Badajoz (provincia)
Nombre del proyecto: Participa Diputación Badajoz
Biggest of all
The province of Badajoz is the largest of Spains 50 provinces, with 21.766 square kilometer reaching from the border of Portugal to Toledo province, which borders the capital of Madrid. Badajoz, like much of Spanish rural territories, an relatively old population.
Diputación de Badajoz is the provincial administration which covers the entire provincial territory except that of the largest cities Badajoz, Zafra and Mérida.
Historically citizen participation has been widely implemented in Badajoz, but up until 2019 it has remained mainly an in-person issue with no digital tools to facilitate processes.
In 2019 the province of Badajoz started to work directly with the municipality of Madrid which had developed the Consul platform a few years earlier.
Pandemic
However, it was the Covid-19 pandemic that provided the final push. The province administration aimed at launching support and emergency finance policies for municipalities and companies in Badajoz but first it needed to know what people needed exactly.
Two things led to implementing the Consul platform. One: Covid-19 prohibited the province from convening in-person meetings. Two: people are scattered throughout the large provincial territory which made organizing live meetings time-consuming and costly.
A few public consultations around Covid-19-related issues asking people about their immediate needs was implemented through the Debate and Poll features of the Consul platform.
First PB
Later, in 2022, the first participatory budget was implemented in Badajoz. The next one, in 2023, had a budget of 2,7 million euros. In 2024, this was raised to almost 3 million euros, also the budget for the current 2025-2026 cycle.
The budget is split between a general provincial budget and 14 sub-budgets for the 14 comarcas, Spain's subprovincial administrative layer.
The participation numbers have been steadily improving as an aging population not used to using digital tools, got used to using the platform for the participatory budget. In 2023, 137 proposals were submitted and 4334 votes were casted. In 2024, less proposals were submitted (91) but the number of votes more than doubled to 10704 (a little under 2% of the entire province population).
Inequality between regions
The province administration of Badajoz responsible for citizen participation observes big inequalities when it comes to resources and turnout, especially between rural and urban regions.
Public budgets, for example, are concentrated in the urban areas of (larger) municipalities. This is why the communication officials from Badajoz try to focus more on and engage rural populations.
An even bigger challenge is to reach elderly in these rural areas. Using digital tools is dificult for that group and, at the same time, it is dificult reaching them even using physical tools because the Badajoz province administration does not have representation in all of the 14 comarcas and, thus, depend on collaboration with smaller nearby municipalities, for example.
Communication
Badajoz tries, however, to be as effective as possible when it comes to communicating about the active participatory budgets and processes. It aims, for example, to launch a video campaign that will be broadcasted digitally but also on television, instructing people where to go, how to participate and what's at stake.
Another way that can strenghten their reach to all inhabitants of Badajoz is the existing databases of neighbourhood associations throughout the province, which could be true allies in getting the word out.
Sustainable development
One feature of the Consul platform Badajoz is using keenly is the UN Sustinable Development Goals feature which allows people to add compatible SDG's to their budget proposal. It is a good fit because province policy called Agenda 2030 is aligned explicitly with the SDG's, and Badajoz aims to exclusively develop and implement project that align with them.
In the platform, this mentality is further expressed in the software development that Badajoz made themselves, in collaboration with the Spanish Consul provider Osoigo, which is the so-called Baremación. During this step proposals receive a score based not only on percentages of municipalities affected by the proposals, but also on their performance regarding economic development, sustainable development and social participation.
180 points is a full score, 50 points is the treshold to proceed to the PB final voting phase.
It's not the only thing that was developed. Badajoz also added progress tracking bars to its Consul platform, both on general, comarca and project level (see the image above).
Future plans
Badajoz collaborates with Osoigo to working on a new version of their Consul platform which will harness the full set of available partipation tools. It intends to organize, besides the PB processes, to start organizing digital public consultations, not only about existing regulations (something which is obligatory in Spain), but also policy in the making. One potential candidate are the Agendas Urbanas, that already have a participatory element, but could be done (partly) online through Consul.
Another interesting idea at Badajoz is to start working with the Multi Tenancy feature of the platform. Originally developed by the Cabildo de Tenerife, it is designed to create separate platforms within one single Consul installation. Cabildo de Tenerife uses it to host Consul for the municipalities on the island, Badajoz might do the same for its comarcas or towns.
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