Contributions of Participatory Budgeting to climate change adaptation and mitigation. Current local practices around the world & lessons from the field

This report builds on the contributions from two international sessions on the contributions of participatory budgeting (PB) to climate change adaptation and mitigation. It also draws on PB initiatives in 15 participating cities and regions from different continents. Its first objective is to describe and understand what is actually happening in the field and explore the extent to which PB contributes to climate change adaptation and mitigation, how it does so, and the current challenges facing PB actors. It assesses the nature and importance of these contributions: Are they marginal or not? How many projects are implemented each year? What do they cost and where do the resources come from? It highlights the numerous innovations that actors have introduced to integrate PB into climate adaptation and mitigation efforts. It finally raises questions for future explorations and advocates for climate-related participatory budgeting, raising awareness on its huge (and as yet largely untapped) potential to help addressing the dramatic impacts that climate change has on millions of people’s lives

Financing urban agriculture

For most small urban farmers, the lack of access to financing is a major bottleneck in their capacity to maintain and expand their activities, and more generally in the potential for scaling up affordable food production in cities. This paper reports on action research undertaken by local teams in 17 cities of different size in Latin America, Asia and Africa. In each city, the teams examined how urban farmers are financing their activities along the value chain, essentially with their own resources, what the gaps are between their needs and the existing practices of public and private institutions with regard to finance, and what mechanisms and innovations can help to close this gap. Financing is defined here as a complex, dynamic combination of resource mobilization, both monetary and non-monetary, plus savings, subsidies and credits

Revisitando las promesas democráticas del presupuesto participativo, a la luz de lógicas antagónicas de radicalización política, de buena gobernanza y tecnocrática

El presupuesto participativo (PP) ha sido una innovación democrática de suma importancia a nivel mundial, con más de 6000 experiencias identificadas en por lo menos 40 países en 2018. El PP se ha diversificado durante sus 30 años de existencia, con numerosos experimentos, también denominados PP, solo tangencialmente relacionados con el proyecto original de “democratizar radicalmente la democracia”. Proponemos una taxonomía para distinguir las lógicas que respaldan actualmente los PsPs en la práctica: radicalización política (apuntando hacia un cambio democrático radical), de buena gobernanza (para mejorar las relaciones entre la esfera pública y los ciudadanos) y tecnocrática (para optimizar el uso y transparencia de los recursos públicos para el beneficio de los ciudadanos). Al ilustrar estas lógicas antagónicas a través de experiencias contemporáneas, reflejamos sobre las contribuciones de la buena gobernanza y de los marcos tecnocráticos a la modernización del estado y de la gestión urbana. Sin duda alguna, estas dos lógicas ayudan a explicar la creciente atracción de los PP a partidarios de la agenda de la buena gobernanza. Sin embargo, sostenemos que, para reavivar la promesa de los PsPs como instrumento de profundización de la democracia, se requiere volver a priorizar su calidad deliberativa. Resaltamos la educación cívica y el empoderamiento de los participantes como componentes clave de los PsPs para abrir caminos hacia sistemas políticos alternativos, materializando de esta forma los ideales del Derecho a la Ciudad, propuestos por Henri Lefebvre hace 50 años

Urban and Peri-urban agriculture, social inclusion of migrant population and right to the city:practices in Lisbon and London

Two main questions are addressed in this paper, namely: to what extent can urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) contribute to the social inclusion of migrants? And does UPA practised by urban farmers of foreign origin contribute to the expansion of biodiversity in cities? A comparative analysis of current peri-urban agriculture practices in Lisbon and London was carried out in allotment gardens and other spaces far from the centre in and on the edges of these capital cities. In both cases, a significant proportion of the migrant population is involved in two different frameworks: regulated in London and non-regulated in Lisbon. The paper concludes that patterns of social inclusion are quite city specific: urban farming communities from the Cape Verde islands maintain and strengthen community bonds through their activity but this does not necessary lead to better social integration within the wider Portuguese society. In London, migrants of foreign origin become part of an integrated communitarism on an individual basis. Concerning the contribution of peri-urban agriculture to biodiversity, evidence gathered strongly suggests that urban farmers of foreign origin do contribute to broadening biodiversity primarily in Lisbon and to a lesser extent in London. Final observations note to what extent these urban practices contribute to the Right to the City and thus if they are, more broadly, of an emancipatory and transformative nature

