Results
Research Report on the Implementation of Digital Participation Platforms (DPPs) and Supporting Organizational Arrangements in the United Kingdom
This report was prepared as part of research examining how Digital Participation Platforms (DPPs) can be implemented in society. In March 2026, we conducted on-site visits in London and Edinburgh and organized the insights gained through dialogue with practitioners. By sharing these findings with a wide range of people involved in citizen participation and collaboration, beyond individual organizations, we hope to contribute to the development of future discussion and practice.
In the United Kingdom, citizens' assemblies and participatory budgeting are becoming more widespread at the local government level, and an ecosystem in which civic tech companies develop and provide a variety of digital tools has matured. During this study tour, we visited six organizations with different roles: those creating institutional arrangements (local governments and local government associations), those supporting them (civic tech companies), and those analyzing them (think tanks). We sought to gain a multidimensional understanding of the process of implementing DPPs and the organizational arrangements that support it.
Organizations visited
Delib (civic tech company / London): Provides Citizen Space, a platform supporting statutory consultations in the United Kingdom
Camden Council (London borough): A leading local authority embedding participatory democracy in its organizational culture, including through its pioneering climate citizens' assembly
New Local and Demos (think tanks / joint session): Lead Waves, the largest digital deliberation project in UK history
Commonplace (civic tech company, Zencity Group): Provides a citizen participation and engagement platform with a strong focus on mapping features
COSLA (Convention of Scottish Local Authorities / Edinburgh): Leads the implementation of the open-source platform Consul and the nationwide rollout of participatory budgeting
Research topics
Basic policies on citizen participation and the institutional and legal frameworks supporting them
Background to the adoption of DPPs, objectives for their use, and specific initiatives
Internal arrangements for implementation within government and other organizations
Efforts to broaden participation
Approaches to the use of AI
Current challenges and future prospects
Each meeting took the form of a semi-structured interview. Through two-way discussions with local practitioners, we placed particular emphasis on understanding their experiences of trial and error, organizational cultures, and institutional contexts, which desk research alone cannot reveal.
Insights from this report
This report offers insights into questions such as:
What does Waves, the largest digital democracy project in UK history, aim to achieve, and what challenges does it face in practice?
What organizational arrangements and philosophy underpin Camden Council's success in embedding citizen participation in its organizational culture?
How has the civic tech market matured in the United Kingdom, where consultation is legally required?
What has enabled Scotland to roll out participatory budgeting and open-source platforms nationwide?
The final chapter organizes these findings into three perspectives:
• Designing participation processes: framing questions, presenting trade-offs, and closing the feedback loop
• Government organization and people: making participation a way of working across government, beyond the responsibility of a single department
• Tools and markets: what to deliver, to whom, and how
It uses these perspectives to draw implications for citizen participation in Japan.
The report offers practical insights for local government staff responsible for introducing and operating digital citizen participation initiatives, businesses working on smart cities and co-creation projects, and researchers studying citizen participation and digital democracy.
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