The participatory budgeting platform developed by the Ministry of Smart Administration and Regional Development (VARAM) took second place in the “Innovations in Public Administration, Governance, and Policy” category of the European Public Sector Awards 2025–2026 (EPSA). The award underscores the significance of this Latvian-developed digital solution for the advancement of public participation and modern public administration on a European scale.
This year, 134 projects from 30 countries were submitted to the competition organized by the European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA).
Ilze Oša, Deputy State Secretary for Regional Development at VARAM: “I am very pleased that my team and I have been able to make a significant contribution to strengthening public participation by creating the participatory budgeting platform. This recognition is particularly meaningful to me because participatory budgeting is not just an opportunity to vote on projects. It gives people the chance to feel that their opinions matter and strengthens their sense of belonging to their community.”
The European Public Sector Award is already the second major recognition received by the participatory budgeting platform developed by VARAM. In October 2025, VARAM received the “Celmlauzis” Public Administration Innovation Award in the “Practice” category for the creation of the platform; this category evaluates solutions that have already been implemented and are sustainably maintained.
The participatory budgeting platform is based on the mechanisms for citizen participation enshrined in the Local Government Law. One of the new forms of participation is participatory budgeting, the implementation of which has been mandatory in all Latvian municipalities since 2025. To provide municipalities with a unified digital solution for implementing participatory budgeting, VARAM developed the participatory budgeting platform as part of the Recovery Fund project.
Participatory budgeting allows residents to get directly involved in deciding how a portion of the local government budget is used for the development of their community. Unlike traditional project competitions, residents themselves submit project ideas and vote on their implementation, while projects that receive residents’ support in the vote are carried out by the municipality. In this way, participatory budgeting fosters purposeful collaboration between residents and the local government and allows the public to be directly involved in the development of their community.
The public section of the platform is available on the national geospatial information portal GeoLatvija.lv, while the existing Territorial Development Planning Information System was adapted and enhanced in its development. As a result, local governments did not need to develop their own technical solutions for implementing participatory budgeting.
Already in its first full year of operation, 634 project ideas were submitted to the platform, and 60,875 unique users voted on projects submitted by local governments for a vote, casting a total of 88,352 votes.
In 2026, the platform saw steadily increasing activity in both the submission of project ideas and voting, while the platform’s content has been viewed more than 2 million times. This confirms that participatory budgeting is becoming a significant tool for engaging residents in addressing local development issues.
