BA Elige: Buenos Aires's Online Participatory Budget
From 2017 Buenos Aires ran BA Elige on Consul, the open-source participation platform Madrid released in 2015, letting residents propose and vote on neighbourhood works. The city's own dataset records three editions — 2017, 2018 and 2019 — across which website visits fell from 6.4 million to 1.59 million and winning projects dropped from 443 to 108. Opposition legislators and communal board members argued the programme routed around the comunas, whose consultative councils Ley 1777 gives a role in a budget the city constitution already declares participatory. The platform is now gone: its domain no longer resolves, the last web archive capture is from June 2023, and the city never published a completion record for the projects residents voted for.
A participation platform can document its turnout in fine detail and its delivery not at all — then disappear, taking the record with it.
Evidence• No measured figure
Scale🏙️ City-wide
FundingCity of Buenos Aires budget
Sources
↗ Buenos Aires Data — Participación Ciudadana: BA Elige (city open data)Authoritative city resource, fetched 2026-07-26. Columns cover web visits, registered users, proposals created, supports, votes and winning projects. Covers 2017, 2018 and 2019 only — no later edition appears. Web visits fall 6.4M (2017) to 1.59M (2019); 2019 records 28,098 proposals and 108 winning projects, against 239 winners in 2017 and 443 in 2018. Carries no execution or completion field.
↗ Buenos Aires Data — Programa BA Elige datasetGender-ratio dataset for the programme, published 10 May 2021. Update frequency is listed as historical, with no regular updates planned — the city's own signal that the programme is closed.
↗ Nadie Nos Invito — 'Se conocieron las 15 propuestas más votadas del BA Elige y crecen los cuestionamientos'18 July 2017. Carries the comunas counterweight: legislator Adrián Camps calls BA Elige 'a way to bypass all the activity of the communes… participatory budgeting managed directly from the executive power without participation of neighbours through communal consultative councils'. Communal representatives Zicolill and Suarez say the mechanism 'can be easily manipulated by political operators'. Supports the bypass claim in the snippet; does not evidence any specific manipulation case, so none is asserted.
↗ OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation — Consul ProjectIndependent confirmation of the Consul lineage: platform originally developed for the Madrid city government, adopted by 100+ institutions across 30+ countries, with Buenos Aires named among the municipalities using it.
↗ Defensoría del Pueblo CABA — '20 años de la Ley de Comunas'2025 event marking 20 years of Ley 1777. Rubén Daniel López, coordinator of the Inter-Council Communal Consultative Council, states the participatory budget was never implemented — the constitutional backdrop against which BA Elige was an executive-run substitute.
↗ Programme site (defunct) — baelige.buenosaires.gob.arFETCH FAILURE, recorded as evidence: DNS resolution failed (ENOTFOUND) on 2026-07-26. The most recent Internet Archive capture is 2023-06-07; web.archive.org itself is not fetchable from this environment, so the snapshot date comes from the Wayback availability API. Retained as the primary-source citation precisely because its disappearance is the finding.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “BA Elige: Buenos Aires's Online Participatory Budget” — Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/buenos-aires-ba-elige/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
