“This has never happened to me, I have never felt like the protagonist”.
This phrase sums up the emotions of one of the young attendees at an ‘Easy Government’ workshop, a project to increase public participation of people with disabilities and socially vulnerable groups.
Citizen participation and political engagement are essential for creating an open society. In Aragón, we seek to engage as many citizens as we can, but we know that obstacles to access, like work and family obligations or integration, often make it challenging for certain groups to engage. In addition, the language used by the public administration to communicate with citizens is often too technical and is not adapted to meet the needs of different groups.
Although citizen participation processes and prior public consultations do exist in Aragón, the public that attends these events usually do so at a professional level, like through a civil society organization or academic affiliation. While these groups are quite balanced in terms of gender, they lack inclusion of other communities such as youth, non-Spanish residents, people with disabilities, and the elderly.
Almost 8% of the total population of Aragón have moderate to high degree of disability (i.e. a degree of disability equal or greater than 33% that prevents people from leading a normal life as recognized by the Spanish law). This percentage extends to almost 25% if we include lower degrees of disability, people in situations of social vulnerability, or caretakers.
Easy Government is a public policy co-creation project promoted by Laboratorio de Aragón Gobierno Abierto (LAAAB) that incorporates new sensitivities in citizen participation processes to make people with disabilities the protagonists and generate services and public policies that are universally accessible.
Easy Government seeks to improve accessibility to information in administrative documents, forms, plans or laws while they are drafted. In a series of workshops, people with disabilities and socially vulnerable people work hand in hand with public officials to make these texts more inclusive based on their inputs. It helps transform complex texts using the easy-to-read methodology.
Carrying out this type of workshop goes far beyond validating easy-to-read texts though. As Anabel Beltran, Head of Transparency Service from the Government of Aragón and promoter of this project explains, “The ‘Easy Government’ project is the most exciting of all the ones I have participated in in my long professional career because it forces us to look at what is public and [look at] life through different glasses. The transparency of the 21st century is no longer about disseminating tons of data and information, but about communicating with citizens in the same language registers that they use, especially if groups with special difficulties have to understand us. The project combines participation, clear communication, easy reading and a lot of utility for potential users.” These potential users include people with disabilities and their immediate environment. The project allows public policies to respond to their real needs and gives them greater autonomy to access administrative materials.
One of the most important moments of the project was when people with disabilities met in person for workshops and drafted the “Integral Action Plan for People with Disabilities in Aragón 2021-2024”.This plan aims to respond to the needs of people with disabilities and their families to improve and progress in the care, promotion, and inclusion of people with disabilities in the region. In other words, it seeks to incorporate the perspective of disability in all public action and advances towards independent living and an inclusive society.
Fifty people with disabilities participated in four workshops, collecting a total of 326 ideas stemming from governance and participation, to equal opportunities, accessibility, education, employment, health, social services and legal protection. More than half of these ideas were included in the “Integral Action Plan for People with Disabilities.”
We also held validation workshops to adapt the text of the “Law on equal opportunities between women and men in Aragón”, with the collaboration of the Aragonese Institute for Women and the Equality Units of the Government of Aragón. In total 36 people with disabilities and seven support people participated in these workshops from several organizations including Kairós Cooperative, Full Inclusion Aragón, ADISPAZ, and Valentia.
We will continue working to encourage participation of people with disabilities and socially vulnerable groups to the decision-making process. Easy Government is not just about including their voice but also about promoting their empowerment through the creation of spaces of trust and a shared language that removes barriers and facilitates access of information and participation. Until the end of the year we plan to carry out a series of workshops to adapt more documents to be easier to read and use clearer language for the official documents issued by the government of Aragón that recognizes people’s disabilities.
