Presentation of the "Cascais Participation System" at the 23rd IOPD Conference

As a member of the Network of Portuguese Municipalities and the IOPD, Cascais has also been home to this conference and had a large working group in Valongo, led by Councillor José d'Almeida and including Isabel Xavier and Teresa Vicente. The team presented the ‘Cascais Participation System’, an integrated and inclusive vision of the various municipal projects created to provide citizens with multiple opportunities to participate in community life. Teresa Vicente, a sociologist, presented the application of this system to the ‘Cascais Social Network’ and Guðný Bára, Jónsdóttir Sigurlaug and Anna Jóhannsdóttir presented the Participation System of Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland. Cascais' participation in this 23rd IOPD Conference will also be highlighted by the presentation of the book “Carers of the Territory - Partnerships between State and Community for the co-management of public goods”. ‘A research project carried out over the last year and a half, the first challenge of which was to map collaborative initiatives between local authorities and citizens for the joint management of public goods,’ explain the authors Nelson Dias, Tatiana Urbanovik Brandimiller and Tatiane Serrano Dias, for whom ‘carer initiatives are configured as an innovative model of collaborative governance, which strengthens the capacities of the state, while at the same time deepening citizenship, promoting a virtuous cycle of mutual trust and shared responsibility, thus helping to tackle the crisis of modern democracies’. The book dedicates a section to the Cascais project ‘Tutores de Bairro’ (Neighbourhood Tutors) and Zilda Costa Silva, from Cascais Ambiente, accompanied the presentation (more about the book). About the International Observatory for Participatory Democracy (IOPD) | It is an international network open to all cities, organisations and research centres interested in learning about, exchanging and applying experiences of participatory democracy at local level.