Participatory Budgeting: A Framework to Analyze the Value-Add of Citizen Participation

Abstract

The dynamic and tremendous evolution of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has provided unique opportunities for citizen participation in democratic decision making processes. Such opportunities have been widely noted, in recent years, in processes like Participatory Budgeting (PB). From the originating practices of PB in Brazil, experiences of PB around the world have been uniquely exercised. While some processes leverage widely on the use of ICTs, others do not. The rationale of utilizing ICTs in PB processes with respect to challenges, benefits and resulted public value-add is still unclear. This has created a wide perspective on whether ICTs should be adopted in the traditional PB processes. This paper investigates the added public value through the use of ICTs in PB by comparing three models of participation in PB - offline, online and hybrid models. The comparison of these models reveals insights and understandings of diverse processes, challenges and underlying rationales of ICT use with respect to public value-add. In order to better understand the impact of ICTs to public value in PB, this paper proposes a framework for analyzing public value-add of ICT use in PB processes. The framework is used to assess ICT use in the three models of PB.