Data

Face-to-Face, Online, or Both?
Both
General Type of Method
Public budgeting
Planning
Long-term civic bodies
Typical Purpose
Make, influence, or challenge decisions of government and public bodies
Deliver goods & services
Spectrum of Public Participation
Collaborate
Links
Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP) website
Democracy Spot - Participatory Budgeting: Seven Defining Characteristics
Open to All or Limited to Some?
Mixed
Recruitment Method for Limited Subset of Population
Election
Number of Participants
Large groups
There is no limit to the number of people who can participate
Types of Interaction Among Participants
Discussion, Dialogue, or Deliberation
Negotiation & Bargaining
Express Opinions/Preferences Only
Facilitation
Yes
Decision Methods
Idea Generation
Voting
If Voting
Preferential Voting
Scope of Implementation
City/Town
Neighbourhood
Organization
Level of Polarization This Method Can Handle
Moderate polarization
Level of Complexity This Method Can Handle
Moderate Complexity

METHOD

Participatory Budgeting

June 16, 2021 Patrick L Scully, Participedia Team
July 23, 2020 alexmengozzi
May 25, 2020 Jesi Carson, Participedia Team
March 12, 2020 Jaskiran Gakhal, Participedia Team
March 11, 2020 Patrick L Scully, Participedia Team
August 26, 2019 Scott Fletcher Bowlsby
June 29, 2018 Lucy J Parry, Participedia Team
May 24, 2018 Scott Fletcher Bowlsby
February 26, 2017 Boutall
August 22, 2009 Boutall
Face-to-Face, Online, or Both?
Both
General Type of Method
Public budgeting
Planning
Long-term civic bodies
Typical Purpose
Make, influence, or challenge decisions of government and public bodies
Deliver goods & services
Spectrum of Public Participation
Collaborate
Links
Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP) website
Democracy Spot - Participatory Budgeting: Seven Defining Characteristics
Open to All or Limited to Some?
Mixed
Recruitment Method for Limited Subset of Population
Election
Number of Participants
Large groups
There is no limit to the number of people who can participate
Types of Interaction Among Participants
Discussion, Dialogue, or Deliberation
Negotiation & Bargaining
Express Opinions/Preferences Only
Facilitation
Yes
Decision Methods
Idea Generation
Voting
If Voting
Preferential Voting
Scope of Implementation
City/Town
Neighbourhood
Organization
Level of Polarization This Method Can Handle
Moderate polarization
Level of Complexity This Method Can Handle
Moderate Complexity

Participatory budgeting is a method of democratic decision-making whereby participants engage in deliberation regarding how public resources ought to be allocated and distributed.

Problems and Purpose

Participatory budgeting is a decision-making process through which citizens deliberate and negotiate over the distribution of public resources.[1]

Participatory budgeting programs are implemented at the behest of governments, citizens, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and civil society organizations (CSOs) to allow citizens to play a direct role in deciding how and where resources should be spent. These programs create opportunities for engaging, educating, and empowering citizens, which can foster a more vibrant civil society. Participatory budgeting also helps promote transparency, which has the potential to reduce government inefficiencies and corruption. Because most citizens who participate have low incomes and low levels of formal education, participatory budgeting offers citizens from historically excluded groups the opportunity to make choices that will affect how their government acts. Put simply, participatory budgeting programs provide poor and historically excluded citizens with access to important decision-making venues.[1]

Origins and Development

Genesis in Porto Alegre

Participatory budgeting began in 1989 in the municipality of Porto Alegre, the capital of Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul (see Porto Alegre Participatory Budgeting). Porto Alegre has more than 1 million inhabitants and is wealthy by Brazilian standards. In 1988, the Workers’ Party, a progressive political party founded during the waning years of the 1964–85 military dictatorship, won the mayoral election. Its campaign was based on democratic participation and the “inversion of spending priorities”—that is, the reversal of a decades-long trend in which public resources were spent in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods. Participatory budgeting was intended to help poorer citizens and neighborhoods receive larger shares of public spending.

When the Workers’ Party won the mayor’s office in Porto Alegre, it inherited a bankrupt municipality and a disorganized bureaucracy. During its first two years in office, the new administration experimented with different mechanisms to tackle financial constraints, provide citizens with a direct role in the government’s activities, and invert the social spending priorities of previous administrations. Participatory budgeting was born through this experimental process.

