Barcelona, Spain – Using Technology for Wellbeing Economy Policy Design

Following the 2009 global recession, Barcelona developed a technological platform to increase citizens input on economic recovery efforts. Dedicim Barcelona is a web-based platform where citizens can submit policy proposals and help to design and monitor the participatory process of selection. The platform promotes exists to enable free open-source participatory democracy for cities and organizations.

From 2015-2016, over 220,000 interactions took place with citizens submitting proposals for economic recovery and also commenting, debating, and voting on the proposals of others. The city council evaluated every policy proposal using technical and qualitative criteria, whereby they did not only consider the number of votes a proposal received but also the number of neighbourhoods who discussed the proposal and number of organizations who supported it.

As a result of this participatory processes, Barcelona implemented a wide range of policy reforms with a key shift towards re-municipalisation and localisation of resources and economic assets through the promotion of cooperation business models and the use of public procurement to shift local economies in this direction.

Find out more:
https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/digital/en/digital-empowerment/democracy-and-digital-rights/decidim-barcelona
https://decidim.org/