Politics & Society Participatory Budgeting as if Emancipation Mattered (original) (raw)
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Participatory Budgeting: As if Emancipation Mattered
Politics & Society 2014, 42: 29-50
Participatory Budgeting has by now been widely discussed, and often celebrated, now instituted in at least 1,500 cities worldwide. Some of its central features - its structure of open meetings, its yearly cycle, and its combination of deliberation and representation are by now well-known. In this paper, however, we critically reflect on its global travel and argue for more careful consideration of some of its less well-known features, namely, the coupling of the budgeting meetings with the exercise of power. We disaggregate PB into its communicative and empowerment dimensions and argue that its empowerment dimensions have usually not been part of its global expansion and this is cause for concern from the point of view of emancipation. In this paper we thus discuss the specific institutional reforms associated with empowerment in the original version as well as its analytic dimensions. We also address some of the specific dangers of a communication-only version of PB as well as some suggestions for reintroducing empowerment.
Participatory Budgeting as if Emancipation Mattered.pdf
Participatory Budgeting has by now been widely discussed, and often celebrated, now instituted in at least 1,500 cities worldwide. Some of its central features-its structure of open meetings, its yearly cycle, and its combination of deliberation and representation are by now well-known. In this paper, however, we critically reflect on its global travel and argue for more careful consideration of some of its less well-known features, namely, the coupling of the budgeting meetings with the exercise of power. We disaggregate PB into its communicative and empowerment dimensions and argue that its empowerment dimensions have usually not been part of its global expansion and this is cause for concern from the point of view of emancipation. In this paper we thus discuss the specific institutional reforms associated with empowerment in the original version as well as its analytic dimensions. We also address some of the specific dangers of a communication-only version of PB as well as some suggestions for reintroducing empowerment.
The Democratic Contribution of Participatory Budgeting
Participatory Budgeting (PB) has emerged as one of the major innovations in participatory governance for local management and local democracy world-wide. With more than 14,000 experiences recorded in over forty countries, PB is gradually changing the living conditions of increasing numbers of citizens across the world. Highly heterogeneous in processes and underlying ambitions, PB in its diversity provides a challenging alternative to the New Public Management-informed route to public sector reform. In most cases, PB has positively contributed to administrative modernization and other ‘good governance’ imperatives, including bringing substance to decentralization policies. In its most radical incarnations, PB has moreover contributed to inversing established spatial, social and political priorities in cities, in favour of the more deprived. This working paper briefly introduces the world-wide expansion of PB and the heterogeneity of current experiences (section 1) before proposing two analytical frameworks to help differentiate between them. The first is an analytical grid that enables the ‘grading’ of PB experiments according to certain key processes. This is both useful for comparative purposes and as and advocacy tool to orient or re-orient PB practices in a given city or locality (section 2). The second analytical tool proposes a synthesis of the grid’s findings by bringing out, in a succinct fashion, the highly divergent logics underpinning PB experiments in practice. These logics can be described as political (for radical democratic change), managerial and technocratic (to improve municipal finance transparency and optimize the use of public resources for citizens’ benefit) or good governance driven (to improve links between the public and citizens spheres). In section three, we explore four prominent experiences from diverse political systems to illustrate these logics: Seville, Spain and Chengdu, China (political); Solingen, Germany (managerial and technocratic); and Dondo, Mozambique (good governance). Finally, we close the chapter with an assessment of PB’s major contributions to democratic governance, as well as its on-going challenges and limitations to date (section 4).
Working Paper Series 2015 No . 15-168 The Democratic Contribution of Participatory Budgeting
2015
Participatory Budgeting (PB) has emerged as one of the major innovations in participatory governance for local management and local democracy world-wide. With more than 14,000 experiences recorded in over forty countries, PB is gradually changing the living conditions of increasing numbers of citizens across the world. Highly heterogeneous in processes and underlying ambitions, PB in its diversity provides a challenging alternative to the New Public Management-informed route to public sector reform. In most cases, PB has positively contributed to administrative modernization and other ‘good governance’ imperatives, including bringing substance to decentralization policies. In its most radical incarnations, PB has moreover contributed to inversing established spatial, social and political priorities in cities, in favour of the more deprived. This working paper briefly introduces the world-wide expansion of PB and the heterogeneity of current experiences (section 1) before proposing t...
