Strengthen the interaction between representative democracy (municipality board and States) and the participation democracy (participation of citizens)?
Challenge
The representative and participation democracy of today’s society often operate in two different worlds, while these two have the opportunity to strengthen each other within one, powerful local democracy. On the one hand, councilors are confronted with facts of which they are unsure whether these are a true reflection of a specific neighborhood or city. On the other hand, citizens may believe that they have little influence on the dialogue of the city council, even though they often feel the need to share their opinion, experiences and concerns on certain topics. This challenge aims to strengthen the interaction between the representative and participative democracies during the decision-making process.
The current process:
Description of the desired situation:
The challenge allows startups to further specify the domains of the interaction between citizens and council/state members. This has to be explicitly done in collaboration with these three parties, since it has to fulfill the desires of these stakeholders. The results of this ‘needs assessment’ may also indicate that the challenge must be further narrowed down/specified. An example is the new neighborhood agendas. The government has the aim to create an agenda, based on hard and soft data, for every neighborhood in the Netherlands. This document will register the challenges and priorities that are located within this area. The challenge could in theory be focused on The Hague’s interaction process between the council and citizens that would benefit the complete process setting up the neighborhood agenda’s. In this example, the council is only present at the final destination, but also interacts during the process.
The ministry of Interior and Kingdom Relations and their collaboration program ‘Democracy in Action’ focus on the new forms of democracy. This challenge suits their needs to test and experiment with different and new approaches perfectly.
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