Participatory democracy
If you’re feeling cynical or disillusioned at getting to vote every four or five years for a limited range of political parties, participative democracy may offer you something a bit more meaningful.
In contrast to representative democracy, which enables us to elect others to make decisions on our behalf, participative approaches such as partipatory budgeting and citizens juries let us get right into the nitty gritty of the decision making.
These methods involve sharing your experiences and listening to those of others, and coming to better decisions together as a result. Even better, people who take part in this joint decision-making tend to feel better about their communities and more confident as a result, and often go on to participate in other ways afterwards.
See below for some of the main approaches, policies and other resources.
Participation requests are a way for communities to work with public bodies to make services better. This resource pack contains a range of guides, tools and templates to help you understand the participation request process, the language and terms that are used, and the process involved.
The Global Participatory Budgeting Hub is aims to improve and expand participatory budgeting (PB) around the world by addressing common challenges and opportunities faced by PB implementers and supporters. It provides information on what PB is, how to design and carry out PB, funding, training, events and news updates.
This report from SCDC and What Works Scotland explores how community councils can be even more relevant in Scotland’s evolving policy context, especially as public service reform continues through the Local Governance Review.
Scotland’s Climate Assembly brought a group of people together who were broadly representative of the Scottish population to learn about, discuss and make recommendations on how we can best tackle climate change.
The Citizens’ Assembly of Scotland involved 100 citizens from across Scotland, who were broadly representative of the country, coming together to listen, discuss and think about what kind of country we want to build in Scotland, as well as other related questions.
The Citizen Participation Network includes 600 citizens, researchers, practitioners and policy makers working in a range of fields in Scotland and beyond. It should be relevant to anyone wanting to know more about the theory and practical methods behind participatory democracy.
In this briefing, CHEX argues that by building on the fantastic community-led response to Covid-19 and by making use of great ways for everyone to take part (e.g. citizens assemblies) we can build a more just and sustainable country which really begins to tackle long-term health inequalities.
The Local Governance Review aims to find out what changes are needed to encourage a more local, participatory and inclusive democracy in Scotland.
We highlight three ways that your community group can get involved in participatory budgteting…
Participatory budgeting is a way for people to directly vote on how local money should be spent. PB Scotland acts as a hub for sharing and learning about PB across Scotland. It provides updates on events, policy and resources relevant to PB in Scotland, and profiles good examples of PB in action.