1000 Citizens to Participate in Seoul Budget Planning Begin Activities Next Month

'Citizen Deliberation Budget' Expanded to 600 Billion KRW This Year

[Asia Economy Reporter Jo In-kyung] The Seoul Metropolitan Government announced on the 23rd that it has formed a 1,000-member citizen participation group for the 'On-Citizen Budget Plaza' and will begin full-scale activities starting next month. The On-Citizen Budget Plaza monitors the 'citizen deliberation budget' formulation process online. After a pilot operation with 300 participants last year, the number has been expanded this year.

The citizen deliberation budget is an expanded scale and scope of the 'citizen participation budget,' which Seoul started in 2012 with a budget of 50 billion KRW to institutionally guarantee citizen participation in the budget formulation process. There are two types: the 'proposal type,' where citizens propose, review, and select new projects to allocate the budget, and the 'deliberation type,' where the budget is designed through focused deliberation and public discussion on existing projects. This year, these two types are combined and promoted with a scale of 600 billion KRW.

The deliberation type covers 13 fields: women, welfare, environment, citizen health, livelihood economy, democratic Seoul, safety, transportation, culture, tourism and sports, housing, urban regeneration, and parks. It is a budget formulated through a deliberation and public discussion process jointly decided by the public and private sectors for projects currently underway that require citizen opinions or in-depth discussion. Once the deliberation target projects are selected and the deliberation process on the budget is completed several times, a policy preference vote is conducted among the general citizens, and projects with higher priority are selected to formulate the budget plan.

The On-Citizen Budget Plaza is the online monitoring group for the citizen deliberation budget. The sector-specific 'Deliberation Budget Citizen Council' deliberates and discusses budget projects, shares the results on the On-Citizen Budget Plaza website, and reflects the opinions of the citizen participation group gathered through online comments to proceed with the deliberation process.

The On-Citizen Budget Plaza is a citizen monitoring group representing all Seoul citizens, composed of 1,000 members considering the population ratio of Seoul. From March 25 to April 16, over three weeks, members were selected through a random extraction method of wired and wireless channels by the professional research company M Brain Public Co., Ltd., considering representativeness by gender, region, and age.

They conducted online pre-education (orientation) from the 20th to the 24th of this month, and next month will be assigned to their respective activity fields among the 13 budget sectors and begin full-scale online monitoring. During the approximately three months of deliberation until July, they will learn about policies and budget projects by sector and provide monitoring opinions. Members may be dismissed if they are negligent in their activities. The entire deliberation process is disclosed through the On-Citizen Budget Plaza on the Seoul Citizen Participation Budget website (yesan.seoul.go.kr), where any citizen can participate, monitor budget deliberations, and provide opinions.

Oh Gwan-young, Chairman of the Seoul Democracy Commission, said, "Since the city budget comes from citizens and is used for citizens, it is very important for citizens to decide where and how to spend the budget to realize fiscal democracy," adding, "I hope many good opinions will be shared through comments."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.