Revisiting the democratic promise of participatory budgeting in light of competing political, good governance and technocratic logics

Participatory budgeting (PB) has been a major innovation in participatory governance worldwide, with more than 3,000 experiences listed across 40 countries. PB has diversified over its 30 years, with many contemporary experiments (referred to as PBs) only tangentially related to the original project to "radically democratize democracy”. We propose a taxonomy to distinguish the logics currently underpinning PB in practice: political (for radical democratic change), good governance (to improve links between the public and citizens’ spheres), and technocratic (to optimize the use and transparency of public resources for citizens’ benefit). Illustrating these competing rationales through contemporary experiences, we reflect on the contributions of the good governance and technocratic frameworks to managerial and state modernization. These help explain PB’s growing attraction for proponents of the good governance agenda. Rekindling PB’s promise for democratic deepening, we argue, requires refocusing on its deliberative quality. We draw attention to civic education and empowerment of participants. These are key to PBs’ intent to open pathways towards alternative political systems – indeed, of materializing Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city”

The Core of the Participatory Budgeting Problem

In participatory budgeting, communities collectively decide on the allocation of public tax dollars for local public projects. In this work, we consider the question of fairly aggregating the preferences of community members to determine an allocation of funds to projects. This problem is different from standard fair resource allocation because of public goods: The allocated goods benefit all users simultaneously. Fairness is crucial in participatory decision making, since generating equitable outcomes is an important goal of these processes. We argue that the classic game theoretic notion of core captures fairness in the setting. To compute the core, we first develop a novel characterization of a public goods market equilibrium called the Lindahl equilibrium, which is always a core solution. We then provide the first (to our knowledge) polynomial time algorithm for computing such an equilibrium for a broad set of utility functions; our algorithm also generalizes (in a non-trivial way) the well-known concept of proportional fairness. We use our theoretical insights to perform experiments on real participatory budgeting voting data. We empirically show that the core can be efficiently computed for utility functions that naturally model our practical setting, and examine the relation of the core with the familiar welfare objective. Finally, we address concerns of incentives and mechanism design by developing a randomized approximately dominant-strategy truthful mechanism building on the exponential mechanism from differential privacy

The MESANGE model: re-estimation on National Accounts base 2000 / Part 2 Version with chained-linked volumes

Mesange is a medium-size quarterly macro-econometric model of the French economy (about 500 equations, three sectors). The model describes short-term Keynesian dynamics and its long-term equilibrium is driven by supply-side determinants. Its reestimation on data from the national accounts base 2000 with fixed-base volumes is presented in a recent working paper (Klein and Simon, 2010). This first version of the model has been optimized for simulation use. Other applications of the Mesange model (short-term forecasting, analyses of the past) required its adaptation to the published data from the quarterly accounts with chained-linked volumes, as well as the integration of the recent crisis episode. A second version of the Mesange model has, therefore, been developed for this purpose. This version is presented in this working paper. First, the problems raised for macroeconomic modelling by national accounts with chained-linked volumes are explained and the solutions chosen to adapt the model to these new conventions are discussed. The applications of the version of the model with chained-linked volumes are, then, explained and illustrated with examples. Last, the main reestimated equations are detailed. The differences with respect to the version of the model with fixed-base volumes are commented. They stem from estimations based on non-identical data, but also from the different uses made of the two versions of Mesange and the resulting various needs and constraints that have conditioned the methodological choices that have been made. As for the version of the model with chained-linked volumes, priority has been given to the quality of the adjustment to the data rather than to the underlying theoretical framework. Nonetheless, the philosophy and general structure of the two versions of the model remain very much alike.macroeconometric model, estimation, chained-linked volumes, short-term forecasting, contribution analysis