The Power of Ambiguity: How Participatory Budgeting Travels the Globe
From its inception in Brazil in the late 1980s, Participatory Budgeting has now been instituted in over 1500 cities worldwide. This paper discusses what actually travels under the name of Participatory Budgeting. We rely on science studies for a fundamental insight: it is not enough to simply speak of “diffusion” while forgetting the way that the circulation and translation of an idea fundamentally transform it (Latour 1987). In this case, the travel itself has made PB into an attractive and politically malleable device by reducing and simplifying it to a set of procedures for the democratization of demand-making. The relationship of those procedures to the administrative machinery is ambiguous, but fundamentally important for the eventual impact of Participatory Budgeting in any one context.
International Diffusion of Participatory Budgeting Practices
International Conference on Policy Difuson and Development, 2018
One of the most remarkable examples of international diffusion of public policies in the 21 st century is the case of Participatory Budgeting (PB). From the first experiences in Brazil to today, PB practices spread all over the world in a huge diversity of models and contexts. Today, there are around 2.500 experiences related with the label PB all over the world. All of them are based on a common basis, the direct participation of the citizens on the decision making process on a wide range of public policies, from investments to the overall public management. Those different experiences have in common the political will to transform the patterns of the relationship between the state and the citizens in a more democratic way. And after almost thirty years of PD experiences there is a relatively high level of consensus in the specialized literature that PB "increases civic participation, reduces corruption, makes government more accountable, and implement projects that benefit the public" (Menser, 2017:67) The dissemination of PB provided new dimensions of democratic practices in the implementation of public policies, in a moment of a generalized distrust of the political systems all over the world. Representative democracy is in crisis, and PB may represent an alternative to recover the confidence in politics. The theoretical reflection on the subject highlights the potential of PB as a tool to renovate the democratic process. For some authors PB represents a step in the direction of a new participatory form of democracy (Cabbanes 2004, Sintomer 2002) that could overcome the traditional of clientelism on the relation of the state and the citizens (Abers, 1998), others stand out the dimension of empowerment and the protagonism of the social movements (Fung and Wright
Environment and Urbanization, 2018
Abstract Participatory budgeting (PB) has been a major innovation in participatory governance worldwide, with more than 3,000 experiences listed across 40 countries. PB has also diversified over its 30 years, with many contemporary experiments (referred to as PBs) only tangentially related to the original project to “radically democratize democracy”. We propose a taxonomy to distinguish the logics currently underpinning PB in practice: political (for radical democratic change), good governance (to improve links between the public and citizens’ spheres), and technocratic (to optimize the use and transparency of public resources for citizens’ benefit). Illustrating these competing rationales through contemporary experiences, we reflect on the contributions of the good governance and technocratic frameworks to managerial and state modernization. Undoubtedly, these help explain PB’s growing attraction for proponents of the good governance agenda. However, rekindling PB’s promise for democratic deepening, we argue, requires refocusing on its deliberative quality. We draw attention to civic education and empowerment of participants as key components of PB practices intent on opening pathways towards alternative political systems – indeed, of materializing Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city”.
Participatory Budgeting: Heading Towards a ‘Civil’ Democracy?
This paper provides a theoretical evaluation of the recent spread of participatory budgeting practices worldwide. Several different participatory initiatives are emerging, but participatory budgeting (PB) seems to be the most valid option for dealing with the crisis of democracy. PB is discussed from the background of the various approaches of democratic theory and the implications on the discourse of the governance role of civil society. The systemic involvement of civil society actors through multiple, open and deliberative arenas make PB not just an example of participatory democracy among the others but, rather, a potentially new model of ‘civil’ representative democracy
Unraveled Practices of Participatory Budgeting in European Democracies
International Trends in Participatory Budgeting
The goal of the final chapter was to summarize lessons about the worst and best practices, causes, and effects of (successful or unsuccessful) participatory budgeting, delivered by the country case studies included in this book. The information collected serves to check to what extent participatory budgeting as practiced in the countries involved presents a real attempt to change municipal budgets toward addressing the needs of marginalized groups and to improve decision-making based on local democracy and participation, or whether these processes as such are to be judged to be more important than any output and outcomes. All in all, the practices of PB as they evolved in European countries out of the innovative original as developed in Porto Alegre in the 1990s can be seen neither as a process of policy diffusion nor as a process of policy mimesis. The terminology of participatory budgeting remained, but the goals and tools to achieve the goals resulted only in marginal changes in ...