2023 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"
17th Edition
For the first time, Bordeaux Metropole (the government of Bordeaux metropolitan area) launched a metropolitan participatory budget in several communes. Still unprecedented in France, this initiative on an intercommunal territory is part of the new metropolitan strategy for citizen dialogue. Experimental in nature, it enables the emergence of new levers for citizen mobilization. With this approach, Bordeaux Metropole aims to provide citizens with the right conditions to take ownership of the city's public policies.
For its first edition, the metropolitan participatory budget is part of the "Let's plant one million trees" program, designed to develop citizen mobilization around tree planting. The program provides Bordeaux Metropole with plots of land to plant trees, maintain these areas and develop ecological, social and educational projects.
The model invented for this participatory budget aims to mobilize both citizens forming associations and the general public. Indeed, the call for projects was aimed at associations in order to guarantee the quality of project proposals, while avoiding competition with municipal participatory budget models already in place. The general public throughout the metropolis was then invited to vote for the selected projects.
Another innovative aspect was the creation of a mixed committee which was set up to introduce a participatory approach to the governance of the project. 8 volunteer metropolitan agents and 11 citizens provided a technical and user perspective on the various projects, thanks to a cross-disciplinary approach. This committee co-elaborated the rules of the participatory budget and refined the eligibility criteria for the projects submitted, then afterwards selected the projects that were submitted to citizens for voting.
The first edition of the metropolitan participatory budget enabled six associations to implement their projects on plots of land located in seven communes of the metropolis. 350 K€ was distributed by Bordeaux Metropole (i.e. 50k€ per project in euros or in kind) for a duration of site management of 5 years. Thanks to the 1,870 votes cast by citizens and the financial and technical support provided by the metropolis, seven winning projects were implemented. The metropolitan participatory budget favored the implementation of innovative and creative projects, that would not have been intuitively conceived by public services : garden with multi-sensory experience and tunnel scents, fruit tree plantation, planting trees for agroforestry …
Bordeaux Metropole has given citizens the opportunity to become involved in the "Let's plant a million trees" program, while at the same time improving the city's various public policies. It has encouraged the implementation of projects with a positive impact on biodiversity, with a view to improving the living environment of metropolitan residents, while creating the conditions for citizen participation in these projects.
The evaluation of the first edition of the metropolitan participatory budget is being finalized by the project team and the various associated players (associations, joint commission, etc.). The complete evaluation is still a work in progress, but feedback received so far is very positive. A second edition of the Metropolitan Participatory Budget is already under consideration.
Budget Participatif Métropolitain - Bordeaux Metropole (bordeaux-metropole.fr)
Bordeaux Metropole - site officiel - Bordeaux Metropole (bordeaux-metropole.fr)
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