Participatory budgeting and urban sustainability: Reviewing lessons from Latin America

Abstract

The proliferation of citizen participation experiments in local budgeting processes that began in the early 1990s in Latin America under the name of participatory budgeting has continued to gather speed in the twenty-first century, both regionally and globally (Sintomer et al., 2010). Participatory budgeting (PB) is a process by which citizens, either as individuals or through civic associations, can voluntarily and regularly contribute to decision-making over at least part of a public budget, through an annual series of scheduled meetings with government authorities. Many academics, political activists, and international development agencies promote PB as a tool for improving local government by, for example, helping to achieve greater accountability and responsiveness, reducing corruption, stimulating civic associations, and expanding access to urban services (see Goldfrank, 2011). Environmental concerns have not figured prominently in studies of PB; yet, with Latin America’s high urbanization rate and vulnerability to environmental hazards, which scientists expect will worsen with climate change (Hardoy & Romero-Lankao, 2011), some scholars in the recent literature on sustainability have suggested PB as a potential means of incorporating citizen participation into environmental management and promoting sustainable development (Satterthwaite, 2011). The Brazilian city of Porto Alegre hosts the best-known PB process, and is often cited as an example. However, at the same time as academic attention has intensified, an increasing number of scholars are beginning to note that the results of PB show substantial variation across cities and countries, often not corresponding to what its promoters expect; and that in many places that experimented with PB, it was soon abandoned (Goldfrank, 2007; Costa, 2010; Spada, 2010). Therefore, both the utility of PB as well as its own sustainability have come into question.