Participatory Paris: Home of the largest participatory budget in the world

France’s capital city has found that giving control over a local budget can help rejuvenate democracy.

by @PaulineVeron

In France as elsewhere, the economic crisis has turned into a social and political crisis through the weakening of social cohesion and democratic consensus. A great number of citizens doubt that elected representatives can understand their aspirations and create a framework that will fulfil them. This impression has resulted in an increase of voter abstention and a loss of faith in democratic institutions. This cycle has to be broken urgently as it endangers our democracy.

Such a break requires the opening of public action — previously the preserve of local government — to citizens, letting inhabitants involve themselves in every discussion and decision that concerns them. Mayor of Paris Anne Hildago saw the introduction of the Paris Participatory Budget in 2014 as a means of responding to the crisis of confidence that has arisen between citizens and politicians. Its evolution since then has been a great experiment in the democratisation of public action.

This means giving citizens the ability to develop proposals for their city, to communicate with the administration and municipal service experts, and to decide how to use a significant part of the public budget by voting for their favourite projects. In Paris, we decided to allocate substantial resources to such citizen participation, dedicating 5% of the city’s total investment budget in the programme every year.

This represents half a billion euros for the whole term, which makes Paris the home of the largest participatory budget in the world.

In terms of democratisation, in our experience it appears that participatory budgets can be deeply refreshing and innovative. But such benefits are contingent on the right tools being developed to ensure the programme functions democratically, is collaborative and reaches all sections of society. This depends on various factors and on the design of each step of the process.

One of our first major challenges was to guarantee significant take up of the tool across a representative cross section of citizens, taking into account factors such as age and nationality. Guaranteeing a broad representation of the population requires an innovative communication effort. So far, 7% of Parisians are voting in the participatory budget, which is a good rate in comparison with similar schemes. Still, we are striving to improve on that figure. In particular, we are focusing our efforts on the marginalised groups, which tend to be remote from public institutions and traditional political mechanisms. The aim is to include these groups in each step of the process and use the participatory budget as a tool for democratic redistribution, as the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre has done with their model. To achieve this, we have cooperated with not-for-profit organisations that work within these neighbourhoods and groups that are generally excluded from public debate. As well as informing these groups, the scheme has helped them collectively build and formalise their projects according to their specific needs.

To ensure that projects actually emerge in these neighbourhoods, we have reserved a third of the participatory budget — €30 million a year — for these projects. Finally, we chose to develop both online and offline voting mechanisms in order to reach diverse populations and places.

We have also developed a specific version of the participatory budget for primary and middle school pupils. Students are asked to vote for projects that will occur within their school, whether it is more furniture, more cultural or sporting activities, robotics and so on. This means young citizens are given the opportunity to take decisions that affect their everyday and collective lives, and makes them active citizens from an early age.

Working with the people

A second important challenge is fostering high-quality dialogue between the administration, political staff and citizens, and guaranteeing total transparency throughout the process. We consider transparency a central value of every democratic device because success depends on everyone understanding and following the decisions. It is therefore important to always guide citizens through the process, which is the mission of our team of six civil servants in charge of the participatory budget. We created an open source platform to receive, evaluate, put to the vote and follow the projects. Thanks to this platform, we are able to communicate directly with all the projects’ builders and to give precise explanations for every refusal.

We also decided to allow face-to-face participation because we believe it is key to the participatory process, enabling social links and debate among citizens, and helping them find common interests. To this end, we organise workshops with people who propose similar projects, helping them to co-construct a collective project. We also hold meetings with the winners to involve them in the implementation of their ideas.

It is a huge challenge for a public administration and political staff to manage such a democratic device and it creates room for criticism, debate and contradiction. But it is also part of a necessary modernisation of public institutions and a new way of building public policies. More than 500 civil servants take part in our participatory budget; this encourages us to learn how to work with the people we serve, to share knowledge and to include constraints from both sides and innovative ideas. In the end, it leads to a more collaborative city and gives citizens a better understanding of public action and of their institutions, which is positive for everyone.

The participatory budget is an overall success for the city, a success that continues to grow. Although, it is not the only measure pushed by Paris in an effort to encourage citizen participation and democratic renewal. We think democratisation has to be inclusive and involve a combination of tools, devices and mechanisms in order to transform the whole of society. In recent years, many citizen gatherings, workshops and consultations have been organised on various aspect of the Parisian life. What should be kept in mind, and what we have learnt, is that such measures must be conceived and developed in a participatory way, and not just imposed from the top down. This is the only way to guarantee more collaboration and more trust between the citizens, their institutions and their elected representatives.