As part of the "Dreaming Democracy" series to capture learning on participatory budgeting, we spoke to Coryn Barclay, Research Consultant and PB path finder at Fife council. Since September last year in 2019, Fife’s first instance and large scale test of mainstreaming PB is “Let's talk about transporting people.” https://our.fife.scot/transportingpeople/
Fife Council is 1 of 19 winners across the UK of Nesta's 2020 Democracy Pioneers Award. Coryn is also writing a Pioneers blog on the Fife PB work, which will be out soon!
Fife’s Participatory Budgeting story
Fife have been using a PB approach since 2010, dispersing around 1 million pounds in small grants. There’s now a commitment to 1% in mainstreaming PB across Scotland. For Fife, this equates to around 7 million pounds through PB annually and Coryn says they’re not going to get there through small grants alone.
Read more about Fife PB story 2010-2017 here.
5 top tips in integrating an online PB tool like Consul
Promotion and awareness building. Because it [Consul] is sitting on another platform elsewhere, you need to direct people from where they are -for instance Facebook or other channels. Changing people’s expectations on how they interact with the council and creating a co-operative space that is more about dialogue and deliberation and a two-way conversation, rather than contacting the council to complain about something.Pose questions positively online and you will get people engaging in a positive way. By doing this, Fife hasn’t had any issues with moderation.Thinking about equity of the voting process, you can create other methods to do that in-person such as fill in a form and hand it in, to provide options for people. Have a look at their site “Let’s talk about our Fife” here.
Top 3 PB learnings
If using a digital tool for the first time, keep it simple and don’t try and be too clever with that.Think about how online extends or compliments your offline engagement processes so it’s not a replacement for it.Give it a try, learn from it and improve for the next time. For each of the iterations there are things you can use and adapt. For example, one of the things Fife has learned over time from public voting processes is to have people available from the funding team to follow-up on proposals which weren’t successful.
Podcast by Annie Cook at Democratic Society.
Music by bensound.com