Scaling Scotland's Nationwide Participatory Budgeting with NLP on the Consul Platform

In 2017, Scotland's local authorities and the Scottish Government agreed a framework committing at least 1% of local government budgets to participatory budgeting (PB) by the end of 2021, reaffirmed in a revised 2021 Framework Agreement between the Scottish Government and COSLA (the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities). By the milestone reported in 2023, more than 110,000 people had taken part and directly decided how £154 million of council budgets were spent — reaching 1.4% of eligible budgets, above the original 1% target — across all 32 Scottish local authorities.

To help PB scale across so many authorities and processes at once, a research team from the University of Warwick, the Alan Turing Institute and the University of Oxford (Jonathan Davies, Miguel Arana-Catania, Rob Procter, Felix-Anselm van Lier and Yulan He) evaluated the application of NLP tools on the Consul digital platform in mainstream Scottish PB, using a qualitative longitudinal design combining interviews, process observation and platform-data analysis across the live study sites. Their reported initial results indicate that scaling challenges 'may be tackled using NLP technology which, in a previous controlled use case-based evaluation, has shown to improve the effectiveness of citizen participation.'

The NLP findings are explicitly framed by the authors as preliminary ('initial results'); the strongest, independently verified evidence here concerns the PB programme's national scale and mainstreaming — COSLA's published spend and participation figures — while the AI layer's effectiveness is still being established through ongoing academic study rather than a completed government evaluation.

Read the full analysis: https://www.cosla.gov.uk/news/2023/participatory-budgeting-milestone-reached