5.9 E-participation
From 2017 to 2020, the Office of the Plenipotentiary of the Government of the Slovak Republic was implementing a national project Support for Partnership and Dialogue in Participatory Public Policy Making (in short NP PARTI). The project was funded by the Operational Program Effective Public Administration.
On the basis of memoranda of cooperation between the Plenipotentiary of the Government of the Slovak Republic, a public administration entity and a specific non-governmental organization, 12 pilot projects were implemented (including topics on open data and children and youth), which tested various participatory scenarios and tools for public involvement in public policy-making on national, regional, micro-regional and local level.
Selected project outputs:
- Rules of public involvement in the creation of public policies approved by the Resolution of the Government of the Slovak Republic no. 645/2014,
- more than 60 municipalities and 4 self-governing regions enabled their citizens to co-decide on the distribution of public resources through participatory budgets,
- launch of a pilot scheme for the implementation of participatory budgets at 16 secondary schools in the Trenčín Region (2019), continuing in 2020 at 12 primary schools and 95 secondary schools in the Trenčín, Bratislava and Trnava regions in cooperation with the City of Trenčín and the Open Society Foundation.
Information on public policies and opportunities for public involvement in its creation at the regional and local level is provided by local governments individually through their websites, social media or applications, which they developed for this purpose, or used available platforms such as Decidim. At the national level, citizens can comment on draft legislation through the Slov-Lex application.
When creating guidelines on e-participation young people are usually part of the overall target group. There have been, however, several initiatives/projects that enabled young people to voice their opinions such as Online Model European Union conference or UN75 Online Dialogues. Some presidents of self-governing regions/mayors invite young people to contact them directly via e-mails or forms on their websites.