Participatory budgeting


Participatory budgeting is a type of citizen sourcing in which ordinary people decide how to allocate part of a municipal or public budget through a process of democratic deliberation and decision-making. These processes typically begin with a series of neighborhood popular assemblies to initiate and discuss proposals and end with voting on the final decisions.
Participatory budgeting allows citizens or residents of a locality to identify, discuss, and prioritize public spending projects, and gives them the power to make real decisions about how money is spent. Participatory budgeting processes are typically designed to involve those left out of traditional methods of public engagement, such as low-income residents, non-citizens, and youth. A comprehensive case study of eight municipalities in Brazil analyzing the successes and failures of participatory budgeting has suggested that it often results in more equitable public spending, greater government transparency and accountability, increased levels of public participation, and democratic and citizenship learning. Participatory budgeting stands as one of several democratic innovations—such as British Columbia's Citizens' Assembly—encompassing the ideals of a participatory democracy.
Frameworks of participatory budgeting differ throughout the globe in terms of scale, procedure, and objective. Participatory budgeting, in its conception, is often contextualized to suit a region's particular conditions and needs. Thus, the magnitudes of participatory budgeting vary depending on whether it is carried out at a municipal, regional, or provincial level. In many cases, participatory budgeting has been legally enforced and regulated; however, some are internally arranged and promoted. Since the original invention in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1988, participatory budgeting has manifested itself in a myriad of designs, with variations in methodology, form, and technology. As of 2024, participatory budgeting is becoming a mainstream practice, with over 11,500 municipal PB processes implemented globally, representing significant growth from nearly 1,500 municipalities and institutions in 2014.

History

Participatory budgeting was first developed in the 1980s by the Brazilian Workers' Party, drawing on the party's stated belief that electoral success is not an end in itself but a springboard for developing radical, participatory forms of democracy. While there were several early experiments, the first full participatory budgeting process was implemented in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989. Porto Alegre is the capital city of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, and a busy industrial, financial, and service center; at that time of implementation, it had a population of 1.2 million. The initial success of participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre soon made it attractive to other municipalities. By 2001, more than 100 cities in Brazil had implemented participatory budgeting, while in 2015, thousands of variations have been implemented in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe.

Porto Alegre

In its first Title, the 1988 Constitution of Brazil states: "All power originates from the people, who exercise it by the means of elected representatives or directly, according to the terms of this Constitution." The authoring of the Constitution was a reaction to the previous twenty years of military dictatorship, and the new Constitution sought to secure individual liberty while also decentralizing and democratizing ruling power, in the hope that authoritarian dictatorship would not reemerge.
Brazil's contemporary political economy is an outgrowth of the Portuguese empire's patrimonial capitalism, where "power was not exercised according to rules, but was structured through personal relationships". Unlike the Athenian ideal of democracy, in which all citizens participate directly and decide policy collectively, Brazil's government is structured as a republic with elected representatives. This creates a separation between the state and civil society, which has opened the doors for clientelism. Because the law-making process occurs behind closed doors, elected officials and bureaucrats can access state resources in ways that benefit certain 'clients', typically those of extraordinary social or economic relevance. The influential clients receive policy favors and repay elected officials with votes from the groups they influence. For example, a neighborhood leader who represents the views of shop owners may ask a local party official for laws to increase foot traffic on commercial streets. At the same time, the neighborhood leader mobilizes shop owners to vote for the political party responsible for the policy. Because this patronage operates on the basis of individual ties between patron and clients, true decision-making power is limited to a small network of party officials and influential citizens rather than the broader public.
In 1989, Olívio Dutra won the mayor's seat in Porto Alegre. In an attempt to encourage popular participation in government and redirect government resources towards the poor, Dutra institutionalized the PT's organizational structure on a citywide level. The result is what we now know as participatory budgeting.
PB was active in Porto Alegre until 2017. Over time, city leaders’ political support for the participatory budget has declined, and Porto Alegre’s current leadership has suspended the process.

