66 research outputs found

    Turning Ideas into Proposals : A Case for Blended Participation During the Participatory Budgeting Trial in Helsinki

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    Balancing between online-offline stages of participatory procedures is a delicate art that may support or hinder the success of participatory democracy. Participatory budgeting (PB), in particular, is generally rooted in online platforms, but as our case study on the City of Helsinki PB trial suggests, face-to-face events are necessary to engage targeted and often less resourceful actors in the process. Based on a longer-term participant observation, covering the PB process from its early to ideation phase to the current stage of proposal development for the final vote, we argue that the process has thus far been successful in blending online-offline components, largely supported by the active support of borough liaisons who have served as navigators between the different stages. From the point of view of co-creation, different stages of the PB process (ideation, co-creation) call for different strategies of online-offline participation. Effective mobilization of marginalized actors and interactions between public servants and citizens seem to benefit from face-to-face processes, while city-wide voting and discussion can effectively occur in the online platform.Peer reviewe

    The impact of Participatory Budgeting on health and wellbeing:A scoping review of evaluations

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    Background: Participatory budgeting (PB), citizens deliberating among themselves and with officials to decide how to allocate funds for public goods, has been increasingly implemented across Europe and worldwide. While PB is recommended as good practice by the World Bank and the United Nations, with potential to improve health and wellbeing, it is unclear what evaluations have been conducted on the impact of PB on health and wellbeing. Methods: For this scoping review, we searched 21 databases with no restrictions on publication date or language. The search term ‘participatory budget’ was used as the relevant global label for the intervention of interest. Studies were included if they reported original analysis of health, social, political, or economic and budgetary outcomes of PB. We examined the study design, analysis, outcomes and location of included articles. Findings are reported narratively. Results: From 1458 identified references, 37 studies were included. The majority of evaluations (n = 24) were of PB in South America, seven were in Europe. Most evaluations were case studies (n = 23) conducting ethnography and surveys, focussing on political outcomes such as participation in PB or impacts on political activities. All of the quantitative observational studies analysing population level data, except one in Russia, were conducted in South America. Conclusion: Despite increasing interest in PB, evaluations applying robust methods to analyse health and wellbeing outcomes are scarce, particularly beyond Brazil. Therefore, implementation of PB schemes should be accompanied by rigorous qualitative and quantitative evaluation to identify impacts and the processes by which they are realised

    Participatory Budgeting and Local Government in a Vertical Society: A Japanese Story

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    This article examines a case of participatory budgeting in Japanese local government. The article demonstrates how cultural values interact with stages of budgeting (in our case, the co-planning or consultation phase of budgeting). We find three key stakeholders – councillors, administrators and citizens – have varying degree of participation in the budget process. While direct citizen participation has been limited and challenging, we find that local associations and councillors work as lobbyists to influence the budget less publicly. The budget desk led by the mayor plays the dominant role. This article contributes to the broader debate on local government reforms and their translation into varied contexts by problematising such a linear adoption of knowledge from a cultural perspective

    Between Governance-Driven Democratisation and Democracy-Driven Governance: explaining changes in Participatory Governance in the Case of Barcelona

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    Scholars of participatory democracy have long noted dynamic interactions and transformations within and between political spaces that can foster (de)democratisation. At the heart of this dynamism lie (a) the processes through which top‐down “closed” spaces can create opportunities for rupture and democratic challenges and (b) vice‐versa, the mechanisms through which bottom‐up, open spaces can be co‐opted through institutionalisation. This paper seeks to unpick dynamic interactions between different spaces of participation by looking specifically at two forms of participatory governance, or participatory forms of political decision making used to improve the quality of democracy. First, Mark Warren's concept of ‘governance‐driven democratization’ describes top‐down and technocratic participatory governance aiming to produce better policies in response to bureaucratic rationales. Second, we introduce a new concept, democracy‐driven governance, to refer to efforts by social movements to invent new, and reclaim and transform existing, spaces of participatory governance and shape them to respond to citizens’ demands. The paper defines these concepts and argues that they co‐exist and interact in dynamic fashion; it draws on an analysis of case study literature on participatory governance in Barcelona to illuminate this relationship. Finally, the paper relates the theoretical framework to the case study by making propositions as to the structural and agential drivers of shifts in participatory governance

    Партисипативный бюджет: разнообразие форм и моделей

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    The article focuses on the participatory budget formation at the local level. The authors suggest the approach to the definition of the ‘participatory budget’, formulate the conditions for participatory budget formation, and summarize the current data on the implementation of the participatory budgeting in the international practice. The major attention is given to analyzing the models of participatory budget. The authors propose criteria for the models classification and describe the motivation of the key target groups in formulation of the participatory budget

    Citizens and participation

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