This guest blog by Giovanni Allegretti, a senior researcher from the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, is about his experiences of a What Works Scotland seminar focused on participatory democracy.

Author: Giovanni Allegretti, University of Coimbra, Portugal

Date: 7 September 2016

The seminar explored Scotland’s experiences and what goes on world-wide, with a focus on participatory budgeting (PB). How can it be scaled up? In Scotland, the Scottish Government supports PB and offers a programme for local authorities and communities.

Giovanni discusses his two experiences of scaling up participation experiments at a regional level in Italy. Scotland, he says, has multiple opportunities to foster a collaborative environment between different participatory experiments at municipal level. These would benefit from permanent collaboration between other regional and national governments who want to increase participatory democracy.

Read the post on the What Works Scotland blog