Local Government
111
Large Cities
1
Capital Cities
3
Regional or State Governments
0
National Government
0
Other Institutions
5
Local Government
111
Large Cities
1
Capital Cities
3
Regional or State Governments
0
National Government
0
Other Institutions
5
Community
Capital
Rome
Population
60 297 400
Language
Italian
Currency
Euro
Indexes
Democracy
35
Flawed Democracy
Democracy
Democracy
35
Flawed Democracy
Democracy
Corruption Perception
51/180
Medium
Corruption Perception
Corruption Perception
51/180
Medium
Corruption Perception
Human Development
29
Very High
Human Development
Human Development
29
Very High
Human Development
World Happiness
30/153
Very High
World Happiness
World Happiness
30/153
Very High
World Happiness
Global Peace
39
High
Global Peace
Global Peace
39
High
Global Peace
Global Terrorism
63
Low
Global Terrorism
Global Terrorism
63
Low
Global Terrorism
Legislação sobre Orçamentos Participativos
There is no specific legislation about PB in Italy but some regional laws which promote more broadly participatory processes at local level or in schools and civil society organizations. The first regional law was issued and implemented in Tuscany (2007), then followed by Emilia Romagna and Umbria (2010), Puglia (2017), and more recently Marche (2019). They all share a similar approach which consists of funding and supporting every year the start-up of a selected number of participatory democracy initiatives. These regions share the same political left-wing orientation.
The region of Sicily, instead, introduced an amendment to the regional framework on local finances (2014 and later), stating that every year a minimum 2% of regional funds devoted to municipalities must be used to implement projects proposed by the citizens through forms of participatory democracy. In 2018 this rule was limited to the municipalities that are recipients of larger funds39, thus limiting the number of PB initiatives. Unfortunately, no financial or technical support is provided to the Municipalities that therefore usually organize very simple and sometimes naive consultation processes which are improperly named PB.
Outstanding Innovations
In 2019, for the first time, a PB process was implemented in a prison, it was organized completely on a voluntary basis, including the budget and the implementation costs, that were dependent on private donations, sponsorships and crowdfunding. The process was resembling a city-wide PB, where wards were considered like neighborhoods. The peculiarity of “Idee in fuga” (fleeing ideas, the name of the project) was the complete absence of the internet in the promotion of the initiative among the prisoners and the implementation of some participatory actions such as the vote. The aim of the project is not only to introduce democratic and participatory mechanisms within a prison, as a form of rehabilitation, but also to create a bridge between the internal community (the prisoners) and the external one (civil society, citizens, and organizations), thus increasing the chances for the prisoners to get jobs, create new social relations and removing the stigma. The project was suspended due to the Covid-19 emergence and the restrictions within the penal institutions, then reactivated after 7 months to vote for the final projects.
INITIAL REFERENCE FOR THE ADOPTION OF PB IN THE COUNTRY
The first waves of PB had the Porto Alegre PB model as reference, in the past years scholars and practitioners who were more devoted to deliberative democracy influenced many PB processes that were designed around the idea of the mini-public, then face-to-face facilitated meetings and randomized samples of citizens.
SUBSEQUENT REFERENCE FOR PB DISSEMINATION
Despite the fact that we cannot assume any direct relation, there is a strong similarity between the PB processes born in the Lombardy region in the last decade (the first experiment was held in the small town of Canegrate, to be then replicated in the city of Milan) and those developed in the last years in the Spanish municipalities with the use of the software platform Consul (starting from Madrid). They introduced the “supports” (a kind of pre-voting session) in the first phase to filter and select the proposals to be evaluated, designed and then brought to the vote.
Main Trends of PB in the Country During the Pandemic
No in-depth research has been conducted so far to monitor the state of the art of the ongoing PB processes. However, during the most critical time, most of the Municipalities suspended or just slowed down PBs in order to focus more on facing the Covid-19 emergence, while some PB has recently resumed or just started.
Additional Information
A nation-wide project has started in 2020 and it will involve 5 high schools all over the country that will be trained and will develop a school PB process. The project (named RIPARTIRE) will therefore produce learning kits and tools to spread PB in the other Italian schools and cities, focusing on the participation of young people.
