Citizen participation is often thought of in terms of government-led efforts to include citizen voices or open opportunities for collaboration. These types of spaces (e.g. participatory budgeting, participatory policymaking, citizen feedback to improve services) are essential, but they are based on the traditional power dynamic that gives public institutions power to summon and decide how and if to listen to citizens. Additionally, COVID-19 prevents traditional forms for collective demand such as rallies, protests, and offline organizing. There is a huge technological gap in this sector, that doesn’t always have the resources (both technical and human) to amplify their work through technology.
We believe that a strong understanding of citizens’ needs, their context, and factors in decision-making will better inform later-stage design work and increase the potential for positive impact. Through this framework we intend to help transform the citizen-government relationship and also shift the distribution of power, enabling citizens to meaningfully participate in shaping and driving public decision-making and processes.
This framework is being written to help individuals and organizations to plan and conduct digital participatory processes using technology through open-source tools. Based on our learnings, we have tried to provide the best practices on how to plan a participatory process, find the right stakeholders, conduct participatory activities and maximize impact. It also contains the main dilemmas that tend to arise when designing participatory processes.
The framework is to guide the readers to get started:
Public and private institutions across the globe have started realizing the importance of public participation. Participatory processes include citizens, as such, or only representatives of associations or organized groups for a variety of purposes, processes, and decisions. A typical participatory process offers facilitation support to locals (such as villages, communities, interest groups, associations, etc.) on a demand-responsive basis, and assists them in getting their interests represented. For example, getting grassroots-level planning and action integrated into local and regional planning approaches. This leads to a more sustainable and better-coordinated way of development. In addition to this vertical integration, participatory processes also try to enhance horizontal integration, i.e. the collaboration of different agencies, sector organizations, and different groups of stakeholders within a region.
Public participation is also often mentioned among policymakers’ procedural instruments when shaping policies (Howlett, 2011). That is, instead of defining all of the content themselves, policymakers can choose to submit some aspects of it to a procedure in which citizens are involved in the design process. Public participation is thus a procedural tool that allows policymakers to include new actors (i.e. citizens) in a policy network and entrust them with some design-related tasks.
While the first world countries have started to adopt participatory processes as a common practice, on other hand, many developing countries are yet to involve the citizens in their decision-making processes. However, in both cases, they frequently do not have a good understanding of how to design participation processes to achieve desired outcomes.
The Code for All (CfAll) Exchange Programme was designed to provide member organizations the opportunity to work together with grassroots organizations to strengthen citizens’ efforts to defend human rights, demand transparency, and propose solutions to our cities’ current problems through digital means. Focusing on creating or replicating programs, training exercises, and capacity-building practices.
To this end, Code for Pakistan (opens new window) and Codeando México (opens new window) conducted a joint case study to develop a framework for digitally-enabled citizen-led participatory processes, with civil society organizations (CSO) from both Pakistan and México: Accountability Lab (opens new window) and URBE León (opens new window) and Lab León (opens new window).
Code for Pakistan and Accountability Lab worked together to conduct a citizen input exercise to address COVID vaccine awareness and misinformation amongst women and marginalized communities. Accountability Lab worked with female leaders from government and civil society, to debunk rumors or misinformation; disseminate verified information, and gather feedback on the coronavirus response from local communities in target Union Councils (UCs). The goal of the project was to support and enhance the role of local women leaders in raising awareness among local communities, particularly among women from marginalized communities and those with disabilities. Based on the baseline and end-line survey data, Code for Pakistan developed an open-source dashboard compiling and analyzing the results, drawing trends indicating awareness of a segment of the community regarding Covid19.
On the other hand, Codeando México (opens new window) along with their partners URBE León (opens new window) and Lab León (opens new window) worked on a crowdsource mapping project to generate relevant data and information on sustainable mobility issues of a city.
The main objective was to include citizens in a collective evaluation of the current state of the pedestrian, cycling, and public transport infrastructure, identifying the main problems and opportunities for improvement in the city. This through the use of open data, which allows the replicability of this exercise and reinforces the principles of transparency in activities of public interest through citizen participation, with the intention that these results can be used to generate proposals or discussions about how to have a public impact on the decisions made by the government.