`Dundee Decides' was the biggest participatory budgeting project undertaken by any council in Scotland in relation to its mainstream budget, with citizens empowered to make decisions about the spending of £1.2 million on projects such as play areas, pedestrian crossings, pavements, lighting and planting.
The process involved community engagement throughout, including the selection of projects, a community conference to shape the ideas, and a voting system with support for people to take part. This support included access to IT in community settings and additional assistance to those with IT, language or health barriers. A comic, a film and social media were among the approaches used to widen participation.
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a relatively new concept for local authorities and delivering this project required skills and input from different services to get it designed and implemented. Everyone involved embraced the concept, was willing to learn and try new things and approached it with a `can do' attitude which resulted in very high levels of local participation, with over 11,000 people voting on their priority projects.
The challenge
Following the Community Empowerment Act (Scotland) 2015, the Scottish Government has set councils a target of having “at least 1% of their budget subject to Community Choices Budgeting - Participatory Budgeting by 2020/21.”
The `Dundee Decides' team worked together to develop and document a structured process to deliver a new participatory budgeting model in relation to the council's budget for local infrastructure projects. They ensured that the process involved community engagement and participation at all stages, from the selection of infrastructure projects through to the final decision, which involved a voting exercise. The team developed a model which can be adapted and sustained. Working with external consultancy support, the team developed a good understanding of PB models and put in place an evaluation framework which has been monitoring the process from start to finish and will provide learning to shape future exercises in Dundee and for Councils elsewhere.
Actions and approach
Three outcomes were set at the start of the process:
- Dundee City Council will learn about the most effective methods for community participation.
- Local people will be meaningfully involved in decision making for spending of £1.2 million on local infrastructure projects from the Council's mainstream budget.
- Communities will become familiar with Participatory Budgeting as an approach.
All of these outcomes have been successfully achieved.
The team identified potential barriers and used learning from other participatory budgeting exercises to decide what methods were effective and would work best in our local circumstances. Taking account of stakeholder needs, an online voting system with face-to-face support was developed, which provided help for people to take part by providing access to IT in community settings and targeting specific groups who needed additional assistance to participate due to barriers such as access to IT, language or health.
Through the local Community Planning Partnerships, existing representative groups and elected members were involved in shaping the exercise. Local communities were involved through a community conference in shaping the ideas, feedback was sought from elected members at different stages of the process, and council and third sector staff were trained in the principles of PB and how to engage and involve the community. Using money secured from the Scottish Government, the team engaged PB Partners, an external body, to provide advice. They have also evaluated the process, providing feedback and learning for us and for other councils and the Scottish Government.
A support grant from the Scottish Government allowed for the purchase of 70 tablets, which made it possible to:
- provide ready access to the voting website, especially for residents with no IT access
- let people vote flexibly in different settings e.g. the tablets were used at existing community events or left with workers at community centres to collect votes in the absence of the community development team.
The use of tablets was complemented by encouraging voters to log on to the website and vote at home or from their own mobile devices. A `vote on your phone' initiative in local schools was particularly well received by pupils as use of mobile phones in schools is usually prohibited! A particularly successful example of the outreach work undertaken by the CLD team involved sessions at local high schools, where pupils took up the `voting offer' enthusiastically, and in turn took the message home to their families. There were also numerous examples of successful `piggybacking' on existing community event - these really demonstrated the value of having `voting tablets' available for easy, immediate use.
Impact and results
Dundee Decides has hugely widened the base of resident participation and made local communities much more involved in making decisions which directly affect their local areas.
We set a target to involve 6,000 people using our previous large scale community engagement initiative, `Engage Dundee', as a benchmark. Dundee Decides achieved almost double this target - over 11,000 people took part.
Over 50% of participants to date have completed feedback questionnaires, providing us with information which demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach:
- 76% report that this is the first time they have taken part in decisions in their community
- 76% feel that Dundee Decides has helped them have a greater say on how money is spent
- 84% feel this is an effective way of increasing community involvement
- 82% think this is a good way to allocate public funds
- 82% would like more Council money allocated in this way
- 80% report that this has helped them understand the different costs of projects
- 94% found the online site easy to use
The last word goes to Alan Budge of PB Partners who said in his evaluation: “Overall, Dundee Decides has been an outstanding success, in terms of pioneering the development and delivery of a pilot mainstream PB programme in Scotland, and something that will hopefully serve as an inspiration to other Local Authority areas as they develop their PB programmes in future.”
How is the new approach being sustained?
We are analysing information on voting patterns, age and gender which will help to inform future exercises and we are receiving interview and narrative feedback, which provides comment on the most effective engagement tools and communication methods. Evidence so far indicates that we have achieved what we set out to do while also gathering useful feedback to inform and improve future practice in Dundee and elsewhere.
Lessons learned
Dundee Decides was innovative because it was the first time that any council in Scotland involved local residents in making decisions on spending such a large scale mainstream budget using a participatory budgeting approach, ultimately handing over the final decision making 100% to the community, through a public vote.
This is in line with the changing face of public services and community empowerment. Having ideas generated and voted upon by the community has seen a different role for officers - they have had to work up ideas put forward by communities which might be different from their own priorities and have had to justify any deletions/amendments to projects. This challenged traditional ways of working but also resulted in greater joint working and understanding of different viewpoints on priorities and needs.
Colleagues in IT have learned about new platforms, how to develop use of IT in citizen engagement, what barriers exist and what supports are required to undertake engagement online.
Another innovation was that we targeted this exercise from age 11+ to involve younger people, so this is also an educative process in citizen involvement and democratic accountability.
We have also been innovative in our communications, with colleagues from the Communications team helping to lead the development of the brand `Dundee Decides'. Use of social media and the production of a comic and short film to explain the process are examples of best practice in how to get out an engaging message in different forms.
Next steps
The evaluation data from Dundee Decides will help to inform work on our digital strategy going forward. Our ongoing data collection and evaluation will help in future Participatory Budgeting exercises and we are feeding the findings through the Scottish PB network to ensure best practice is shared with colleagues all across the country. This project won a COSLA Gold Award in 2018.
For further information on this case study, please contact
Marie Dailly
marie.dailly@dundeecity.gov.uk
01382 435820