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United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Sustainable Development

Helsinki participation model and participatory budgeting

(
Local / Regional Government
)
#SDGAction43312
Description
Description
The citizens’ knowledge and competence form the basis for the Helsinki participation model. A better Helsinki is built together. The participatory budgeting was launched in the city as a part of the participation model and a new participation method. In participatory budgeting, the City opens a budget of 4.4 million euros to implement the residents’ ideas every year. The budgeted funds have been distributed among seven areas depending on their resident number, and 20 percent of the sum has been allocated to plans applying to the whole City. All citizens can make suggestions about the use of these funds.

The City of Helsinki's Participation Game helps city employees consider how the operations and services could be planned in even better co-operation with the residents. At the same time, it helps introduce Helsinki's participation model and build a concrete participation plan with contributions from the entire personnel. The Participation Game is a board game that can be played by anyone who is interested in the operations of the City and the development of them. The material is available to all on the web.

Helsinki has an open-source digital platform Decidim for gathering proposals from the citizens, co-create proposals into plans and for voting. The citizens sent in a total of nearly 1,300 proposals for the participatory budgeting. For facilitating the making of the proposals, the City of Helsinki designed a participatory budgeting card game together with the service design firm Hellon. The objective of this game is to lower the threshold of participation and help understand the process of participatory budgeting.

Joint development workshops were also held in different parts of the city as a part of the participatory budgeting process. In these workshops, the proposals were adapted into concrete plans, with several suggestions being linked to each plan. More than 800 citizens and 170 city experts took part in these workshops. In total, 350 plans were made based on all the suggestions of the participatory budgeting process. Most of the suggestions were about developing the City’s built environment, for example the renovation and building of sports facilities and parks.

Helsinki’s participatory budgeting is tightly interlinked with the schools’ education for democracy and their efforts to enhance digital skills. The City’s participatory budgeting and the voting for the young people’s own Ruuti budget are located on the same digital platform (omastadi.hel.fi) where they may be accessed during the school day. In addition, the voting procedure has been streamlined. The young are entitled to decide about a budgetary appropriation of nearly 4.7 million euros. Through close and broad cooperation, the various municipal units and services have been able to make voting at school possible.

The first period of budgeting generated almost 1,300 proposals and consisted of 4,604 participants. Nearly 140 open workshops were held in many city districts. Efforts have been made to take the principle of equality into consideration in participatory budgeting by means such as extensive usability tests, language versions, organisational co-operation and regional use of the City’s service network.
Expected Impact

The residents of Helsinki are able to have a direct impact on how money is used in their own area, community or the entire City. The participation model and budget empower and promote the the social and economic inclusion of all. At the same time the model brings transparency to the economic models of the city.

The goal of the Participation Model is to achieve one pedagogical process that is clear from young people’s perspective, progresses logically and takes city-level influencing opportunities into account in addition to regional participation.

The aim of the Participatory Budgeting game is to help citizens to co-create city development ideas through gamified approach. The card game makes participatory budgeting more approachable and understandable for citizens and enables a more democratic citizen involvement.

Partners
City of Helsinki and City divisions (local / regional government City residents (other relevant actor) Residents’ organizations (civil society organizations)
False
Action Network
SDG Acceleration Actions
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Timeline
01 May 2018 (start date)
31 January 2022 (date of completion)
Entity
City of Helsinki
SDGs
Region
  1. Europe
Geographical coverage
Helsinki, Finland
Countries
Finland
Finland
Contact Information

Sanna-Mari Jäntti, Director, Strategic Initiatives