Participatory democracy in local governance

Welcome to this online learning course

Welcome to this course on Participatory democracy in Local Level Governance.

The course will introduce you to the concept of Participatory democracy, explain what it is and why participatory democracy methods are relevant, and helpful, for your local government.

It consists of four modules, each taking roughly 1 hour to complete. We recommend that you do one at a time.

This course is open so you do not need to log in to access it. Click on Curriculum to start!

Learning Objectives

After completing this course you can expect to have learned: 

1. What participatory democracy means, and how you can strengthen it through your ICLD project. 
2. What the various participatory methods are and how they can be applied in local government and in your ICLD project

Target group

All ICLD project and steering group members.

How to use this course to support your ICLD project

This course will be facilitated by the ICLD in our network workshops.

Any Project or Steering Group member is of course also welcome to conduct this course online independently at any time.
ICLD strongly recommends that project coordinators share this course with all Project and Steering Group members if whilst conducting ICLD organisational readiness assessment it becomes apparent that your project will focus on Citizen inclusion and particpation.

This course can be used in two different ways depending on the main focus of your ICLD project.

1. If you have identified “lack of citizen participation” in your Local Government as your main societal problem in ICLD project planning workbook, this course provides you with an overview of methods and tools available for you to explore. The implementation of the one you select should then be the focus of your action plan. In this case, your project and group must be made up individuals with the mandate to implement new participatory democracy methods in your local government (for example, from your Local Government’s department/unit of citizen participation). In this case, we suggest focusing on empowering citizen participation methods.

2. If you have identified another issue in your Local Government as your main societal problem in ICLD project planning workbook, this course can be used as an inspiration as to how you can add elements of citizen participation to your project. In this case, your project and group can be made up of individuals from any departments. We suggest focusing on consultative citizen participation method.

If you plan do go through the Core Course on Human Rights Budgeting, it is recommended to complete this one on Participatory Democracy first.

General Resources

These are a selection of reports and tools published by ICLD that relate to participatory democracy and that are recommended as inspiration. These are many more on our website: check out the Knowledge Bank and filter for policy briefs, toolboxes, or certain topics.

Learning cases

Child Participation in the City of Vienna

To the learning case

Policy briefs and publications

Videos

Other tools