“Tell us the craziest ideas you have” is the rallying cry from public servants in Ecuador’s capital, Quito.

In the city, the doors of government are thrown open and the people in the city are asked, via a series of assemblies, how to allocate parts of the city’s budget. The process is known as participatory budgeting.

It’s often used to get people to decide on new roads or infrastructure projects. But alongside its traditional purpose, Quito also asks its people to use participatory budgeting to think more broadly to consider the city’s social needs.

Across all of this, the city uses insights from how we behave as people to inform its approach. In doing so, Ecuador’s capital is flipping the relationship with its people upside down by inviting them into decisions affecting their society and its cohesiveness. But what really happens when everyone can be a policymaker?

Getting social

“We felt in the beginning that of course citizens are not going to prioritise a social programme instead of another road or an infrastructure project,” said Nicole Galindo, Director of Citizen Participation for Development in one of the city’s nine administrative districts until 2018. “But they did.”

"We felt in the beginning that of course citizens are not going to prioritise a social programme instead of another road or an infrastructure project. But they did"

So how were the locals of Quito convinced to back social projects? By making the process for establishing a social project itself a social activity: one of the four tenets of behavioural insights thinking. In this case, it was essential for people to speak to other people in order to gain their buy-in for the project via a set of assemblies and consultations.

Galindo cited the clear-out of a ravine that was previously used as garbage disposal. Once the ravine was cleared, the question came from the people: “what next?” They were told about the city’s 10% social commitment.

A collective then proposed that the previous dumping ground site be used as a space for a series of cultural events, designed to bring the neighbourhood together. With the support of the municipality, they campaigned for the project to be established, demonstrating support from people across the area.

“We thought, ‘this isn’t going to work because so many others will want infrastructure projects,’” said Galindo. “But it worked because the team behind it campaigned and the others in the neighbourhood voted for it.”

Social skills

Quito isn’t a lone ranger in this space — South America has a long history of innovating with its budgets. The system was first adopted in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989, to empower community members to make decisions over their city’s finances.

Quito watched. The Ecuadorian city’s process began in 2006 following an order from the top of government, but the legislation sat on the statute books unused. The city didn’t properly kick-start the initiative until 2014, when it was decided that at least 60% of the city’s budget had to be determined through a participatory budgeting process.

"We, as government, have the people, we have the technicians, we have the information overall. We do the work"

The initial types of participatory budgeting projects were good for the city, but not good enough. “You can have a road, you can have a park,” reflected Diego Hidalgo Calero, the city’s former Metropolitan Director of Citizen Participation. “But that doesn't give solutions to a lot of social problems. With social projects, you actually could give tools for people to learn skills.”

So from 2017 came the shift: 10% of the money allocated through participatory budgeting was to be dedicated to social programs, boosting civic education and social inclusion.

There’s a lot of cash at stake: people decide on $25 million per year through this participation mechanism, meaning $2.5 million is reserved for social programmes. From 2016 to 2019, more than 1,300 infrastructure and social projects have been decided on and led by the general public.

It’s difficult to measure success when you’re trying to demonstrate cultural and social change. “It’s one of the hardest parts,” said Galindo.

One of the metrics Galindo used was the number of bids for projects in her district, which covered a ninth of the city’s population. “In the first year, we had four proposals for social projects. In the second year, we had 15.” Almost a third of the city’s neighbourhoods are engaged with the system.

Hiding the wires

Alongside building social participation, another pillar of behavioural insights thinking is to make processes as easy as possible. And even though there’s a lot of bureaucracy involved with participatory budgeting, in Quito, it’s largely kept hidden from the public.

Initially, the forms for people's suggestions for infrastructure projects asked for a precise plan, providing details of how the project would run, how many people would benefit, how much it would cost and a map of its proposed location.

"As citizens we want an answer to everything"

It proved a barrier to applications, so Hidalgo Calero pushed to make the systems easier for users, and hide the government wires underneath.

“It was pretty complex from the inside,” he said. “I had to build in controls to prevent corruption and to create cross-checks when the applications come into the municipality.”

But for the public, all they could see for infrastructure project bids was “only the initial form and nothing else”, asking only the basic information like where the work was going to be done, rather than a detailed impact assessment.

For social projects, forms were slightly more complicated — they required an outline of the project’s social objectives, but the municipality remained on hand to help.

In both cases, it was the government’s job to run around after the person — serving their needs by making the process as simple as possible. “We, as government, have the people, we have the technicians, we have the information overall,” said Hidalgo Calero. “We do the work.”

And when people failed to secure funding as part of the process, Hidalgo Calero stressed that it was important to show them why they failed, which he said was largely due to technical issues. They were given a copy of the impact study showing the municipality’s working out. “As citizens we want an answer to everything,” he said.

It’s all part of getting into the mindset of the people you are serving. “You have to think — how would I feel going into an institution?” said Hidalgo Calero. “How would I feel as I fill in the forms?"

The answer? “It’s about not getting tired and not getting used by the institutions.”

Building belonging

Hidalgo Calero and Galindo succeeded in one final area: building, for people, a sense of complete ownership and belonging into the process.

“We would tell people that this is your money, these are your taxes,” said Galindo. “You are the one in charge of creating this project.”

And once an initiative is designed and ready to go, governments naturally want to shout about it. But instead of the administration taking credit, Galindo ensured to centre the public in its success.

“I would sometimes have problems with the person in charge of public relations in my office,” she remembered. “The director was drafting an article to send to a local newspaper, and would write: ‘the municipality of Quito is creating this initiative’.

“My response would be: ‘No, we did not create that. We have a process, which is participatory budgeting, and we are the forum, and we administer the money. But it’s their idea, it’s their money, it’s their project.’

“We’re just here to give you the dialogue.”

Behavioural insights had a hand in building this dialogue, shaping a genuine two-way conversation between Quito’s people and government — with locals, not the municipality, at the front and centre. “In fact, not our budget,” said Galindo. “But rather the people's budget.” — Emma Sisk