Beginning in 2015, Milan's Participatory Budget contains four phases and covers two years. A multi-channel approach using online, deliberative, and informal activities, was adopted to increase levels of participation. Oversight of the chosen projects is also open to the public.
Problems and Purpose
One of the most advanced Italian participatory budgeting projects started in 2015 in the city of Milan by the name of ‘I Count, I Participate, I Decide’ (Conto Partecipo Scelgo). Partially influenced by the Porto Alegre example[1], it also presents elements of e-democracy and of territorial division inspired by French Participatory Budgeting (PB). Moreover, the budgeting process adds the use of random selection, a recruitment technique common among mini-publics. With a total budget of € 9 ml for the project, the Municipality dedicated € 1 ml to each one of the 9 autonomous districts of the city, promoting the redistribution of resources.
Milan's PB was initiated with inclusiveness as one of its key principles. The purpose of the project was and continues to be the enhancement of public decision-making, underpinned by a formal structure of institutionalized citizen participation and deliberation, and bolstered by an active civil society including informal forms of participation.
The initiative also includes the participation of the young population (from 14 to 25 years of age) and of the city's numerous minorities, foreigners, and immigrants. Expanding the accessibility of the project to almost any member of society is vital and the adoption of PB was seen by the Milan administration as an ‘opportunity to strengthen a method of wide, democratic and active consultation that characterizes the city’.[2] The final approval of the projects to be realized on a three-year basis and equally divided between districts, demonstrated the efficiency of the PB in terms of procedural structure.
Background History and Context
The project was initially started by the left-wing administration in 2015 and the practice was then carried on by the new left-wing administration elected in 2016.
Even though there is a good distribution of Participatory Budgeting projects already running in Italy, Milan's foray into Participatory Budget has, thus far, proven to be innovative and extensive, fully supported by the Municipality and with a notable budget to support the projects voted by the citizens.
Organizing, Supporting, and Funding Entities
With a total budget of € 9 ml for the project, the Municipality dedicated € 1 ml to each one of the 9 autonomous districts of the city, promoting the redistribution of resources.
Participant Recruitment and Selection
The first phase was open to all although facilitators during the open meetings ("town halls") handed out 'do-it-yourself' guides which, during the pilot PB cycle, led to a number of citizen-led meetings which specifically targeted the participation of foreigners, minorities, and immigrants. As well, all public schools were included in the listening phase and student proposals and project ideas were posted on the website and considered in the second phase: co-planning.
The second phase of collaborative planning involved one group of 30 citizens per region. Participants were selected through lot (random sampling) but only those who participated in the first phase were able to apply for selection. Professional facilitators were hired to lead the co-planning meetings and each group was assisted by municipal technicians (experts in planning and budgeting).
The third phase - voting - was open to everyone over the age of 14. Voting can be done online or in-person on select dates. Those under the age of 14 were also allowed to vote but only in person, through paper ballot.
The fourth phase involved the implementation of the chosen projects. The primary participants are municipal officials, technicians, and experts although the public could monitor their progress on the PB website.
Methods and Tools Used
The first experiment of PB happened in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 1989. Since then, this type of democratic deliberative systems developed in many other geographical areas of the world. However, PB has so far had predominantly small geopolitical scope, focusing on local municipalities and big cities, but never an entire nation state. The reason for this has been explained by Pateman, who highlights the fact that working on small units enhances cooperation and equality, which consequently translates into efficiency and higher popular involvement within the local community.[3] Notwithstanding, the project of the municipality of Milan is still impressively ambitious, since it tries to draw the participation of all the social groups in a city of over 1 million inhabitants.
What Went On: Process, Interaction, and Participation
PB as a practice in Milan was structured and organized into four main phases. This allowed the development of such phases and the introduction of features previously developed in other PB processes.
