[Panel 1] Participation in practice (I): participatory processes and budgets

Erabaki: citizen participation and social empowerment

During the last legislation, Aranzadi - Pamplona en común managed the Department of Citizen Participation of the City Council of Pamplona. Different instruments were deployed, including Erabaki (Decidim) and various processes of collaborative (de) construction of the city were launched. The talk/debate aims to be a review of the challenges and achievements (and also failures) of participation in a small city like Pamplona, the importance of digital tools as a process systematization mechanism, and to discuss evaluation mechanisms and make proposals for improvement to future processes.

Innovative processes in the deepening of democracy. Analysis of participatory experiences promoted by the local administration

The session’s objective is to reflect on how to improve the democratic quality of the participatory processes. To do so, we will use the results of the research “Innovative processes in the deepening of democracy. Analysis of participatory experiences promoted by the local administration” as a starting point. This research was supported by the Democratic Quality Award 2017 awarded by the City Council of Barcelona. 

In our presentation we will introduce the notion of democratic quality, based on existing literature, and discuss in which dimensions it can be operated. Afterwards, we will conduct a brief explanation of the results of the analysis of the cases studied in the research (participatory budgets in Cascais, the participatory design process of the Plaza España de Madrid and PAM 2016-2019 of the City Council of Barcelona). The concrete analysis of the experiences will allow us to see which specific options in the design and development of the processes have some or other impacts on their democratic quality.

All three processes have a virtual dimension of the participatory process. In two of the three cases (Madrid and Barcelona) through the Decidim platform. To close our presentation we will also analyze how these dimensions and components of democratic quality can be specified in the design and implementation of the participatory process on the platform Decidim.

Participatory Budgets in the city of Zaragoza. Impacts, learnings and challenges after the first two editions

The aim of this session is to collectively analyze and reflect on the increase of power in decision-making by citizens through forums or selfless work in the form of support, experiences and knowledge of people and entities.

The objective is not only to assess the implementation of the public police, but also the organizational forms and support groups for the development of the same by groups and local associations and the dynamics and resistance of individual participation.