- WP1 - Project Management
- WP2 - Mediated deliberation of participatory budgeting
- WP3 - Participatory budgeting experiments and events
- WP4 - Understanding citizen engagement and deliberation
- WP5- An agenda for democratic renewal through territorial cohesion
- WP6 - Communication and Dissemination
- WP7 - Ethics requirements
Project Management
| Start Month | End Month |
| 1 | 36 |
This WP covers the day-to-day project management measures and coordination activities to run the project effectively and efficiently. These include monitoring the progress of project implementation and ensuring quality control, ensuring good communication within the Consortium and with the European Commission, as well as elaborating plans for data management, ethics standards, gender management and risk management.
Objectives
- effective and efficient organisational, administrative and financial management of the project;
- coordination of all work packages and tasks;
- ensure that the project meets all of its objectives and delivers high-quality outputs to specification, on time, and to budget manage good working relations and information flows with the European Commission and other stakeholders
Mediated deliberation of participatory budgeting
| Start Month | End Month |
| 2 | 35 |
This WP provides an innovative analysis of Participatory Budgeting (PB) media coverage and deliberation. Three main tasks are involved in this WP: (i) designing a toolkit for identifying relevant content on participatory budgeting; (ii) conducting an extensive cross-national and regional data gathering exercise that draws on online media and social media data and (iii) a content analysis of the DEMOTEC corpus of documents to feed the case studies of the partners and for comparative analysis.
Objectives
- to analyse the determinants of effective citizen engagement in PB for regional and urban development policies (EU and domestic);
- to investigate the discourse on participatory budgeting of regional and urban development policies in the public sphere, via its representation in online news and social media;
- to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and exchange of experience on democratic innovations among practitioners between countries and authorities at different levels
Participatory budgeting experiments and events
| Start Month | End Month |
| 3 | 36 |
This WP will create a common methodological framework for PB that is flexible enough to allow local adaption in order to implement PB experiments and events in the following cities: Cluj-Napoca, Fife, Sligo, Limassol, Rotterdam, Thessaloniki, and Walbrzych. The pilot experiments involve configuring a PB platform to cater for a number of experimental conditions to manipulate the scope for deliberation as well as simulating different real-world implementations of PB around Europe.
Objectives
- to apply different deliberative methods in practice, including piloting PB experiments and conducting PB events using digital technologies that involve different citizen groups, in regional and urban development policies in seven urban authorities across Europe;
- to identify lessons for effective and efficient methods for citizen engagement – specifically, increasing public awareness, understanding and involvement by citizens in regional and urban development policies;
- to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and exchange of experience on democratic innovations among practitioners between countries and authorities at different levels
Understanding citizen engagement and deliberation
| Start Month | End Month |
| 6 | 31 |
This WP investigates public attitudes to citizen engagement in democratic innovations and their determinants. To do so, an original and representative survey of citizens’ will be undertaken in the case study countries and a further three European countries with significant experience in PB (DE, ES, FR) mirroring the media analysis WP. This will be complemented with a qualitative discourse analysis of the participatory budgeting deliberations to provide a more in-depth perspective of citizens’ views on democratic innovations and their potential to produce more informed citizen engagement in policy processes.
Objectives
- to analyse the determinants of effective citizen engagement in PB for regional and urban development policies (EU and domestic);
- to investigate the discourse on participatory budgeting of regional and urban development policies in the public sphere, via its representation in online news and social media;
- to identify lessons for effective and efficient methods for citizen engagement – specifically, increasing public awareness, understanding and involvement by citizens in regional and urban development policies
An agenda for democratic renewal through territorial cohesion
| Start Month | End Month |
| 18 | 34 |
This package will bring together the results of WPs 2-4 and will address the central question of whether and to what extent participatory budgeting has the potential for delivering greater and more enlightened citizen engagement including among disadvantaged groups and with respect to the European Union. The case study reports will synthesis research from the other work packages, which will in turn be used to draw out key conclusions and lessons to promote learning about how to improve citizen engagement at local, regional, national and EU levels. A central objective of this task will be to develop a policy agenda for participatory budgeting in the EU through a Handbook of EU Participatory Budgeting.
Objectives
- to investigate citizen engagement through democratic innovations and the implications for participatory democracy and renewal
- to generate new insights into the geographical variations and determinants of citizen engagement across European cities
- to assess the effectiveness of democratic innovations and to formulate recommendations to improve their effectiveness
Communication and Dissemination
| Start Month | End Month |
| 1 | 36 |
This WP sets out a communication and dissemination strategy and activities. During the project implementation appropriate tools will be developed to maximise the project’s visibility and to diffuse information on its goals, achievements, impacts and results to the relevant stakeholders including public sector bodies at levels, research and education institutions, and civil society organisations and non-governmental organisations and the wider public. Under the lead of a leading European media organisation (EURACTIV), all project partners will be involved in different stages by providing their specific contributions particularly for communications within their own countries but also contributing more widely to the core messages and outcomes and involving a wide range of stakeholders and citizens.
Objectives
- to promote awareness around the participatory budgeting process among EU citizens;
- to produce effective and cogent editorial coverage of the participatory budgeting process;
- to disseminate information in multiple European languages;
- to organise important stakeholders to discuss the theme and results of the project
Ethics requirements
| Start Month | End Month |
| 2 | 35 |
This work package sets out the ‘ethics requirements’ that the project must comply with.