PHASE 1 – ‘Listening: public meetings for the gathering of needs’
The first phase ran from early May until late September 2015. A set of meetings was scheduled by the Municipality and participation in these public hearings was open to the general public. A broad range of online and offline invitations were spread into the city, in an attempt to reach every citizen who was a minimum of 14 years old. After a few introductory meetings in which the citizens were told the scope and depth of this new PB project in the city, a total of 1442 citizens gathered together to attend 45 meetings. During these events, under the guidance of professional facilitators helping to achieve a positive and productive discussion, the participants tried to address the many issues they experience while living in the city. The initial ideas were then developed into projects of intervention with interests that varied from improving scholastic facilities to developing playgrounds in various parks, etc. The logistics of the meetings were fundamental to the realization of the project: the participants split into 9 different groups and had specific assembly points depending on which of the 9 different districts of Milan they were originally from. This latter aspect was key to fully exploit the efficiency deriving from the direct interest of the citizens. The Municipality of Milan also tried to address the minority issue and reached out to the various communities, with a total of 60 members (coming from 12 different minority groups) autonomously participating in the meetings. Various charities and other associations helped the Municipality getting in contact with members of minorities.
In addition to all this, 17 supplementary assemblies with elected peer facilitators were organized and run by citizens. Furthermore, 350 young participants aged 14 to 25 had 9 meetings (one for each area) with professional facilitators and every group produced proposals that can be found on the website. At the end of September 2015 and of Phase 1, the totality of the proposals was gathered for Phase 2.
PHASE 2 – ‘Co-design: workshops to design interventions’
The Proposals
The division of meetings during Phase 1 into the 9 districts brought up numerous proposals to be advanced to the second Phase. Therefore, Phase 2 aimed at rearranging such projects and grouping up together as many of them as possible into bigger ones. The outcome of the meetings in Phase 2 was of 40 complete projects to be advanced to the voting phase (Phase 3).
Citizen participation
Unlike in Phase 1 -which was open to any citizen or resident in the city-, during Phase 2 the participants were randomly selected from an initial total of 610 people who participated in Phase 1. These 610 participants were people who had previously actively followed Phase 1 and gave availability for the selected days (24th and 25th October 2015). The random selection was carried out by the Municipality over the course of one day and a total of 45 citizens attended, having the role of scrutinizing the process. Out of the 610 available from Phase 1, a total of 30 citizens for each district group was selected for a total of 270 participants, who met in the local assembly point of the 9 districts in order to deliberate. Of the 270 selected, 210 were actually present and participated to the meetings for Phase 2.
Random selection has the advantage of not systematically excluding any social group, especially with regards to the minorities of the area who would otherwise normally risk being underrepresented. However, the random selection system posed the danger of not being able to equally draw from the total of 610 citizens a participant for every municipal area or to give equal say to different genders or ages. Therefore, the choice was made to respect these parameters first, not focusing much on ensuring the representation of minorities. Consequently, the random selection [4] was realized while still respecting a balance of gender, of geographical provenience and of age, but there is no information available over the number of members of minorities acceding to Phase 1.
At the end of Phase 2, the 40 final projects were rearranged with the help of two professional facilitators per district. In addition, experts were present to give technical advice over the feasibility of projects in terms of cost and timing, with the purpose being to reorganize more projects together while trying to safeguard the efficiency of the results and the total budget.
Meanwhile, there have been elements of online participation to Phase 2, mainly through social media. In this regard, the web site of the Municipality but more consistently the Facebook page ‘Bilancio Partecipativo Milano’, have proven to be extremely active in following the various stages of the project and dealing with online discussions over topics.
PHASE 3 - Voting: choosing the projects to be carried out
Once reorganized, the totality of the projects was uploaded online and made accessible to every citizen. Phase 3 consisted of the voting process, which ran from the 12th until the 29th of November 2015. During these 17 days, citizens had the chance to vote online, or offline. The online vote could be completed on the Municipality web page and there are was an online voting tutorial [5] available on Youtube.
23835 citizens voted online and another 1700 voted with the so-called ‘assisted vote’ system. The population could also access a list of 20 voting points [6] all around the city where they could go and vote with the help of voting assistants. In addition to this segment of the population, 6337 votes were collected from schools all over the city, gathering votes from the young population from 14 to 25 years old.
However, the total voters represented roughly 3% of the total population of the city and included also people normally not entitled to vote (14-18 years old). An example of this is district number 3, in which 2724 people out of 150,000 inhabitants voted.
