> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://docs.consuldemocracy.org/use_cases/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://docs.consuldemocracy.org/use_cases/spain/malaga.md).
# Málaga
### Introducing Málaga
Málaga is a city in the South-West of Spain, with a population of 600.000 million people. The metropolitan area has a population of 1.2 million people. Twenty percent of the population are non-natives, consisting mainly of North African (Moroccon) migrants, Ukrainian refugees and migrants from West and North European countires, which makes Málaga a mixed and heterogonous city.
Málaga has a rich cultural life and heritage and thanks to this, it has been attracting people, organizations and business from all over Europe. Many of these are tech companies, which has made Málaga into a fast developing business and tech center in Southern Europe.
### Málaga's threefold mission
The responsibility for carrying out participatory project at the Málaga municipality lies with a department that has a broader set of responsibilities: it handles the city's agendas for Migration, Foreign Development, Transparency, Good Governance and Citizen Participation. Within the department, there are different people working on each of those policy areas.
Málaga does not approach citizen participation as a standalone topic but attempts to connect it with others. In practice this means that the work on three pillars are considered complementary for progress on issues related to 'open government': active transparency, citizen participation and open data.
### How participation started
The most impactful recent exercise of citizen participation in policy formation in Málaga was the creation of the so-called Strategic Plan in the early 2000s. The city saw itself confronted with a transformed city, through which concentrated tourism contributed to a division of the city in two independet municipalities: the tourist and economic center district of Torremolinos, and the rest of the city.
To create a more balanced and unified city, the city of Málaga sketched out the concept for a city-wide Strategic Plan in which many people were motivated to contribute to as the division issue was well-known problem for the city. Concretely, inhabitants were included in deciding the 'development axes' essential to the strategic development of the city. The implementation of the collaborative strategic plan has made Málaga into the city it is today.
### Participation tools and channels
Over the years, the city of Málaga has developed a set of participation tools and instruments. These include both more traditional as well as innovative tools:
* citizen councils (consejos), which are spaces for debates and discussion, organized either by district or by theme, corresponding to the municipality's thematic organization (mobility, sustainability, economy, social affairs, etc.)
* project tables (mesa de proyecto), that serve as a practical form in which citizen councils come together with municipal teams and make proposal for development projects, policies, strategies. Currently there are five active project tables.
* participatory budgets. The city has completed two cycles (2026) of participatory budgeting using the CONSUL DEMOCRACY platform. Inhabitants propose projects and 'support' others. 25 project per district with the highest number of supports go through a municipal feasibilit check, followed by a final voting.
* urban agendas, which concerns the co-creation of development goals and priorities for the urban areas that surround the municipality of Málaga, relevant because of its continuous growth as a metropole.
* social innovation, which includes citizens in official projects called Challenges where people and government officials work together on devising innovative solutions to the urban challenges.
* Proximity Week (Semana de la Proximidad), a full week in which the municipality works together with and draws attention to citizen initiatives and associations that contribute to a more proximate, just and sustainable city. Last year (2025) it features more than 190 projects.
### Challenges of (digital) participation
1. The first challenge is the **involvement of young people**, that do not seem to be very involved in participation, at least not compared to other age groups. It should be noted that the percentage of young people in Málaga is decreasing as a result of a general ageing population. To resolve this, it is using other communication channels like Whatsapp to connect better with young segments of the city.
2. Málaga, like other cities doing digital participation, deals with a **digital participation 'gap'.** Not everyone has digital skills necessary to interact with digital platforms. For this reason the team at Málaga has implemented a hybrid voting process, providing support for elderly and the less tech-savvy on-site and accepting votes in-person. These votes are then processed digitally on the CONSUL DEMOCRACY platform using its 'voting booths' functionality.
3. Citizen participation can be very **low impact** when created in isolation and when it is not communicated well. Málaga's central CONSUL DEMOCRACY-powered participation platform allows the municipality to draw people to a familiar place, announce projects and include citizens in the early stages of processes, and generally make participation more easy to follow, accessible and reliable in the eyes of the citizenry.
### Implementing software in Málaga
When the team at Málaga called Enreda Coop, a non profit tech cooperative and CONSUL DEMOCRACY Certified Tech Partner, the idea right from the start was to create a platform for the entire municipality. Not a platform for just the citizen participation team, but for all teams across all of the city's departments.
The fact that Málaga's administration consists of 11 districts, 8 'areas' and 16 'municipal organisms', doesn't make installing and working with the platform easier. This is the reason why Enreda Coop started to train municipal staff early on in the process (back in 2022). The goal is to have a participation platform that anyone or at least many people and teams within the municipality can use and harness for their own projects.
Implementing an advanced participation tool in a rigid institution like Málaga, is not easy. Three key actors were involved from the beginning: the participation 'area of the city, its IT department, and Enreda Coop.
Málaga's IT department is keen on digital sovereignty on maintaining control over the technologies that it uses. This is why Málaga, for example, has its own Wi-Fi network but also its own servers on which technologies in use should be installed, while being authorized and checked by the IT department. To sketch the situation: in many cases, CONSUL is installed on a server preferred by the implementation partner in question.
### Citizen proposals and government proposals
Initially, two types of processes were launched on Malaga's CONSUL platform: one for citizen proposals and one for government proposals. The former worked well on the Citizen Proposal module of the platform, without too much changes. The latter needed a flexible approach and was implemented using the Collaborative Legislation module of the platform, which can be adapted based on the required participation processes and phases.
Málaga regulations stipulate two types of participation processes: a consultation and a hearing. Using the Collaborative Legislation module allowed the municipality to 'package' the process into a multiphase process consisting of these two fases: a consultation (i.e. a series of questions or survey) and a 'hearing' (i.e. a commenting round on a concept plan, strategy or other document).
Enreda also further developed the CONSUL platform. One of their additions was developed with the purpose of saving time: a short form generator which administrators could use to automatically generate official reports about participation projects happening on the platform with all the data (topic, date, relevant municipal area, etc.) required by the relevant regulation.
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