In 1989 and 1990, the first two years of participatory budgeting, fewer than 1,000 citizens participated in the participatory budgeting process; by 1992 the number of participants had jumped to nearly 8,000. After the Workers’ Party was re-elected in 1992, the program took on a life of its own, with participation increasing to more than 20,000 people a year. Participation grew as citizens realized that participatory budgeting was an important decision-making venue.[1]

Experimentation in Latin America

Throughout the 1990s, participatory budgeting spread to other municipalities in Brazil and to other countries in South America, including Bolivia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Peru. In his analysis of experiments in participatory budgeting in Latin America, Benjamin Goldfrank identified several factors that can contribute to its success:

  • the mayor is indigenous, from a party on the left, or both;
  • opposition from local political elites is weak or nonexistent;
  • national or international aid organizations provide project funding, technical assistance, or both;
  • the municipality has sufficient revenues to make significant investments in public works or programs;
  • there is a tradition of participation and cooperation within and among local civic associations or indigenous customary organizations that has not been destroyed by guerrilla warfare or clientelist politics.[3]

Spread throughout the World

From the late 1990s, participatory budgeting in different formats has begun to take root in Central and Eastern Europe[4], Asia,[5], Sub-Saharan Africa[6], the Middle East and North Africa.[4]

In 2007, participatory budgeting became a formal strand of government policy in the UK.

Participant Recruitment and Selection

Know how participants are recruited for this method? Help us complete this section! 

How it Works: Process, Interaction, and Decision-Making

The UK's Participatory Budgeting Unit reports that, as participatory budgeting is quite new, innovative forms of participatory budgeting are being developed all the time and new budgets, new themes, new partners, different areas are demonstrating that participatory budgeting is possible and beneficial for a wide range of services and areas.

The participatory budgeting process usually requires citizen engagement in the various phases of a budget cycle to identify the capital investments and projects to address the most pressing local needs.

Participatory budgeting involves citizens, councillors and local government officers working together. Participatory budgeting aims to include those who are not traditionally engaged in policy decisions. As well as citizen involvement, participatory budgeting creates opportunities for greater efficiency in the allocation of public funds and increased community cohesion.

The main features of participatory budgeting include:

  • a geographically defined area such as a local authority, a decentralised district of a local authority, or a defined neighbourhood
  • regularly scheduled meetings and debates in each geographical unit
  • a cycle of activities closely following the local budgeting cycle
  • a network of individuals and organisations involved in training, informing and mobilising local citizen

There is no universal way of applying participatory budgeting. Methodologies vary from area to area but typically it involves allocating between two to three percent of the annual revenue budgets and sometimes the allocation of new investments. The process involves citizens taking into account both the demand and supply of services and public infrastructure. In the UK, participatory budgeting has mainly been applied to allocating resources for area regeneration and for directing statutory funds to voluntary sector organisations.[2] Paolo Spada, a member of Participedia's core development team, describes the participatory budgeting process as follows:

"Most [initiatives] have at least two channels, one open to all, one for super participants that uses some sort of selection method. In the US people volunteer, in some places they are randomly selected generating a mix between the traditional minipublic and PB, [while] in all Latin America they are elected. These people [super participants] in the US are called budget delegates and they are the ones that take the raw ideas and improve them in collaboration with the organizers (city staff or NGO depending on location) and then create the ballot on which everybody else is called to vote. So think 3 phases: 1) brainstorming (open to all), 2) filtering (open to super participants) 3) vote (open to all). Note lastly that in big cities PB is decentralized so there are two layers of representatives, the one in the districts and the one at the city level. The theory of multichannel engagement emerged from PB because it was an ante-litteram participatory system combining multiple participatory spaces for different publics."

Influence, Outcomes, and Effects

Case Studies

UK Local Councils

Local councils in the UK began to experiment with participatory budgeting, or "community kitties" as it was sometimes known, around 2006 in places such as:

  • Coedpoeth in North Wales[7]
  • Harrow in London[8]
  • Bradford in Yorkshire[9].

In 2007, the national Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) published jointly with the Local Government Association their 'An Action Plan for Community Empowerment: Building on success'[10] In March 2008, CLG published a consultation document 'Participatory Budgeting: a draft national strategy'[11] which stated its ambition for "ambition for participatory budgeting in all local authority areas by 2012". The UK Government's White Paper 'Communities in control: Real people, real power'[12] committed to a new 'Duty to Involve' for local councils which came into effect on 1 April 2009 as part of the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007.[13]

Arts in UK

A recent study by Involve, UK and the Participatory Budgeting Unit, Manchester, UK looked at the impact of participatory budgeting on the arts in the UK.[14] The study found that arts projects fare well in the small-grant, community-focused form of participatory budgeting. The projects most likely to succeed are those that are seen to benefit the community directly, provide value for money, are easy to understand and appeal to voters’ emotional response. The study also found that participatory budgeting can bring a number of benefits for the local arts sector, including:

  • new funding opportunities
  • better informed decision making
  • public support and ownership of publicly funded arts
  • raising the public profile of the arts
  • educating people about the value of the arts
  • helping art organisations get funding from elsewhere
  • improving relationships between artists and communities.

