More information
Description
Young people have little interest in politics and participation in the political process. They lack political knowledge and do not trust democratic processes and political actors in society. They feel a sense of powerlessness because they think that politicians are not interested in their wishes and views. They conclude that they have no influence in the political system and therefore distance themselves from it. But this does not mean that they are not interested in political participation. Young people are very willing to work in civil society organizations. We can conclude that the absence of young people''s participation in the political process is a result of a lack of political space and specific mechanisms young people could trust and see as an opportunity to pursue their interests.
In order to solve this problem, our project will promote active citizenship among young people by developing a participatory budgeting model for primary and secondary schools based on the good practice of our partner - Citizens'' Foundation Iceland. The main purpose of the project will be to open a political space within the school system, which will allow young people to learn about participatory democracy and actively try it out. The model will be based on the equal involvement of all young people in co-decision-making processes supported through critical literacy workshops (implemented by Pekarna).
The main activities of the project will be preparing the ground for the development of the school participatory budgeting model that any school will be able to use; conducting trainings for students and teachers on direct democracy and participatory budgeting; an adaptation of the ICT tool for the implementation of the process itself and a pilot implementation of the entire participatory budgeting process at III. Gymnasium Maribor.
The project will introduce a participatory budgeting mechanism into the Slovenian school system for the first time.
Summary of project results
Youth is not prepared for political participation. They lack political knowledge, they do not trust democratic procedures and political actors in society and believe that their engagement would be fruitless. They are increasingly less interested in broader social concerns and are becoming more individualised. This stems partly from the fact that they are unable to experience democracy while in the school system and are thus unmotivated and unprepared to participate.
The project will prepare a model for implementing participatory budgeting into primary and secondary schools which would open up a political space where the young will be able to inform themselves about participatory democracy and also participate in it. The model will be based on inclusion of all pupils or students into codecision processes. We will adapt IKT tools for the process and educate the principals and educators in how to institute participatory budgeting in their schools. We will achieve a pilot implementation of participatory budgeting in one of the schools. By using the concept of critical literacy we will educate pupils and students about the difference between representative and participatory democracy, familiarize them with participation generally and encourage them to think about power relations in society.
We successfully implemented a pilot project for introducing participatory budgeting in Slovenian schools, with the pilot taking place at the III. Gymnasium Maribor. The open-source tool, which we adapted for Slovenian schools, was successfully used to collect project proposals for participatory budgeting. Then, using the school''s e-Assistant system, we conducted a voting process that all students from the 1st to 3rd year could participate in. Out of 672 students, 444 participated in the voting, or about 66%—which is significantly higher than our target of 20%. The students prepared more than 20 project proposals, 10 of which met all the conditions to be included in the voting. We conducted 10 presentations of participatory budgeting in schools for principals of primary and secondary schools in Maribor. It turned out that 70% of the principals were very supportive of introducing participatory budgeting at their own schools after the presentation.
Additionally, critical literacy workshops on participatory democracy were held for 255 students at the II and III Gymnasium Maribor. The workshops proved to be very effective, as before the workshop, only 17% of students had a good understanding of participatory options. After the workshop, more than 53% had a good understanding of participatory options. The number of students who were completely unaware of these options decreased from 33% to less than 5%.
Summary of bilateral results
Together with our partner, the Citizens Foundation, which is the author of many open-source applications designed for participatory democracy, we selected and adapted one or more ICT tools for the Slovenian context, which improved and facilitated the introduction and implementation of participatory budgeting in schools.