In short

• Peer-learning networks helped municipalities test, adapt and scale digital participation pilots.
• Low-cost, co-created tools (e.g., WhatsApp, simple dashboards) enabled wider uptake and reduced institutional barriers.
• Digital participation improves policy responsiveness through structured, multilingual public-input data.
• Sustainable impact requires institutionalisation, national frameworks, strong IT governance and trust-building.

Digitally enabled participation can complement other forms of public engagement in municipal policy and planning. The HSRC has been working with several municipalities to implement digital or e-participation pilot projects and explore how these approaches can be scaled and institutionalised in broader government decision-making.

From 26 to 28 August 2025, more than 60 officials from municipalities, the Parliament of South Africa, research organisations and other government entities gathered in Cape Town for an e-Participation and Policy Modelling Learning Forum. Hosted by the HSRC and the South African Local Government Association (SALGA), the event marked a key milestone in the HSRC’s e-Participation and Policy Modelling Platform for South Africa (ePPMOSA) project. Municipalities shared their experiences implementing digital participation pilot projects and their visions for embedding these new practices.

Municipality-led initiatives of doing, sharing and learning have been central to the ePPMOSA project. By observing how peers use technology and navigate challenges, officials are encouraged to test new ideas in their own contexts. Building this peer network has been critical for supporting initial uptake, as well as the long-term goal of sustainable adoption and institutionalisation.

Image: Poppet, Freepik

Can pilot projects have a wider impact on policy and planning?

The HSRC’s ePPMOSA project, conceived by the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSTI), envisions digital technologies being widely adopted by local governments to enable more inclusive and responsive decision-making.

A major challenge for pilot projects, however, is scaling beyond their initial users and becoming embedded in institutional processes and structures. This challenge is particularly acute for South African municipalities, which serve as the face of government where citizens directly experience public services and decision-making. With trust in government having declined in recent years, rebuilding credibility and accountability at the local level is crucial. Digital participation tools hold great promise—but only if they move beyond short-term pilots and become part of everyday municipal operations.

Co-creating around accessible technologies

A key lesson from the ePPMOSA pilots has been the value of starting with accessible, low-cost technologies. For citizens, this includes mobile-first and low-data services such as WhatsApp. For municipal officials, interactive dashboards and web forms built on available tools make information easier to digest and comment on. For senior management, this approach alleviates concerns about long-term costs and vendor lock-in.

Equally important has been the co-creation approach. Rather than researchers dictating solutions, officials from various departments collaborated to map existing participation capabilities and design new approaches. This broad participation is critical for sustaining pilot project work, and these relationships form the foundation for future scaling and institutionalisation.

Incubating innovations for policy and community impact

By reflecting on the early phases of piloting, the municipalities and HSRC identified opportunities to innovate with technology and processes for greater policy and community impact.

One concern has been that technology might replace in-person engagement, leading to exclusion and undermining collective deliberation. The project therefore emphasises bridging in-person and virtual engagement while enabling community ownership—an approach some local governments have been exploring. One pilot, for example, aims to have a digital tool for use during community-based planning workshops and follow-up engagements. In another, community members worked in groups to interrogate planning and budget data and make joint submissions, which can increase the credibility of proposals during policy processes.

A primary outcome of digital participation is to see public input data supporting more responsive policy and planning. The development of structured data pipelines has increased the credibility of public inputs. Using emerging natural language models to manage inputs in multiple languages is critical in the South African context. As the structure and richness of inputs improve, there is potential for more nuanced decision-making support: from tailoring municipalities’ community engagement approaches in different regions to coordinating planning by multiple departments.

Working towards transformative innovation

While these technological and process innovations are yielding benefits, achieving systemic impact depends on wider structural reforms.

The DSTI and several research partners are exploring how niche innovations can translate into sustainable, macro-level change through a collaboration on transformative innovation policy (TIP). TIP provides evidence on how new practices and technologies may be enrolled into a broader reconfiguration of rules, learning processes and market structures.

