2018 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"

The goal of this distinction is to acknowledge the innovative experiences which local governments implementate in the participatory democracy field. Also, we aim to give visibility to these practices in a direct way, to approach them to other local governments and to let them be replicated, as well as to promote networking.

Click “View steps” to see the different stages of the process.

Click “Proposals” to submit your proposal.

Proposals:

• Applications may be submitted by local, municipal and supramunicipal governments which are member of the IOPD and have launched a participatory democracy experience at a local scale.
• Applications may only be submitted by those members who are signed up as users for the online platform and have filled in their personal profile.
• The implementation of all experiences must have started in the 2016-2017 period.
• The experiences which were submitted in previous editions of the distinction cannot be submitted.
• Experiences before 2016 or submitted in previous editions of the distinction may be submitted if a substantial methodological innovation is submitted. In this case, the candidacy will submit this innovation and not the experience itself.
• It’s recommended to submit just one application per city. In exceptional cases up to three applications may be submitted, as long as another IOPD member submits it.

Applications may only be submitted if their main goal is one of the following ones:

• To reach higher equality levels when participating and to incorporate diversity as a inclusion criteria
• To strengthen the community
• To strengthen the non-organised citizens
• To extend the right of the citizens in relation to the political participation
• To connect different participation tools in a participatory democracy “ecosystem”
• Improve the quality of public decisions through participatory democracy mechanisms
• To improve the efficacy and efficiency of participatory democracy mechanisms
• To improve the evaluation and tracking of participatory democracy mechanisms