Report about the Swedish case

As a part of the research project COLDIGIT, this report studies the processes of housing participatory budgeting (housing PB) in the Gothenburg areas of Biskopsgården and Hammarkullen in 2019 through 2022. Adhering to the Co-Creation Radar framework, the report expands on factors relating to Objectives, Implementation, Actors, and Results, followed by a final discussion on lessons learned for future processes. The report displays that the public housing company Bostadsbolaget has been at the vanguard when it comes to delivering participatory democracy in Gothenburg, seeing the PB initiatives as parts of addressing an overarching strategy of reducing vulnerability in certain areas. However, when deploying the PB processes a number of challenges have been encountered, mainly concerning allocation of internal resources, use and outreach of the digital platform, implementation of winning proposals, communication, and level of co- creation. Improvements have however subsequently been made in every process. For future PB processes, this report highlights the need of continuously addressing these factors as a part of subsequent development to reduce vulnerability. Most notably, this could require a wider scope on what organisational adaptations are needed to reinforce and enhance the potential of PB. Download report