Czech Republic

The political changes at the turn of 1980s and 1990s in the Czech Republic brought about not only democratic principles, freedom and plurality, but also triggered territorial decentralization and the gradual development of civic awareness and growth of trust in local institutions. However, the atmosphere of democratic innovation did not lead to an establishment of legislation that would mandate PBs. Currently, there is no broad political discussion about introducing relevant legislation even though a number of PBs continues to grow and a neighbouring Poland has a legislation that mandates PBs (in certain situations, in particular after 2018).

An exception is to be found in the platform of the Czech Pirate Party, a liberal party in the Czech Republic. The party actively promotes PB and makes a strong effort to use this tool (PB) as a regular part of municipal budgets. However, it does not have an opportunity to enforce it broadly, yet they also apply it to creating their party budget.

In the past five years Participatory Budgeting spread significantly across cities and towns of all sizes in the Czech Republic. However, little or no innovation was applied to design of the process as it stays fairly standardized across different places. The PB process is always managed by the city hall or a district level administration and follows the same sequence of steps.

Yet an interesting example of innovative thinking can be found in the city of Kutna Hora. It is a town of 21 000 residents in the Central Bohemian Region of the Czech Republic. The city is formed by districts of drastically different size and socio-demographics structure. Thus, when deciding to implement city-level PB, it was decided that it will be managed on the district level to accommodate differences between the districts.

Another issue faced by the town of Kutna Hora was lack of in-house capacities. Neither the districts, nor the town hall have enough human resources to manage the process. Yet since the city has already implemented Participatory Budgeting in 8 of its primary and high schools and has an active youth parliament, it was decided that the process will be managed by the young people who have experience with school PB and are already actively engaged in the town community governance.

The first PBs in the Czech Republic (2014) were influenced by the examples of the city of Cascais in Portugal and the examples coming from Poland brought to the Czech Republic by D21 and AGORA CE respectively. The city of Cascais, a leading pioneer in public participation, served as a studying ground for the team of D21 and became a reference point to many of the Czech cities and towns. Since then, as PB has been growing in popularity, the PB has been implemented by various non-profit actors who replicate the existing model.

The Czech Republic became a country where a unique school PB methodology was developed. This methodology allows for a quick and seamless implementation that spans through 3 to 6 weeks only. It was created by D21 to engage students of all ages and allows kids as young as 10 years old to be a part of the PB process. However, the flow and structure of the process changes drastically in case of PB implementation in the High Schools. High School PBs are co-owned and co-managed by the students themselves allowing them to develop not only skills of active citizenship but also to gain experience and skill set required to do project management work.

Both school PB methodologies are not actively spreading across the Czech Republic (being implemented in over 100 schools) but are also now adopted by regional governments in Slovakia making in the best standard across multiple countries and mainstreaming this practice on the higher governmental level.

1. PB have been suspended: 0%
2. PB continued to function normally: 0%
3. PB have undergone changes/adaptations: 100%

In the case of the Czech Republic, we are not monitoring any fundamental impact of COVID-19 on the current participatory budgeting projects. The most thriving cities with major experience in participatory budgeting (i.e.: Ostrava, Brno, íany) do not state any particular changes or significant changes in either the budget or the process flow. However, the current situation with the COVID-19 is mentioned on the websites of the projects and in-person meetings in person are cut down to the minimum. Yet in case PB coordinators arrange meetings, they are run outdoors, and participants are required to keep a distance of at least 1m, in order to observe the rules and regulations in the given country.

PBs in the Czech Republic are usually done with the heavy use of civic tech tools and in the majority of cases the solutions are proprietary licensed software platforms. The unique municipality system of the Czech Republic (over 6 300 municipalities in a country of 10.6 million people) creates a rich market for the tech companies. Currently, there are approximately eight major players that take part in the PB process as the digital tool provider that covers all the key steps of the PB process.

However, the tools do not specialize strictly on PB and are often used in other participation-driven processes. For some of the civic tech companies a number of clients can reach a few dozens in case of PB process yet the overall number of clients that use their solution in participatory processes can reach a few hundreds.