multilevel consultation in platform design and institutional safeguards that preserve the functional role of subnational governments even as national platforms expand. These are not complex demands. They are the minimum conditions for ensuring that digital transformation strengthens democratic governance rather than quietly hollowing it out.
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