PHASE 4 – Outcomes: projects updates and accountability
The fourth phase of the participatory budget cycle is more than just the delivery of the chosen projects. Unlike many contemporary examples of PB, Milan's encourages the participation of citizens following the voting phase. The results of the voting process are published online with a detailed description of all projects and the number of votes attributed to each one of them.
More importantly, the 'Monitoring' section of the websites allows anyone to keep track of the project's progress and to contact website administrators with questions.
After the voting phase of the 2015 PB Pilot, representatives of the administration ran a meeting for the citizens to acknowledge the progress made in the development of the projects. The event was also live streamed on Facebook so that citizens could participate by asking questions online. During the meeting, some issues were raised. Apparently, some of the projects that won during the voting process seem not to be feasible and have therefore been abandoned already, which would suggest a failure of the administration in completing the process and positioning the project among the most interesting Italian PB projects realized so far. However, at least the municipality was open in admitting this and further confusion and/or conflict was avoided.
Influence, Outcomes, and Effects
To date, most of the projects voted on during the 2015-2016 PB pilot have been completed or are in progress. While there were some projects dropped to unforeseen technical/budgetary complications, public officials held a public meeting in November 2016 to explain the apparent failure to respect their promises to implement the winning proposals.
The pilot was ultimately deemed successful and Milan began a second cycle of PB in 2017 with the final vote being held in March 2018. The winning projects are currently under final review.
Analysis and Lessons Learned
As in Porto Alegre[7] this project grows on the hope that clientelism in Italy could be reduced thanks to the direct participation of citizens in the budgeting experience. The fight against clientelism was also enhanced by a new Italian anti-corruption law, which protects the projects. Clientelism in Italy often takes place when developing public interventions and especially when important budgets are involved so such a law is important. However, it could be argued that the bureaucratic procedures requested by this new law contributed to slowing down the realization of projects.
Analysis of Milan's PB Pilot "I Count, I Participate, I Decide" (2015-2016)
Even though Milan's first attempt at participatory budgeting aimed at including every social group including minorities, there is not much evidence about their active participation in the project.
Firstly, it was not clarified by any document on the website how the Municipality reached out to the 60 members of minorities who participated in Phase 1. Nevertheless, this latter procedural approach was personally explained by Lorenzo Lipparini – the Councillor for Participation and Active Citizenship of the city of Milan- during the phone interview. The Municipality contacted minorities through institutions and charities, along with other private associations.
Lastly, it is not clear whether the proposals from the minorities were treated as equally as the others in reaching Phase 2.
The form of sortition used was in fact distant from the standard random selection of participants drawn from a list of all citizens [8] and being innovative implies different potential issues. With the citizens selected from the ones who previously participated in Phase 1, the scope of such sortition was partially limited and may have strengthened the minority dilemma, since the random selection criterion did not include ethnic identity.
Since this particular PB was structured to have a final voting process and a limited budget, losing projects that did not reach the minimum number of votes in order to be executed was inevitable.
As Lorenzo Lipparini explained during the interview, the administration partially addressed this issue by promising that the losing projects would have either been funded by the remaining of the budget from the €1 ml assigned to each district or they would have been considered as an indicator for the next years’ administration of the needs of the population.
Unfortunately, this latter approach towards the residue of the PB process could underpin popular disengagement and mistrust in the authorities since it reduces the scope of the whole PB to an act of simple consultation on budget [7], thus diminishing the initial purpose for this PB project in Milan.
Other critiques moved to the administration by citizens included the suggestion to continue the meetings at a local level, as it was during Phase 1 of the pilot ‘I Count, I Participate, I Decide’. The November 30 meeting did not manage to address in detail all of the updates about the projects district by district, but only gave a general comment on each of them. This latter approach to the post-PB (Phase 4) could be argued to be missing a structure. On this regard, however, as explained by the Councillor during the interview, the Municipality has already reconsidered the importance of decentralizing the process even more with the PB projects starting from 2017, following the new indications coming from the 2015 experience. Decentralization will also play a major role in the realizations of Phases 1 to 3, promising to reach even more people and get citizens to participate more actively at a district level.
