Participatory Budgeting and Its Implementation Within The Self-Governing Regions in Slovakia

Abstract

At present, the influence of individual communities of interest on the financing of regional development projects as a space for civic activities in the public interest provided as publicly available services that the region is not executing in an unsatisfactory manner or is not executing at all for various reasons is actively resonating). The article deals with the issue of participatory budgeting as one of the latest budgetary innovations in the field of public sector management and aims to identify the challenges and barriers to the implementation of participatory budgeting in Slovakia at the regional level. It also analyses the implementation of this tool in the regional authorities in the conditions of the Slovak Republic before and during the Covid-19 pandemic, which has significantly affected public budgets and their redistribution. The methodological approach applied in this research includes a systematic review of the literature on participatory budgeting concerning analyses, comparisons, clarification of causal relations, systematization, abstraction, and concretization, and results of researchers´ activities related to the subject of the conducted research. The chapter “Results” presents the findings of a survey carried out in all eight regional authorities of self-governing regions, and show the extent to which the issue in question has been affected by the ongoing pandemic. The paper provides an overview of the challenges and barriers to PB in Slovakia at the regional level.