Seoul City to Increase 'Citizen Deliberation Budget' by 400 Billion Won to Reach 1 Trillion Won

Following the 600 billion KRW budget in 2021, expansion to 1 trillion KRW in 2022 is underway
Citizen-led participation in budget planning... Expanded implementation across all 18 major city policy areas

[Asia Economy Reporter Lim Cheol-young] The Seoul Metropolitan Government is promoting the ‘Citizen Deliberation Budget,’ which expands and develops the citizen participation budget, to the scale of 1 trillion won this year. This is an increase of 400 billion won following the 600 billion won budget allocated last year. As a result, citizen participation in this year’s budget formulation process is expected to be greatly expanded.

On the 3rd, Seoul announced that this year’s ‘Citizen Deliberation Budget,’ which involves citizen participation, will be expanded and allocated across 18 major policy areas of the city. A ‘deliberation type’ budget of 930 billion won, designed through focused deliberation and public discussion on existing projects, and a ‘proposal type’ budget of 70 billion won, where citizens propose, review, and select new projects, will be allocated respectively. The ‘Citizen Deliberation Budget’ is a project promoted by Seoul to institutionally guarantee citizen participation in the budget formulation process, and any Seoul citizen can participate directly.

This year, by integrating the previously dual-operated public-private consultative bodies for the deliberation type and proposal type, efficiency in the budget process is expected to improve. The deliberation type of the Citizen Deliberation Budget is a budget allocated through a deliberation and public discussion process conducted jointly by the public and private sectors for projects that require citizen opinions or in-depth discussion among the existing projects carried out by the city. The results of the deliberation are shared on the ‘On-Citizen Budget Plaza,’ where 1,000 ordinary citizens participate online, and opinions are collected and further discussed at the Deliberation Budget Public-Private Consultative Council.

The 70 billion won scale proposal type of the Citizen Deliberation Budget allows any citizen to propose projects to improve inconveniences in daily life or solve regional and metropolitan-level problems through the city’s participatory budget website, among other channels. There is a 30 billion won ‘Metropolitan Proposal Type’ project aimed at improving citizen benefits across two or more autonomous districts and solving metropolitan urban problems, and a 10 billion won ‘Democracy Seoul Proposal Type’ project, which promotes projects proposed by citizens through Democracy Seoul as city policy projects.

Additionally, a 30 billion won regional-level project to solve community and village-level problems is discovered and reviewed by autonomous districts and approved at the general meeting of the Seoul Participatory Budget Committee. Citizen proposal projects for the metropolitan proposal type are accepted online and offline through the citizen participatory budget website until the 28th of this month.

More than 100,000 people participate directly every year in project proposals, selection, and voting in the Seoul citizen participatory budget system, which is praised for elevating participatory democracy in the fiscal field to a new level.

Oh Gwan-young, Chairperson of the Seoul Democracy Committee, said, “This year marks the 10th anniversary of Seoul introducing the citizen participatory budget. We will further develop the system so that more citizens can participate in the budget formulation process and realize fiscal democracy.”

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