However, it is still too early for a final evaluation since most projects are developed following a 3-year plan and should thus be completed in 2018. By then, it will possible to understand whether if this type of PB in Italy - and more specifically in vast multicultural geographical areas like Milan - could become part of a regular participatory practice embedded in the political structure.
The Councillor, during the interview, confirmed that the project will start again in 2017, based on a yearly basis and considering the experience drawn from the 2015 pilot.
See Also
Participatory Budgeting in Milan - Cycle 2017/18
References
[1] Smith, G. and Fletcher, S. (2016). Porto Alegre Participatory Budgeting Cycle 2005-2007. Participedia, 27 May [last update]. Available from https://participedia.net/case/44
[2] Presentation Booklet, (2015). I Count, I Participate, I Decide: Participatory budgeting of the Municipality of Milan. Available from http://www.bilanciopartecipativomilano.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/BBPM_brochureinformativo_EN_web.pdf [Accessed 20/12/2016], p. 2
[3] Pateman, C. (2014). Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and G. D. H. Cole: a participatory theory of democracy. In: Pateman, C. (2014). Participation and Democratic Theory, 1st edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Available from https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/participation-and-democratic-theory/rousseau-john-stuart-mill-and-g-d-h-cole...
[4] Municipality of Milan, (2015). Bilancio partecipativo Milano – Estrazione dei componenti dei 9 Laboratori di co-progettazione. Available from http://www.bilanciopartecipativomilano.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Estrazione_Laboratori_BPMi_15-ottobre-2015.pdf [Accessed 22/12/2016]
[5] MetroNewsItalia (2015). Milano, Bilancio Partecipativo, tutorial sul voto. Youtube, 11 November. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70-6VQWcKtc
[6] Conto, Partecipo, Scelgo (2015). Elenco dei punti di voto assistito. Available from http://www.bilanciopartecipativomilano.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/punti-voto-assistito.pdf
[7] Sintomer et. al. (2008). Participatory Budgeting in Europe: Potentials and Challenges. Volume 32, Issue 1. In: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Urban Research Publications Limited, 1-249. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2008.00777.x
[8] Smith, G. (2016). Realising the goods of democratic institutions. In: Smith, G. (2016) Democratic Innovations: Designing institutions for Citizen Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 162-193
[9] Davies, T. and Chandler, R. (2013). Online Deliberation Design: Choices, Criteria, and Evidence. In: Nabatchi, T., Gastil, J. , Leighninger, M., Weiksner, M. (2013). Democracy in Motion: Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online.
External Links
ALANews (2015). Rozza: Bilancio partecipativo: così i cittadini decidono dove spendere 9mln. Youtube, 12 November. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkhln0pRiKo
Conto, Partecipo, Scelgo (2015). Graduatoria dei progetti. Available from http://www.bilanciopartecipativomilano.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/graduatoria.pdf
Conto, Partecipo, Scelgo (2015). I progetti finanziati. Available from http://www.bilanciopartecipativomilano.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/progetti_finanziati.pdf
Franco, L. (2015). Bilancio partecipativo a Milano, dalla mobilità alla scuola: scelgono i cittadini. Il Fatto Quotidiano, 11 November. Available from http://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2015/11/11/bilancio-partecipativo-a-milano-dalla-mobilita-alla-scuola-scelgono-i-cittadini-online/2211469/
Giannattasio, M. (2016). Nelle zone diventano realtà i progetti scelti dai cittadini: Via alle opere del bilancio partecipativo. Per gli interventi 9 milioni di euro. Corriere della Sera, 30 May. Available from http://milano.corriere.it/notizie/politica/16_maggio_30/nelle-zone-diventano-realta-bilancio-partecipativo-balzani-rozza-0d218784-25d1-11e6-8b7b-cc77e9e204b3.shtml
Il Giorno, (2015). Bilancio partecipativo, ecco i progetti vincitori. Il Giorno, 3 December. Available from http://www.ilgiorno.it/milano/cronaca/bilancio-partecipativo-progetti-1.1542557
Re, D. (2014). Sperimentazione. Comune di Milano, ecco il bilancio partecipativo. Avvenire, 25 October. Available from https://www.avvenire.it/attualita/pagine/comune-milano-bilancio-partecipativo
Facebook page ‘Bilancio Partecipativo Milano’