EmPaci

Participatory budgeting is a process of democratic decision-making in which ordinary people take part in preparing and adopting a municipal or public budget. In the Baltic Sea region, only a few municipalities have applied participatory budgeting to date. A typical type of citizen in such a process is male, politically active, well-educated, and 35-65 years old. The objective of EmPaci is to get more municipalities involved and mobilise different types of citizens by building municipal capacities, transnational clusters and municipality-citizen cooperation.

Project summary

Challenges to citizen participation in the Baltic Sea region

The Baltic Sea region is characterized by fragmented living areas. This leads to challenges for public authorities and councils when it comes to involving all citizens into joint projects and to discuss relevant issues with all citizen groups. Instruments are needed that enable and encourage the entire citizenry to take part in decisions of their municipality such as decisions regarding expenditures and revenues in the local budget.

EmPaci fosters participatory budgeting

Empaci seeks for close involvement of both municipalities and citizens. We analyse citizens’s needs and develop specific communication on participatory budgeting for different citizen groups (e.g. youth, the elderly, families). Then, we set up an initial participatory budget to test and evaluate it taking into consideration perspectives of citizens and municipalities (i.e. administrations and councils). After an optimization, an advanced participatory budget is implemented to show enhancements and foster municipalities’ capabilities to set up the participatory budget. The project is complemented by orgware to facilitate technology transfer and a training program that builds municipal trainers who disseminate the participatory budgeting idea among Baltic Sea region municipalities. The entire project is backed up by experts with from universities and an Advisory Board, which reduce their project contribution over time during which municipal capacities are created.

Budgets

EmPaci
in numbers

2.42

Million

Total
1.50

Million

Erdf
0.46

Million

Eni + Russia
0.00

Million

Norway

Highlights by mid-term

The project partners conducted a survey with around 22,000 citizens from 18 municipalities or districts from 6 countries involved in the project. The aim was to use the collected data to better adjust the participatory budgeting pilots in nine pilot municipalities (DE, FI, LT, PL, 2 in LV, 3 in RU), but also to draw general conclusions about the citizens’ needs in the region with respect to participatory budgeting design.

First participatory budgeting pilots have been set up in five municipalities. One of them was completed in the Vidzeme Planning Region, Latvia.

It was one of the first public budgeting processes ever conducted in Latvia and the first covering a whole region that comprises 25 municipalities and one city. The public budgeting process was organised in three steps: voting of cultural priorities, making proposals and voting for proposals. In total 8,925 citizens participated with 12,364 votes. A fantastic number of 69 cultural projects were approved.

Participatory budgeting training materials have been jointly developed by the partners and training events were organised by some of the pilot municipalities, e.g. in Rietavas and Telsiai (Lithuania).

Outputs

Project Stories