total of pb processes
​

1686

local government
​

124

regional, state
​and national governments

5

other type of institution

1557

large cities

0

capital cities

3

Legislation regarding the regulation of Participatory Budgeting experiences
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At national level there is a binding legislation regarding the National Schools PB. There are two resolutions form the National council cabinet for Portugal PB and Youth PB. Regarding the autonomous regions, there are two resolutions from the autonomous government council regarding the PB processes for Azores and Madeira. At local level, municipalities and parishes either use municipal regulations or legal rulings. There are roughly 57 municipal regulations and 42 legal rulings for the active PB processes.

Outstanding innovation
​_

The main innovation in Portuguese PB processes regards to the fact that, presently, there are three different levels of governance implementing it: national, regional and local.
It started in 2002 at local level, incremented by municipalities and parishes. In the following years there was a considerable increase in the number of local PB and, in 2017, a scale up to national took place, led by the Portuguese Government. At this point three national processes emerged (the National, the Youth and the School PB). These three were extended to all the Portuguese territory since the mainland until the islands of Azores and Madeira and demand some articulation from the national cabinet with local agents as schools, municipalities and other local organizations.
The third level takes us to the regional scale. The Portuguese islands of Azores and Madeira are ruled by autonomous governments and, by their own resolution each one must increment a PB process regarding its region. In the Portuguese governmental context this means that all the levels of governance are implementing its own PB process and inclusively those at national and regional level are established by legislation.

Principal tendencies detected
​​_

There are two main tendencies regarding Portuguese PB:

1. Predominance of multichannel approaches. There is an increasing tendency, in the active pb, to insert digital in both proposal presentation and voting phases. This shows that PB rulers acknowledge the importance of adding digital approaches as a complement to the face-to-face ones, in order to make the process more accessible and transparent, adapted to the different types of citizens;

2. The growth of youth PB. Youth PB implemented by municipalities and parishes had been increasing in the country, especially since 2016. Also, both national and regional governments had considered the importance of involving youth in these co-decisional processes, namely: at national level with the implementation of youth and school PB; at regional level by considering thematic areas regarding the participation of citizens over 14 years old.

C O M M U N I T Y

capital

Lisbon

population

10 281 760

language

Portuguese

currency

Euro

P O S I T I O N   O N   I N D E X E S

DEMOCRACY

27
FLAWED DEMOCRACY

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

41
VERY HIGH

CORRUPTION PERCEPTION

30/180

WORLD HAPPINESS

66/156

download resources
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Participatory Budgeting in Portugal – standing between a hesitant political will and the impacts on public policies
The National Participatory Budgeting in Portugal: Opportunities and Challenges for Scaling up Citizen Participation in Policymaking
The Schools Participatory Budgeting (SPB) in Portugal
Youth Participatory Budgeting – Portugal