This was a remarkable year for the IOPD: our award set a new record of submissions. This achievement is more than just a number: it is a reflection of the strenuous work of local and regional governments in caring for government, one of the three pillars of the Pact for the Future of UCLG. The creativity of the experiences show the local and regional commitment to promote a more inclusive and sustainable participatory democracy with communities in all their diversity, despite the multiple crises we are currently facing in the world.

New this year, we have added two categories to classify and evaluate the practices submitted. The first one on the most outstanding dimension of the practice: the deliberation process, the inclusion and role of citizens in decision making and the centrality in the citizenship dimension of the project.

The second dimension refers to the size of the candidate city or region: municipalities with less than 50,000 inhabitants, between 50k and 250k inhabitants, between 250K and 1 million inhabitants. Cities with more than 1M inhabitants and finally supralocal and regional governments.

The 149 submissions went through an initial evaluation by a jury to select the 40 finalists. A second, reduced jury deliberated on the award-winning experience and the special mentions. The main criteria for selecting the winning experiences have been: the degree of innovation in its own context, the inclusion promotion, the impacts achieved and the inspiring example to achieve significant transformation from local and regional governments from the hand of the communities.

The Jury decided to grant the 17th IOPD Award to the Ville de Rennes and Rennes Métropole for the experience "European Citizens' Initiative: "Let's ask Europe to give migrants a decent welcome" .

Special mentions were also given to five other experiences that were highly valued by the jury:

• Special Mention in the Citizenship category: Titibirí: “Weaving Citizenship: Training and Social Support for Democracy, Participation, and Reconciliation.”
• Special Mention in the Deliberation category: Fortaleza “Integrated Land Regularization Planning in Special Areas of Social Interest.”
• Special Mention in the Decision category: Rosario: “Participatory Budgeting 2023-2024: Citizen Laboratories as Innovation Devices in Public Policy Management.”
• Special Jury Mention for a Valuable Experience in a Human Rights Violation Context: City of Goma: “University Citizen Program of the Democratic Republic of Congo.”
• Special Mention for the Experience Most Supported by the IOPD Community: City of Lipa: “Launch of the ‘Trash to Cash’ Programme.” This experience received the highest number of votes during the open evaluation through the ParticipateOIDP platform.

The IOPD Technical Secretariat expresses its deepest gratitude to all the local and regional governments that took the time and made the effort to submit a nomination. We also thank all the institutions and partners that have supported us to share this initiative and the network’s collaborating members who, as the Jury, took part in the evaluation of all of the different experiences presented.