São Paulo
Project name: Participe+
Last updated
Project name: Participe+
Last updated
Over the past 10 years, the city government, or prefeitura, of São Paulo has worked on developing public policies and projects that improve the city's transparency, accountability, technological innovation and 'social participation', mainly under the auspices of the Open Government Partnership (OGP). A special team at the prefeitura, the Open Government Coordination office, is responsible for executing the OGP agenda, consisting of an OGP Action Plan and specific commitments in the five areas, determined alongside other local governments from Latin America and beyond.
The technology and social participation pillars come together in the development of the Participe+ (participate more) platform, a digital space that uses CONSUL DEMOCRACY software. Participe+ is dedicated to facilitating collaboration between the government and citizens in the formulation and discussion of municipal public policies, seeking inclusion and accessibility for the entire population of São Paulo which, considering it being a 'megapolis' of 12 million people, isn't easy.
When co-creating the 2nd Open Government Action Plan, between 2018 and 2020, a commitment was made to explore the implementation of a communication and social participation platform. Upon learning about CONSUL DEMOCRACY, the prefeitura began to consider the idea of actually building a social participation platform for the city of São Paulo. With the arrival of the pandemic, this work accelerated due to the need to create a digital space to host the city's participatory budget. Thus, in July 2020, Participe+ was launched.
The Partcipe+ platform offers different functionalities, such as public consultations, voting, participatory budgeting and the Participe+ Councils tool.
The most used feature is the public consultation tool, which can be carried out in four modalities: debates, proposals, notes and review. The review function is a development made in São Paulo. It allows citizens to give their opinion on specific sections of policy documents that are being prepared.
Participe+ also hosts the Citizen Budget, which is a type of participatory budget. Through the platform, civil society can propose and support popular proposals, in addition to monitoring the implementation of popular proposals that have already been approved by law.
Finally, Participe+ uses the voting functionality to carry out various types of voting, which helps in decision-making on public policies, projects and the composition of district and policy boards.
The main issues addressed include urban planning, health, education, the environment and economic development. Hence, different departments of the prefeitura's administration use the platform to implement their participatory projects, using different features. Examples iof such projects include the Intermediate Review of the São Paulo Master Plan, which aims to guide the actions of urban space producers and users; the Mental Health Protocol in Primary Care Consultation which aims to improve mental health protocols in public agencies, carried out by the Municipal Health Department; and the Technical Guidelines for the Child Labor Eradication Program, implemented by the Municipal Department of Social Assistance and Development.
Prefeitura of São Paulo has been using the CONSUL DEMOCRACY software for 4 years, since the launch of Participe+ in July 2020. Currently, around 93,550 people have a registered account, of which 66,000 have complete accounts, that is, profiles with detailed information, such as CPF (person id number), gender, date of birth, race and whether or not they have any disability.
During these four years, more than 100.000 contributions have been submitted in various participatory processes on the platform. In the Citizen Budget, the participatory budget of the city of São Paulo, starting in 2024, each sub-prefecture began to receive R$10 million, totaling R$320 million for citizen proposals.
It is worth noting that the subprefeituras are decentralized administrative units of the prefeitura, created in the first half of the 2000s to promote greater proximity and agility in the management of public services and the implementation of local policies. As regards the Citizen's Budget, São Paulo was able to collect more than 14.000 proposals and over 100.000 votes in all five annual editions since 2021 combined.
One of the biggest challenges for the prefeitura and its OGP office is generating engagement in a city as diverse and large as São Paulo. Engaging citizens from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds requires a broad and inclusive communication strategy.
In addition, ensuring the accessibility of the platform represented a significant technical challenge, as this was still underdeveloped in the version of CONSUL DEMOCRACY in 2021. The São Paulo team invested in accessibility tools, such as LIBRAS readers, to make it more inclusive for people with visual impairments, for example.
Currently, Participe_ is undergoing a process of validating its entire accessibility, which involves PRODAM, a technology company that develops Participe+ together with CGA, and the Municipal Secretariat for People with Disabilities (SMPED).
Another technical challenge we faced was finding a way to ensure that participatory processes, such as voting, were legitimate and safe. To this end, the team implemented a validation mechanism for the CPF, the official identification document of Brazilian citizens.
Finally, a general challenge is to make the Participe+ platform a default choice within the entire prefeitura, and to have all the departments within the city's administration perceive the platform as the bridge between the desires of the government and the interests of civil society.
But perhaps the biggest challenge of all in a country like Brazil has to do with a series of economic and social factors. Brazil is a country with a very unequal society, which is directly reflected in political and social participation, considering that a large part of the population faces barriers to accessing quality education, information and basic resources. The lack of material conditions and time are also factors that affect participation.
Another impactful factor is distrust in institutions. Brazil's history is marked by periods of authoritarianism, corruption and political practices that often excluded civil society from decision-making. In this context, there is also a culture of centralization of power in Brazil, where decisions are made by political elites, at the federal, state and municipal levels. This factor can create the feeling that participation is irrelevant and ineffective. And finally, a lack of political education also represents a significant obstacle, as many people do not have access to clear information about how politics works, let alone how to effectively participate in political decision-making through a digital platform.
