A participatory budget is a method of citizen participation in which neighbors are involved in deciding the allocation of economic resources to different projects to improve the city. Participatory budgets are complex processes that require great technical and communication efforts. That is why it is not advisable to undertake them in municipalities where there is not a strong culture of participation or where the municipality does not have qualified public employees.
If you are a councilor or participation technician and you are not sure if it is convenient to bet on participatory budgets for your city, you can start by answering these questions: Do I have a census of participation with enough emails? Has any online citizen participation project been developed before in the municipality? Is there a healthy and active associative network? If any of your answers is no, then, unfortunately, your time has not yet come. If, on the other hand, you have answered yes to all of them, there are some details that you should not forget.
The first thing to do is to set aside an item in the municipal budget for this purpose. If you are doing this for the first time, make sure that this item does not exceed 2% of the total budget. And remember to set aside at least 0.5% of it for the dissemination campaign.
There are different methodologies to carry out participatory budgets. The most common process consists of asking citizens to make proposals and gather support. Then the proposals go through a technical evaluation in which those that do not meet the criteria of the process are discarded and the economic cost of the others is evaluated. Finally, the projects are put to a final vote. This methodology and its variants require a great effort on the part of the city council technicians when evaluating the proposals, so it is important to size the resources well and warn public employees well in advance so that they can plan the peak workload.
An alternative to this model is to accept only qualified proposals from those entities that wish to carry out the projects - companies, associations, non-profit organizations, etc. The entities themselves will budget their projects, so the evaluation phase will be less intensive. And since it is in the interest of the authors of the projects to be selected, they will help us to make the process more widely known. In return, citizens will only participate in the final vote and will not be active proponents of the changes they want for the city.
Finally, for first-time municipalities, there is the option of turning participatory budgeting into a simple consultation. The municipality will give several options in which to invest the money - thematic areas or specific projects - and the citizens will select one or several. This option is the least flexible but has the advantage of being very easy to explain and disseminate.
All methodologies have their pros and cons. Choose the one that best suits the reality of your municipality and the resources you have available. Once you have chosen the methodology, you can choose the technology you are going to use for the online process and start planning the process. Do not forget to draw up a calendar and gather your team to assign tasks. At Kuorum we have been advising regional and local governments on citizen participation for years; if you are looking for external support for any of the stages of the process, do not hesitate to contact us.
