2023 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"

The City of Agen was the leader of a European network of 8 cities (Active Citizens) within the framework of the URBACT programme. This network has worked on issues of participatory democracy and experimented with new methods to rethink the place of the citizen in governance at the local level.

The Active Citizens network worked on the theme of citizenship: rethinking the place of the citizen in local governance by finding a balance between representative democracy and participatory democracy while taking into account new technological tools. The work of the network has focused on the processes of co-construction and co-decision.

In September 2019, the City of Agen, accompanied by a European Expert, carried out a diagnosis within the network, during the first 6 months of the project, followed by 2 years of experimentation, until June 2022.

Each city in the network has worked both internationally and locally.

From the start of the project, the city of Agen set up a citizen participation group in order to develop participatory democracy tools, give citizens more space in the governance of the city and allow co-creation and co-decision of public actions.

Active Citizens Agen aimed to experiment with new practices.

For the City of Agen, at the local level, these are 4 challenges that have been determined with the Active Citizens Agen group:

•     Develop a culture of participation.
•     Expand and diversify active citizens.
•     Bridging the gap between elected officials and citizens.
•     Co-decide on public budget allocation.

During the project, different methodological phases were followed and implemented by the partners at the local level: choice of partners to form a local working group, choice and analysis of the problems to be tackled, establishment of objectives to be achieved, generation and choice of ideas to experiment, experiments, refining and refining of actions, choice of recommendations and drafting of 8 integrated action plans.

All of the local experiments were carried out in the 8 partner cities and were the subject of analysis, evaluation and conclusions with the Expert, thus making it possible to draft the Integrated Action Plan. These new practices have also made it possible to initiate transformations in the functioning of the administration in terms of citizen participation.

The result of this project was the creation of 8 Integrated Action Plans. This is a method for each partner city that other European cities can adopt and use to set up a participatory democracy approach.

This is the commitment that each city has signed including the recommendations in terms of participatory democracy that it will undertake to follow.

Each Integrated Action Plan was presented to the Municipal Councils of each partner city.

The signatory cities of the Active Citizens network have committed to implementing them.

https://www.agen.fr/grands-projets/urbact-active-citizens/programme-urbact-reseau-active-citizens-1061.html (External link) 

www.agen.fr (External link)