The report argues that the arts sector should take note of participatory budgeting for two reasons: as a source of learning for arts organisations seeking to carry out their own public involvement work, and as a new, important phenomenon, which may have a significant impact on how arts funding is distributed in the future.

Analysis and Lessons Learned

Goldfrank offered an analysis of participatory budgeting in Latin America, contrasting various aspects of process design with the results achieved. The design factors were: how formal or informal the process was (i.e. was it reserved for formal associations to participate or could anyone join in?) and the level of decision-making power of the participants (i.e. whether the participants debate and decide on spending priorities, how much of the budget is affected by these decisions, and whether authorities respect the decisions). The success criteria were: participation rate, level of expansion/redistribution of services and transparency. Goldfrank concluded that there is "some support for the assertion that outcomes tend to be better where participatory budgeting is less formalized and more deliberative...where the structures were less formal, participants had more decision-making power, participation rates were higher, policies were more redistributive, and government was more transparent."[3]

The European Institute for Public Participation[15] is working with the Participatory Budgeting Unit, Manchester, UK and the UK Government's Department for Communities and Local Government to develop a framework for the evaluation of participatory budgeting, along with other forms of public participation in the UK.[16]

See Also

Participatory Budgeting in Berlin-Lichtenberg 

Presupuesto Participativo: Rosario 

Participatory Budgeting Case Studies on Participedia

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Wampler, Brian. 2007. ‘A Guide to Participatory Budgeting’. in Shah, Anwar (ed.). Participatory Budgeting. Washington: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank
  2. http://www.participatorybudgeting.org.uk/about/what-is-pb More About Participatory Budgeting
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Goldfrank, Benjamin. 2007. ‘Lessons from Latin America’s Experience with Participatory Budgeting’. in Shah, Anwar (ed.). Participatory Budgeting. Washington: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Fölscher, Alta. 2007. ‘Participatory Budgeting in Central and Eastern Europe’. in Shah, Anwar (ed.). Participatory Budgeting. Washington: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank
  5. ↑ Fölscher, Alta. 2007. ‘Participatory Budgeting in Asia’. in Shah, Anwar (ed.). Participatory Budgeting. Washington: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank
  6. ↑ Shall, Adrienne. 2007. ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’s Experience with Participatory Budgeting’. in Shah, Anwar (ed.). Participatory Budgeting. Washington: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank
  7. http://www.participatorybudgeting.org.uk/case-studies/the-village-spend-coedpoeth-north-wales The Village Spend, Coedpoeth, North Wales
  8. http://www.participatorybudgeting.org.uk/case-studies/harrow-open-budget Harrow Open Budget
  9. http://www.participatorybudgeting.org.uk/case-studies/keighley-decision-day-bradford Keighley Decision Day, Bradford
  10. ↑ Department for Communities and Local Government and the Local Government Association. (2007). An Action Plan for Community Empowerment: Building on success. Accessed 26 August 2009.
  11. ↑ Department for Communities and Local Government. (2008). Participatory Budgeting: a draft national strategy. Accessed 26 August 2009. http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20120920014515/http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/communities/participatorybudgeting
  12. ↑ Department for Communities and Local Government. (2008). Communities in control: Real people, real power. Accessed 26 August 2009. http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20120919212617/http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/communities/pdf/886045.pdf
  13. ↑ Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007. The Stationery Office. 2007. Accessed 26 August 2009. http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2007/ukpga_20070028_en_1
  14. ↑ Involve. (2009). Participatory budgeting and the arts. Accessed 9 September 2009. https://www.involve.org.uk/sites/default/files/uploads/Participatory-budgeting-and-t...-for-Arts-Council-England.pdf
  15. European Institute for Public Participation. Accessed 3 March 2020. https://www.participationinstitute.org/index.php?id=3
  16. Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government. Accessed 3 March, 2020. https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/ministry-of-housing-communities-and-local-government

Shah, Anwar (2007) Participatory Budgeting. Washington. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank ISBN-10: 0-8213-6923-7

Sintomer, Yves, Carsten Herzberg, and Anja Röcke (2008), Les Budgets participatifs en Europe. Des services publics au service du public (Participatory Budgeting in Europe. Public services at the service of the public). Paris: La Découverte, Paris ISBN-10: 2707156485.

Spada, Paolo. and Russon Gilman, Hollie. Budgets for the People: Brazil's Democratic Innovations. Foreign Affairs, March 11, 2015.

See Tiago Peixoto’s DemocracySpot blog for Participatory Budgeting: Seven Defining Characteristics.

Empatia Project 

External Links

European Institute for Public Participation

Involve

Participatory Budgeting Unit

The Participatory Budgeting Project

Notes