Context
The project was launched in response to a well-known governance challenge: public budgets are among the most decisive policy tools, yet they are often perceived as technical, opaque, and distant from everyday concerns. This weakens informed debate, reduces trust, and limits shared ownership of fiscal choices.
Parlem de Pressupostos addresses this gap by creating a structured, inclusive deliberation process that makes budget trade-offs understandable and actionable for citizens. It combines accessible information with guided discussion and multiple participation channels (including targeted formats for children and young people in partnership with UNICEF and local children’s councils), ensuring that diverse voices can contribute meaningful input.
The initiative aligns with Category I (Innovating Government, Governance and Policies) because it strengthens governance and policymaking: it improves transparency and accountability in a cross-cutting area (public finances), enhances participatory decision-making, and generates evidence-based citizen priorities that inform the medium-term budgetary framework and the preparation of future budgets.
Objectives
Parlem de Pressupostos was created to meet a concrete need: enabling citizens to engage meaningfully with complex fiscal choices and to provide usable input for budget decision-making. The project pursues three objectives as follows.
- It improves public understanding and co-responsibility regarding public finances – how the budget works, what constraints exist, and the real trade-offs behind policy choices.
- It gathers structured, high-quality citizen preferences and reasoning across four policy axes: options for trajectories to reduce public debt; options on revenues and spending to create fiscal space for new initiatives; prioritisation within the main spending policies managed by the Government of Catalonia; and thematic prioritisation of EU Cohesion Funds.
- It strengthens democratic governance by increasing transparency, inclusiveness, and accountability in a cross-cutting area such as budgeting and public finance, ensuring participation is informed and consequential.
Implementation
Parlem de Pressupostos is implemented as a government-led participatory process with a clear governance setup and a standard methodology to ensure consistency and quality across channels. A central coordination team designs the process, prepares accessible materials, sets milestones and quality standards, and oversees delivery. Facilitated sessions follow a common script (brief contextual introduction, guided discussion on trade-offs, prioritisation exercises, and collective conclusions), supported by trained facilitators and structured reporting templates.
To broaden access and reduce participation barriers, the initiative combines multiple formats: an individual survey, facilitated territorial sessions, self-organised sessions using a kit of materials, and tailored sessions for children and young people in collaboration with UNICEF and local children’s councils. Inputs from all channels are consolidated through a synthesis protocol that captures priorities and underlying arguments.
Stakeholder consultation is embedded through partnerships with local authorities, civil society, and youth networks to support outreach and inclusiveness. Communication is coordinated via institutional channels (web, social media, and local dissemination) with clear messages on purpose, timelines, and how results will be used.