Project on Organizing, Development, Education, and Research (PODER)

The mission of the Project on Organizing, Development, Education, and Research (PODER) is to improve corporate transparency and accountability in Latin America and to strengthen civil society stakeholders of corporations as long-term accountability guarantors. The organization accomplishes this by leveraging business intelligence, transparency technologies, and community organizing to ultimately build a citizen-led corporate accountability movement.

PODER envisions a Latin America where the citizen sector is sufficiently powerful so as to be able to engage the public and private sectors in horizontal accountability relationships to ensure democracy and democratic economies. The main problem they seek to address is state capture, whereby an economic and political elite controls public decision-making and effectively limits the realization of sustainable capitalism and democracy for the rest of society. They believe these elite actors have co-opted national economies and politics for their private benefit and, consequently, the rule of law and fledgling democratic mechanisms fail to hold them accountable. Therefore, it is up to citizens, their communities, and civil society organizations (CSOs) to pressure government and corporate actors in order to right the imbalance of power.