Abstract
This article pursues two main objectives. First, it provides a transnational overview and analysis of participatory budgeting, which has been central to the literature on democratic innovations in citizen participation. Second, it combines this broad empirical project with a theoretical approach based on the construction of ideal-types in the Weberian tradition. Namely, it presents six models of citizen participation: participatory democracy, proximity democracy, participative modernization, multi-stakeholder participation, neo-corporatism, and community development. Although these models have evolved from participatory budgeting and the European context, it is our contention that they can help us to understand the socio-political and ideological dynamics, contexts and impacts of civic engagement and democracy today at the transnational scale.
Highlights
We developed our transnational typology of citizen participation with two goals in mind: First, to conduct integrated fieldwork on participatory budgeting in more than 20 European cities, relying on the same methodology and the same concepts and to extend the methodology to other parts of the world where we can maintain the same definition of PB (Sintomer and al., 2008, 2013); Secondly, to facilitate comparisons between countries and continents with the goal of a global analysis of citizen participation and the interpretation of long-term developments
This article discusses the following questions: What kinds of PB programs exist today? How can we explain their different paths of diffusion, varying local adaptations and global spread? How are they linked to the six different models of participation we present? What are the advantages, challenges and impacts of these global models of participation? We answer these questions by (1) defining PB and describing its invention of PB in Porto Alegre, (2) analyzing its spread to Latin America, and (3) other parts in the world: Europe, Africa, and Asia
We have described the spread of participatory budgeting across the continents with a complex mix of transfers, adaptations and autochthonous innovations
Summary
Participatory budgeting spread first in Latin America during the early 1990s, and over the entire globe, hybridizing in contrasting ways. The main weakness is that the focus on annual investments has tended to side-line long-term investments, with the associated risk of PB decisions incurring expenses in the long run (maintenance and salaries) that are not sustainable (World Bank, 2008), or making it more difficult to develop a different urban form (Allegretti, 2003) Despite these limitations, Porto Alegre has been the most important transnational reference for participatory budgeting and has remained one of the most fascinating experiments. Porto Alegre has been the most important transnational reference for participatory budgeting and has remained one of the most fascinating experiments It has convinced alter-globalization activists as well as local governments and advisors from international organizations such as World Bank and UNDP to support PB. We need to see it in the broader context of Latin-America, where PB emanated
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