Drawing on international experiences such as Decidim and Consul Democracy in Spain, a key transformative feature has been involving diverse stakeholders in shaping the e-participation agenda. Through ePPMOSA, the HSRC and municipalities have been testing similar ecosystem activation, such as hosting two hackathons with local developers—in Johannesburg and Cape Town—to explore emerging technologies and ideas for digital engagement. Researchers also facilitated community feedback sessions to discuss challenges and proposals for technology use.

Peer learning among public officials has been central to the ePPMOSA process. For TIP, peer interactions are vital for enabling second-order learning, where participants reflect critically on why and how things are done, not only on what works. The August Learning Forum was the most recent in a series of workshops where participation officials could share day-to-day challenges openly in safe spaces, building trust and solidarity.

This foundation of empathy enabled valuable knowledge transfer. Officials shared practical use cases, discussed benefits and drawbacks candidly, provided hands-on technical support and demonstrated friendly competition that motivated progress. The use of simpler technologies made this peer sharing easy and lowered the barrier for other municipalities to replicate or adapt for their own environments.

Embedding change and ensuring sustainability

As pilots expand, new challenges emerge around institutionalisation. Municipalities need clearer business rules and processes. The expectation of feedback also increases: residents who engage online expect to know how their input was used. This requires closing the loop between participation processes and the planning and budgeting decisions of sector departments.

The relationship with municipal IT departments becomes crucial as technology complexity grows. Procurement and contracting require more attention when working with external service providers to avoid vendor lock-in or data lock-out. Integrating participation data flows with those of policy, planning and budgeting departments remains a key objective. Similarly, making local platforms available for participation or policy processes led by other spheres of government, such as Parliament or through the District Development Model, raises further integration questions.

Privacy management becomes increasingly important when capturing personal data from more citizens, as does compliance with the Protection of Personal Information Act. To address this and ensure wider legal and policy alignment, the HSRC has worked with municipalities to update their public participation policies. However, more work is needed around national standards and frameworks, and institutionalisation broadly, to support more municipalities with sustainable adoption of digital participation.

Many of these processes have been facilitated by the HSRC and SALGA, along with project partners as research intermediaries, especially in mediating access to emerging technologies and supporting peer exchanges among officials. At the same time, the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) has linked ePPMOSA to actors in adjacent innovation projects through the inaugural Conference on Public Innovation, Development and Sustainability and has been building a community of scholars through two rounds of a PhD Summer School attended by over 100 participants worldwide. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has been exploring how digital participation can be expanded as part of a national socio-technical platform.

Important knowledge transfers have also come from interactions with national and international initiatives such as the COMPACT project, Gauteng CoGTA, the Civic Tech Innovation Forum and international digital participation champions from Colombia, China, Spain and Scotland.

Looking ahead

Making digital participation a permanent feature of how South African municipalities engage with citizens and make decisions requires more than technology. It needs supportive national frameworks, clear guidance on how participation processes link across government levels, and possibly legislative updates to reflect new engagement methods.

Ongoing support is needed from intermediaries such as research institutions, universities and regional entities that can provide training, policy development and shared resources—particularly in emerging areas like artificial intelligence governance. International examples and networks can inspire local innovation and provide legitimacy for officials pioneering new approaches in their contexts.

Ultimately, the ePPMOSA experience suggests that sustainable change comes from empowered officials—those empowered to experiment, supported by peers and given space to demonstrate value. As one participant noted during the Learning Forum: “Digital participation is not about technology; it’s about trust, inclusion and shared ownership of the development process.”

Research contacts and acknowledgements

This article was written by Dr Paul Plantinga from the HSRC’s Research, Development, Science and Innovation Division, with contributions from the ePPMOSA project team members from the HSRC’s Developmental, Capable and Ethical State Division, Dr Simangele Dlamini, Diana Carolina Sanchez, Dr Odilile Ayodele and Dr Yul Derek Davids. For more information, contact Plantinga at pplantinga@hsrc.ac.za.

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