Unraveled Practices of Participatory Budgeting in European Democracies

Juraj Nemec,Michiel S. de Vries,David Špaček

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-79930-4_15

Abstract

AbstractThe goal of the final chapter was to summarize lessons about the worst and best practices, causes, and effects of (successful or unsuccessful) participatory budgeting, delivered by the country case studies included in this book. The information collected serves to check to what extent participatory budgeting as practiced in the countries involved presents a real attempt to change municipal budgets toward addressing the needs of marginalized groups and to improve decision-making based on local democracy and participation, or whether these processes as such are to be judged to be more important than any output and outcomes. All in all, the practices of PB as they evolved in European countries out of the innovative original as developed in Porto Alegre in the 1990s can be seen neither as a process of policy diffusion nor as a process of policy mimesis. The terminology of participatory budgeting remained, but the goals and tools to achieve the goals resulted only in marginal changes in the status quo in municipalities in European countries practicing participatory budgeting, instead of resulting in radical changes to increase spending in favor of marginalized groups. Participatory budgeting in selected European countries is far away from the level of “best practice” in which local democracy and participation are promoted. However, it is also not possible to conclude that all experiences are just “trivial pursuits”.

Highlights

The goal of this final chapter is to summarize lessons about the worst and best practices, causes, and effects of participatory budgeting, delivered by the country case studies included in thisM
It does not assume that the policies copied remained identical to the original, but asked instead to what extent deviations from the original are visible in the policy transfer and what this implies for the practices
The first three cases covered in this volume—Germany, Italy, and Sweden— serve as the benchmark for the evaluation of the PB practices in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries that are the main focus of this book

Summary

15.1 Introduction

The goal of this final chapter is to summarize lessons about the worst and best practices, causes, and effects of (successful or unsuccessful) participatory budgeting, delivered by the country case studies included in this. The information collected serves to check to what extent participatory budgeting as practiced in the countries involved presents a real attempt to change municipal budgets toward addressing the needs of marginalized groups and to improve decision-making based on local democracy and participation, or whether these processes as such are to be judged to be more important than any output and outcomes. It does not assume that the policies copied remained identical to the original, but asked instead to what extent deviations from the original are visible in the policy transfer and what this implies for the practices This question better fits within theories on policy transfer in which policy transfer is defined as a process in which policies implemented elsewhere are examined by rational political actors for their potential utilization within another political system The effect is that only a few citizens participate, and the municipal budget is hardly affected

15.2 Participatory Budgeting in Selected “Old Democracies”

15.3 Participatory Budgeting in Central and Eastern Europe

15.3.1 Developments of Participatory Budgeting in the CEE Region

15.3.4 What Are the Outcomes of Participatory Budgeting in the CEE Region?

Findings

15.4 Conclusions