Deputies may now decide winners of “Open budget” projects

A new practice called "Deputies’ initiative" will be introduced from now on, within the framework of the “Participatory budget” program. Under this mechanism, projects that did not win under the program may still be recognized as winners by deputies. This is stated in the Presidential resolution of the Republic of Uzbekistan dated August 29 of this year, “on measures to enhance cooperation between people’s representatives and voters within the framework of improving participatory budget processes".

According to the resolution, a practice will be introduced within the framework of the "Participatory budget" process that allows projects that did not win to be declared winners at the initiative of deputies in order to strengthen cooperation between people’s representatives and voters, starting from 2026.

In this regard:

Each year, deputies of the Legislative chamber of the Oliy Majlis, within the framework of the “Participatory budget” process, will select two projects (one per season) from among the projects in their respective constituencies that did not win, taking into account the interests of the electorate, through the “Open budget” information portal;

The projects selected by the deputies will automatically be declared winners on the “Open budget” information portal and will be financed from the state budget;

A separate page will be created on the portal for projects financed at the initiative of deputies, and a publicly accessible list of all such projects will be maintained;

To finance these expenditures, each deputy will be allocated, for two seasons per year, an amount equivalent to 8,000 times the base calculation value (currently amounting to 3.3 billion soums), which will be provided annually in the State budget of the Republic of Uzbekistan.

It is worth noting that earlier, the voting stage of the second season of this year’s “Participatory budget” began. The voting process will continue until 23:59 on August 31. Within the framework of the second season of the 2025 “Participatory budget” process, a total of 22,263 projects were submitted by citizens, of which 18,656 were admitted to the voting stage.