Slovakia

There is no legislation being developed regarding the regulation of PB across the country. There are only specific local/regional legislations that relate to individual PB experiments and are approved by the respective councils of the cities or regions. Such legislation regulates the rules of PB in the context of a given city or region and usually varies according to how these cities or regions understand what PB is about.

A board game for youth called “No two cities are alike” has been created in cooperation among enthusiasts from the state sector, local government and public. It simulates the process of PB and explains how city can expand when its citizens are given a chance to participate in decision making. The game board city consists of five city districts (Boring, Dirty, Ignorant,Full of Traffic, Swotted) each of which is having its own specific problems. The aim of the game is not only to deal with the problems of players’ own district, but to provoke them to understand the city in all its width & depth, considering the relevance and urgency of the other districts’ needs. This year, the board game has been pilot-tested in formal education at 16 secondary schools within Trenciansky samosprávny kraj (one of the eight self-governing regions in Slovakia) as a part of project in which schools use PB in practice.
Several smaller innovations have been introduced by the town Rožnava in its PB process this year. They set up a tools-for-hire shop with tools that belong to the town and which citizens can borrowed for the implementation of their supported projects.
Furthermore, they have introduced construction diaries which are kept by the authors of successful projects during their implementation and where they describe all the costs and work done on the project. In order to strengthen community activity and increase the value of the projects, they introduced the 70:30 rule. According to this ratio, 30% of the project value represents the contribution of its author (in form of physical work on the project indicated in man hours, supplied material or financial resources gained outside of PB) and 70 % of the project value represents financial contribution from the PB.

GTo support the process of PB, the very first digital platform „The Voice of the Citizens “has been developed in Slovak language by WellGiving. The platform allows citizens to submit their projects online and vote for them once the voting phase is open. It also allows public servants to manage received projects and to assign tasks related to them to different departments within the municipal office. Another digital platform by Civita Center is being created. It will enable project submitting, project presentation with their visualization on the city map and will also cover voting phase.
There can be seen a growing interest in introduction of PB at school l evel, coming especially from the cities/regions with PB already implemented.

Lack of information and literature on PB in Slovak language has certainly slowed down the implementation of PB into practice.
The first courageous municipalities have used the guidance of NGOs and mostly relied on their expertise, ending up with mixed results. This year, the first series of case studies from the field are going to be published which will serve for other municipalities as an inspiration how to do meaningful PB and what to avoid.

One of the main problems of PB in Slovakia is that both the budget resources, as well as time resources of public servants allocated for the process are too limited in comparison to what PB agenda requires. To support the implementation of PB at local level, The Office of the Plenipotentiary of the Slovak Government for the Development of the Civil Society is launching a small pilot scheme in 2020 to refinance and
train public servants whose agenda will be to manage PB process, as well as to promote and oversee participatory public policy-making in areas they will identify. At the same time, any municipality that enters this scheme will commit itself to implement PB in schools within its jurisdiction.​