Abstract
There is rising scholarly and political interest in participatory budgets and their potential to advance urban sustainability. This article aims to contribute to this field of study through the specific lens of the city of Lisbon’s experience as an internationally acknowledged leader in participatory budgeting. To this end, the article critically examines the lessons and potential contribution of the Lisbon Participatory Budget through a multimethod approach. Emerging trends and variations of citizen proposals, projects, votes, and public funding are analysed in tandem with emerging key topics that show links and trade-offs between locally embedded participation and the international discourse on urban sustainability. Our analysis reveals three interconnected findings: first, the achievements of the Lisbon Participatory Budget show the potential to counteract the dominant engineered approach to urban sustainability; second, trends and variations of the achievements depend on both citizens’ voice and the significant influence of the city council through policymaking; and, third, the shift towards a thematic Green Participatory Budget in 2020 was not driven by consolidated social and political awareness on the achievements, suggesting that more could be achieved through the 2021 urban sustainability oriented Participatory Budget. We conclude recommending that this kind of analysis should be systematically carried out and disseminated within city council departments, promoting much needed internal awareness of PBs’ potential as drivers of urban sustainability. We also identify further research needed into the sustainability potential of green PBs.
Highlights
In the last few decades, spreading scepticism towards democratically elected governments and their institutions, along with a shared need to improve democratic decisionmaking, has convinced public authorities to promote participatory processes in policy making [1,2]
Our study aimed to contribute to the participatory dimension of urban sustainability agendas through the specific lens of participatory budgets, by asking what are the lessons and potential contributions of the Lisbon PB experience towards urban sustainability, and analysing in detail Lisbon’s developments in this field, keeping in mind the failed attempt to implement a Green PB in 2020, and the ongoing sustainability-oriented PB in
The Lisbon PB demonstrated considerable achievements in the “environment, green structure and energy” thematic area, corroborating the idea that citizens are interested in promoting urban sustainability
Summary
In the last few decades, spreading scepticism towards democratically elected governments and their institutions, along with a shared need to improve democratic decisionmaking, has convinced public authorities to promote participatory processes in policy making [1,2]. At the end of the 1980s, a particular category of participatory practices came to the fore: Participatory Budgets (PB hereafter). Initiated in Latin America, PBs provided new impetus to participatory processes by allocating a share of the local public budget to citizen-led initiatives. While aiming to get the most marginalised groups of civil society closer to democratic institutions and representatives, PBs were celebrated by movements and parties on the left of the political spectrum for their capacity to foster social justice, transparency, and accountability [3,4]. The magnitude of its dissemination reached the five continents, with
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