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The second stage involves organizing a period of participation reinforcement. Its purpose is to motivate neighbourhood participation, promote work groups, and ensure the validity of the values reflected in the surveys.

Finally, the third phase aims to ensure a heterogeneous presence of participants, a type of social diversity. To this end, meetings and deliberative forums are set up in which citizens can debate with municipal specialists, experts and stakeholder groups in order to learn about the different aspects and consequences of a decision. It concludes with a post-forum survey to assess and measure citizen satisfaction with the implementation of the decision.

This procedural mechanism is in line with the deliberative sessions in which a representative sample of the population contemplates, deliberates and delves into the issue in question with the participation of experts, politicians and/or representatives of social movements who put forward the different points of view on the issue. The provision of information, together with the facilitation of deliberation, are the main elements of this process.

The second dimension is the promotion of information transparency as a tool for improving the amount of reliable and trustworthy economic, managerial, political and social information available to all stakeholders. The merging of transparency and social participation “is an unavoidable element of democracy and the development of politically active, moral citizens, which at the same time contributes to guaranteeing the effectiveness and efficiency of policies and government intervention in the social realm. Trust, on the other hand, is presented as a fundamental factor in promoting collective action and counteracting uncertainty in scenarios of managing differences and dissent on which democracy must take action” (Güemes and Resina, 2018: 76).

This core idea is built on integrity, which is related to honesty in the management of information of a public nature. It is specified in the elaboration of a flow of information and knowledge through journalistic products and services oriented toward the exercise of citizenship. Integrity aims to “make information transparent through the unification of information, the connection with one’s own statistics, the elaboration of a catalogue of reusable and interoperable data, and the promotion of citizen participation initiatives” (Manfredi, Corcoy and Herranz, 2017).

The flow of data is placed at the service of citizen participation when it is transformed into intelligible products in a process of information and response, a sort of conversation between the executive and legislative branches, public employees and society. In this learning process (Manfredi, 2016), social groups inform, act, lobby and guide municipal action plans. This procedure is one of the most interesting assets in the recovery of institutional credibility, because it possesses and publicizes the mechanisms of good governance, and among others, social participation itself. Bright and Margetts (2016) consider that publicity of the processes of creation and management of public policies contributes to the social acceptance of such policies if they contribute actively, and not as a result of the aggregation of votes, tweets or “I Likes”. If this approach is taken, the citizen may not even be aware of this passive participation.

According to Professor Brugué (2014), the recovery of social trust is an urgent task: public policies are failing in their attempts to build societies as they imagine them to be. The crisis of credibility begins in the realm of politics, but extends to that of public policy. Thus, we are referring to a two-fold crisis of legitimacy of the political and administrative system: that which affects the inputs of the system and that which refers to the outputs. By its nature, this crisis creates a new category