2022 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"
16th Edition
The Participatory Budget 2020-2023 constitutes an innovative participatory process in Barcelona, being the first time that a participatory experience of these characteristics has been carried out in the city as a whole. The Participatory Budget has allowed the residents of the city to choose directly which projects to invest in for each of Barcelona's ten districts, and which will run until 2024. The process, which began on February 3, 2020, has 30 million euros from the municipal budget to invest in the 76 projects finally chosen by the residents.
Given precisely the innovative nature of the initiative in the city of Barcelona, several previous experiences have been taken into account when developing the phases and methodology. On the one hand, the pilot tests carried out in the Eixample and Gracia districts between October 2016 and March 2017, both with different methodologies to be able to make a comparative assessment; and on the other hand, the experiences of cities that have become benchmarks in terms of Participatory Budgeting, such as New York, Paris, Madrid, Seville or Cascais, have been analysed.
The participatory process has been proposed from a transversal and innovative approach, specifying in the methodology and in the structure:
- Lowering the minimum age of participation to 14 years, to facilitate the intervention of young people.
- Proposing a hybrid model of participation (digital-face-to-face) that deploys a multiplicity of channels to participate.
- Convening debates and spaces aimed at facilitating the participation of people or groups that generally do not take part in participatory processes, such as people of diverse origins, children, youth or people with functional diversity.
- Establishing a specific budget for each district of the city, thus guaranteeing a balanced territorial distribution, and defining it taking into account socio-demographic variables.
- Incorporating a project concretion phase aimed at sharing the visions of promoters with municipal technicians, thus promoting collective public-citizen co-production.
The communication strategy has been based on a totally inclusive campaign incorporating photographs of groups that were not used to participating in similar processes, to empower citizens in the presentation and defense of their proposals, giving them all the prominence.
Process phases:
- Debate and collection of citizen projects
- Technical assessment of projects
- Prioritization by collecting support
- Concretion of projects with municipal teams
- final vote
- Return and communication of results
- Execution and monitoring of projects
1,982 projects have been presented in the first phase, 823 were technically validated, 204 were prioritized, 184 passed the specification and were put to the vote. 76 projects were finally elected in the voting, which are currently being executed.
Regarding participation, 706 participation spaces have been generated (meetings, meetings and mobile and fixed support points), 73,490 participations (20,772 face-to-face participations and 52,718 participations in Decidim.Barcelona) and during the voting phase 39,433 people have participated.
Space for monitoring projects at Decidim.Barcelona: https://www.decidim.barcelona/processes/PressupostosParticipatius/f/4688/?locale=es
Promotional video: https://youtu.be/_k1lk7q5Gmo
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