Lisbon’s Citizens’ Council: Embedding Deliberation into Local Governance
Lisbon is joining cities like Paris, Bogota, and Milan in establishing new democratic institutions by convening Portugal’s first permanent Citizen Council. In April 2023, a new group of randomly selected citizens will deliberate on how to create a 15-minute city — one where citizens can easily access essential services such as education, health, commerce, culture, or green and leisure spaces.
Lisbon has taken the objective of reinforcing democracy seriously. Citizen participation is the first pillar of its Municipal Plan, intending to build “alternative mechanisms for democratic participation, capable of mobilising people’s knowledge.” To translate this into action, the City established its first Citizens’ Council, a decision-making body that is “representative of Lisbon’s population, while being impartial and independent from political parties.”
Lisbon’s Citizens’ Council is a microcosm of the city’s population
Anyone over 16 years of age who lives, studies, or works in Lisbon is eligible to become a member of the Citizens’ Council. For the first edition, the recruitment process consisted of two stages:
1. Voluntary enrollment to participate in the lottery. This process could be done online or at an in-person kiosk (Lojas Lisboa). The OECD encourages public authorities to select members through a two-stages random selection (civic lottery), to increase representativeness and inclusion.
2. Random selection and stratification, using the following criteria: gender, age, academic qualifications, profession, area of residence, work or study, and level of political engagement.
Among the 2351 citizens that signed up for he first edition, 50 citizens were randomly selected to form a microcosm of Lisbon’s population[i].
The process to select the members of the second edition was modified to include two stages of random selection. Instead of the the voluntary phase, 20 000 randomly selected households across Lisbon received an invitation letter to participate in the lottery.
Members were accompanied by an ecosystem of public servants, civil society stakeholders, academics, scientists, and experts to ensure deliberation was informed, facilitated, and objective. Participation in the Citizens’ Council was not remunerated, nor involved any financial incentives. However, members could request support to cover meals and transportation. The OECD suggests in its good practice principles for deliberative processes that participation should be encouraged through remuneration, coverage of expenses, and provision of childcare and eldercare.
Cities vs climate change, the first topic of Lisbon’s Citizens’ Council
Climate change is often the subject of citizens’ assemblies, juries, and councils. 69 processes of the OECD database dealt with environmental issues in Spain, the UK, Poland, France, and Denmark, among others. The sometimes called “Climate Assemblies” and have been organised most frequently at the local level.
In Lisbon, citizens deliberated for two full days (16 hours) to answer the following question: “What must we do to enable Lisbon to face the challenges posed by climate change?”. Citizens deliberated about: (i) how climate change impacts the daily lives of citizens, (ii) what citizens can do to combat climate change, and (iii) what the City can do.
Members agreed on more than 35 recommendations regarding housing, consumption, transport and mobility, the city’s relations with citizens, public spaces, and more. The Citizens’ Council presented its recommendations to local representatives in June 2022. Since then, the recommendations have been going through a feasibility assessment, and a group of members is following up the implementation status with the City Council.
The process evaluation shows that overall, the Citizens’ Council members had a positive experience. 56% of participants declared being very satisfied and 32% being reasonably satisfied with the sessions. Nevertheless, members stressed the need to ensure that the executive will follow up and implement their recommendations.
Lessons learned — an interview with Lisbon’s Mayor Office
Q1: Now what? What happens with the citizens’ recommendations?
Mayor Carlos Moedas discussed all 35 recommendations with the 50 members and selected 3 proposals to be implemented in priority:
- Launch an awareness campaign on what citizens can do to fight climate change in the city.
- Develop “super-blocks” where certain streets would become pedestrian during certain hours / days of the week.
- Use street corners to plant trees and small gardens, thus contributing to cooling the city and making better use of public space.
The City Hall has already launched the first two measures and is currently working on a pilot project for the third measure.
The implementation phase is quite innovative when compared to other deliberative exercises around the world. Members elect among them a group of “ambassadors” whom we invite to work hand in hand with our municipal teams to enrich the Council’s proposals and ideas. That means we are not reducing the exercise to hearing what the people have to say. We are actually working with citizens to get change done.
Q2: What are the main lessons learned from this first experience, and how will the city address them for the second edition?
The main lesson we got from the first edition was about the learning stage. Most of the topics we approach at the Citizen’s Council are quite complex, so we thought it would be critical for citizens to learn more about climate change and its consequences in a city like Lisbon. We conveyed an expert panel representing different perspectives: an academic, a business representative, an activist, and a municipal public servant.
We observed that members appreciated the experts’ contribution and the quality of their talks, but they had different expectations and would rather have a free discussion than engaging in a sort of “course” about climate change.
For the second edition, we changed the roles. Citizens became our main experts. Their experience in using the different city spaces and equipment will be the most valuable source of information we want to use as basis for discussion. While external contributors with a more technical perspective will be invited to contribute, there will be no talks or PowerPoint presentations. Technicians’ role will stick to answering any questions citizens may have.
Another lesson from the first exercise was to maintain certain flexibility in the methodology. For example, we initially requested a presentation with a limited amount of recommendations to make sure the Municipality is able to follow up. However, citizens felt that their work should not be thrown away and insisted on presenting all proposals to the Mayor. We are glad we decided to “break the rule”. Presenting and discussing all the proposals with the Mayor was seen by citizens as a recognition for their work — undeniably contributing to the success of the exercise.
Q3: How did the random selection process evolved from the first to the second edition?
In the first edition, we faced a major challenge: it was the first time a municipality conducted a citizen assembly in Portugal. That means that most people didn’t necessarily understand the concept and goals of such exercise.
We needed to develop an impactful awareness campaign that would spread the word and get people excited about engaging in public debate, while generating more discussion around the need for democratic innovation and participatory democracy both at the local and national levels. The fact that we had a voluntary enrollment process meant we had a strong call to action and thus were much more efficient in mobilizing people’s attention and ensuring an impactful awareness campaign, while maintaining the basic principle of a citizen assembly: sortition.
In the second edition, we moved from voluntary enrollment to random selection by sending 20 000 letters to households across Lisbon.
Q4: What would be your piece of advice for other cities considering this type of democratic innovations?
First, we believe the most critical aspect of such processes is the aftermath, meaning making sure that the citizen assembly, panel, jury, or council has a visible and clear impact. The Lisbon model is different due to our follow-up system where members kept collaborating with public servants on a more technical level after the Council’s sessions. This helps the City Hall produce impactful projects and respond to citizens’ expectations. It is also crucial to communicate and disseminate the results, otherwise the public will not necessarily understand it. In other words: make it real and make it visible.
Our second advice is to approach participatory processes as experiments. That means public authorities should learn in every step of the way. There are no rights and wrongs, and copy pasting methods or tools used in other places will not produce the desired outcomes. Their success reside in constantly adapting and improving.
For that purpose, we acknowledged we pioneers in Portugal and had so much to learn. We hired Lisbon’s University Institute for Social Sciences to observe and evaluate all aspects of the Citizens’ Council and to produce a public report and that points to specific improvements. We also created an informal Advisory Board with international practitioners we could consult for advice. In other words, we were not afraid to expose our strengths and weaknesses, and that allowed us to improve the process.
A final advice would be to secure political sponsorship. In Lisbon, the Mayor sees the Citizen’s Council as a key aspect of his mandate and was present at the beginning and at the end of the sessions to show citizens his commitment with the process. That is essential for the success of any participatory process.
[i] For a detailed description of the stratification and random selection processes, please consult: https://cidadania.lisboa.pt/fileadmin/cidadania/participacao/conselho_cidadaos/concelho_cidadaos_EN.pdf
