Gran Canaria
Project name: Participa Gran Canaria
Last updated
Project name: Participa Gran Canaria
Last updated
From the very beginning, in 2015, when Jorge Perez Artiles, currently the head of the Directorate General of Citizen Participation at Cabildo de Gran Canaria (island government), took office, he and his team started to design an new public policy that would institutionalize citizen participation in public policy-making in Gran Canaria.
Artiles quickly realized that digital democracy was important to empower people and to make people participate in public decisions. 'We wanted to reach everyone in Gran Canaria,' he says, while taking into account that digital communication technologies like the internet and social networks were already very much into place and used a lot, especially by young people.
He looked around and went to Madrid in 2016 to see how Consul (not CONSUL DEMOCRACY as the project is called nowadays) was being developed and used by the capital's government and by Pablo Soto, former councilor of Citizen Participation and Transparency and Social Innovation in the Madrid local council.
It all started as part of the Podemos political movement, and as part of the coalition that the political party formed with the socialist party PSOE and with the local island party Nuevas Canarias - Blocque Canaristas. Once in power, Podemos initiated the creation of a Citizen Participation General Directorate, which didn't exist at the time. Artiles: "It was the first time that citizen participation public policy was going to be designed and implemented in the island government. That was my mission."
Until then, this island government didn't have such policies, neither did the concejalias, the local 21 councils of Gran Canaria island. It was already mandatory, though, according to Spanish national law, to implement 'citizen participation' at the council level. However, "that didn't have anything to do with including citizens in public decision-making", and more with 'social participation' which is far less consequential and not tied to political processes.
So how was it to start from scratch? "That was an advantage', explains Artiles. "I didn't have anyone deciding otherwise or anyone having opinions about this because nobody basically knew what the hell I was doing, it was new for them. Plus: I had the backup of one of the three parties in government, Podemos."
The work of creating the public policy for and embedding participatory process in government processes was threefold:
working inside the government to spread and extend the participatory mechanisms;
promoting this new public policy for citizen participation in all the 21 municipalities in Gran Canaria;
and promoting and supporting the associations and collectives on the island, who would be key partners and participants in the processes, with financial support.
Participatory processes were implemented in Gran Canaria in different areas, such as urban policies and neighborhood development, but also something special like including certain Canarian geographical sites in the UNESCO's World Heritage catalogue. The current island government is filing applications in the areas of biodiversity and cultural heritage.
"With the means I have at my disposal," Artiles says, "I am trying to demonstrate that these matters also require participatory processes to decide which areas are included in Gran Canaria's UNESCO applications."
Another important aspect of promoting citizen participation across Gran Canaria's local councils is training. The Cabildo de Gran Canaria has been promoting education and participation in participatory methodologies and governance for some years by giving money to universities and by training directly professionals of public institutions. Currently, for example, there is available a short course of 9 hours on digital democracy methodologies.
The Cabildo de Gran Canaria has used the CONSUL DEMOCRACY platform mainly for participatory processes and also for (non-interactive) public consultations.
One example of a public consultation is the UNESCO application. The proposal for a world heritage site in Gran Canaria was admitted by UNESCO in 2019. Back then, Partiles and his team created a hybrid process combining participatory in-person processes and digital processes. "I launched a public consultation through the platform to gauge support for this proposal, this was in 2019. We received overwhelming support."
Another example dates back to the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Cabildo de Gran Canaria launched a consultation to co-create an action plan, a strategic policy document dealing with social and economic recovery post-COVID and stipulating concrete public policies.
Partiles gives another example. "When we were writing the regulation for citizen participation in Gran Canaria, we published the draft online to gather comments and feedback from people. We used again a hybrid process
The main challenge, according to Partiles, was to engage people and have them participate in the process. "In the case of drafting the regulation for citizen participation, we did not receive a lot of feedback. This is an island government, this is not a municipality. Municipal governments deal with day to day things that people are generally more engaged with and that they will probably be more likely to participate in."
One current process is the participatory process on tourism and a model of sustainable tourism development that people can live with. "This is important. This engages people. The public debate about tourism in Spain started actually on the Canary Islands with a big demonstration where people demanded a different development model for tourism. They are saying that tourism is affecting their lives because of the lack of housing, low salaries in the tourism sector, loss of cultural identity."
Even though tourism is important in the local economy, many Canarians are starting to realize is not a viable kind of tourism. Jorge says that the island is 'saturated' with tourists. "Twelve million tourist visit our island every year, on a total population of 2.2 million people."
He also highlights the sheer inequality visible in the tourism sector. "Our gross income consists of forty percent income from the tourism sector. Tourism is the 'locomotive' of the economy. The local economy of the Canary Islands grows at four percent annually, not even Germany achieves these growth levels. But at the same time our average salary level is the second worst in Spain."
Artiles and his team at the Cabildo de Gran Canaria are designing the participatory on this urgent topic as wel write this (December 2024), but there already is a general outline. Artiles: "The first step of the process will be a questionnaire via mail as well as via the platform. Then, in February, we will launch a citizen assembly to talk about the tourism model collectively with as many citizens as possible. And after the assembly, there will be a public consultation through the platform too.
Upon return, he and his team started to look for computer engineers and companies and launched a licitation for the implementation of the CONSUL DEMOCRACY platform. They found the right partner in and in 2018 finished the implementation and created the .
Other options are more in-depth and extensive, like the offered by the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Artiles is the director of that post-grad and has co-designed the academic programme. Graduates have gained expertise in political science, digital methodologies, legal affairs, and more. However, Partiles adds that "it's not only about knowledge, also about practical skills and how to organize social processes."