Pre-requisites

According to the World Bank Group, certain factors are needed for participatory budgeting to be adopted: " strong mayoral support, a civil society willing and able to contribute to ongoing policy debates, a generally supportive political environment that insulates participatory budgeting from legislators' attacks, and financial resources to fund the projects selected by citizens."
There are generally two approaches through which participatory budgeting formulates: top-down and bottom-up. In the top-down approach, the adoption of participatory budgeting is required by the federal government. In the bottom-up approach, local governments initiate participatory budgeting independent from the national agenda ; with this approach, NGO's and local organizations play crucial roles in mobilizing and informing the community members.

Procedure

Broadly, all participatory budgeting programs allow citizens to deliberate with the goal of creating either a concrete financial plan, or a recommendation to elected representatives. In the Porto Alegre model, the structure of the scheme gives sub-jurisdictions authority over the larger political jurisdiction of which they are part. Neighborhood budget committees, for example, have authority to determine the citywide budget, not just the allocation of resources for their particular neighborhood. Therefore, mediating institutions are also needed to combine budget preferences expressed by sub-jurisdictions.
Participatory budgeting processes do not adhere to strict rules, but they generally share several basic steps:
  1. The municipality decides how much of its budget to allocate to PB projects. For example, in 2018, Czech municipalities have devoted 3.7M Euro to PB, which was about 0.6% of their total expenditures. In 2023, Paris decided to devote about 75 million Euro to PB in 2023.
  2. The municipality may be divided geographically into multiple districts, so that the residents in each district can focus on projects more relevant to them. The budget available for each district is also determined at this stage.
  3. Representatives of the districts, either elected or volunteered, work with government officials in a PB committee. The committees meet regularly to deliberate under a specific timeline, and come up with preliminary project proposals.
  4. Proposals, initiated by the citizens, are dealt under different branches of public budget such as recreation, infrastructure, transportation, etc. Participants publicly deliberate with the committee to finalize the projects to be voted on. The initial proposals are developed into feasible proposals by focus groups and experts. In several rounds of deliberation, the list of proposals is shortlisted and finalized.
  5. The short-list of proposals is put to a public vote. See Participatory budgeting ballot types for various types of ballots that can be used in the voting process.
  6. A pre-determined aggregation rule is used to select the winning projects, and the municipal government implements the winning projects.
This cycle of steps is repeated annually.
While the structure of PB cycles is well established, recent analyses have highlighted that most initiatives focus primarily on the formulation and debate phases of the budget cycle, neglecting execution and control stages where key decisions are often made by bureaucratic actors with little citizen oversight.

Digital participatory budgeting (e-participatory budgeting)

Technology has often used been to support participatory budgeting, which is commonly referred to as e-participatory budgeting. The use of digital technologies in the process was pioneered by the municipality of Ipatinga in Brazil, which offered the citizens the possibility to vote for projects via the Internet in 2001. The online voting option was later integrated to the participatory budgeting of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul in 2003, and in the municipality of Belo Horizonte in 2006. Since then, the number of participatory budgeting initiatives that included online voting has multiplied around the world, and includes cities like Paris, New York City, Lisbon, Madrid, and Mexico City.
Although the effects of online voting in participatory budgeting have not been widely researched, a study in 2006 examining the case of participatory budgeting of Belo Horizonte suggests that online voting played a role in increasing the number of participants in the process. A 2015 study of Rio Grande do Sul showed an 8.2% increase in total turnout with the introduction of online voting, with the online channel more likely to attract participants who were younger, male, wealthier, and more educated. Despite these differences in participant demographics, a 2017 study found that the introduction of online voting in Rio Grande do Sul did not lead to a systematic difference in vote choices between online and offline voters.
Telephones—both mobile and fixed landlines—have also been used to stimulate uptake of participatory budgeting processes. The municipality of Ipatinga was the first to employ telephony in 2005, by creating a toll-free number for citizens to indicate their preferences for budget allotments, and by sending automated voice and text messages incentivizing citizens to attend the participatory budgeting meetings. Although some initiatives have used text messages to enable mobile voting—such as in La Plata, Argentina and Cascais, Portugal—most usage has been to encourage voting participation, either in-person or via the Internet.
A participatory budgeting algorithm is sometimes used in order to calculate the budget allocation from the votes. This algorithm takes as input a list of projects, the available budget, and the voters' preferences, and returns an allocation of the budget among the projects satisfying some pre-defined requirements.