Barcelona’s Participatory Budgeting

Good Practice

Efficiency, Sustainability

Barcelona’s Participatory Budgeting

Synchronous and asynchronous participatory experience for citizens to directly choose which projects to invest in for each of Barcelona‘s ten districts.

Barcelona City Council

Spain

Local policy

POLICY OBJECTIVE

The Participatory Budgeting 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. The process, which began on the 3rd of February 2020, has 30 million euros from the municipal budget to invest in the 76 projects finally chosen by citizens.

The process has been developed bearing in mind three main goals:

Expanding citizens‘ rights related to political participation: participatory budgeting involves the direct participation of citizens in the proposal and implementation of projects. This process empowers citizens, whether they are organized or not, enabling their active participation in public policies.
Strengthening unorganized citizens: making a proposal is available to anyone, and the decidim.barcelona platform facilitates the participation of people and groups that are not formally organized or are not used to participating. Through such a platform, asynchronous participation is guaranteed for any interested citizen.
Community empowerment: the budget’s distribution throughout different districts favours citizens’ mobilization to defend projects at the neighbourhood level.

CONTEXT

This first edition of the Participatory Budgeting was deployed in parallel and complementary to the participatory process for the preparation of the Municipal Action Programme (PAM) and the District Action Programmes (PADs). This was the first time a participatory process aimed at influencing Barcelona’s main strategic programmes was proposed to citizens.

Due to the innovative nature of this initiative, several previous experiences were taken into account in order to design the process. On the one hand, the pilot tests carried out in the Eixample and Gràcia districts between October 2016 and March 2017, each one based on different methodologies in order 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, were analysed.

POLICY DESCRIPTION

The participatory process was divided into 7 different phases:

Phase 1: Debate and collection of projects: between February and May 2020, 1,982 citizen proposals were received.
Phase 2: Technical evaluation of the projects: the development of this phase was interrupted by the pandemic period. There were 823 proposals technically validated by the end of March 2021. Some of them were accepted subject to technical adjustments to be worked on in phase 4, should they reach it.
Phase 3: Prioritization by collecting supports: the 20 projects from each of Barcelona’s 10 districts that achieved the highest support were moved on to the next stages of the process, after applying the territorial distribution criteria that ensured balance between neighbourhoods.
Phase 4: Specification of projects: the aim of this phase is to specify the projects to be developed and to quantify their cost as accurately as possible. Projects’ details and costs were to facilitate their subsequent implementation and development, should they be the most voted projects in the district during the next phase. At the end of this phase, time was allowed for rejected projects to make pleads. In some cases, the technical assessment was reviewed, and the project was accepted. Between 14 April and 7 May 2021, individualized meetings were held to specify the investment projects, in which projects were worked on by citizens and municipal staff in relation to the scope of the project.
Phase 5: Final vote: citizens could choose the projects to be implemented in each district. They could vote for as many projects as they considered appropriate, starting from a minimum of 2, and until the budget allocated in the district is used up. However, it was not necessary to use all the allocated budget in a district in order to cast the vote. The voting phase was held between 10 and 20 June 2021.
Phase 6: Return and communication of results: the results of the participatory process were reported and disseminated at the end of June.
Phase 7: Promotion and monitoring of projects: during February and March 2020, monitoring committees were set up in each of the 10 districts of the city in order to promote and monitor the development of the projects (status, incompatibilities…).

Decidim.barcelona platform created a new permanent space, where level of execution for the different projects can be evaluated by district. Therefore, not only guaranteed this initiative asynchronous participation during the whole process, but also an ex-post asynchronous evaluation.

KEY ASPECTS

The participatory process has been proposed from a transversal and innovative approach, and it has been specified in the methodology and structure, and particularly:
Lowering the minimum age of participation to 14 years old in order to facilitate young people‘s participation.
Proposing a hybrid model of participation (digital and face-to-face) that deploys a multiplicity of channels to participate.
Opening 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. Allocating a specific budget for each district of the city, guaranteeing a balanced territorial distribution, and taking into account socio-demographic variables. Incorporating a project specification phase aimed at sharing the visions of promoters with municipal officers, encouraging collective co-production with the public-citizen.

RESULTS

1,982 citizen proposals were received in the first phase of the process, 823 were technically validated, 204 were prioritised and 184 passed the specification phase directly to the final vote phase. Finally, 76 projects were selected in the voting.
In relation to participation, 706 participation spaces have been generated (meetings, itinerant and fixed information points), 73,490 interactions (20,772 face-to-face and 52,718 through decidim.barcelona) and 39,433 people took part in the final vote.
The process generated a great mobilization of organized civil society, especially in the education, sports, sustainable mobility and green spaces sectors. That is why the implemented projects, which received the highest votes, were promoted by the organized civil society, such as: associations of pupils‘ families, sports associations, cycling associations, environmental groups, and all the organizations and neighbours through the neighbourhood councils.

Policy's Website

Arnau

Monterde Mateo

Director for Democratic Innovation

amonterde@bcn.cat

Good Practice