Participatory Budgeting: a developing country process?
A comparative analysis of the experiences of PB in Brazil, France
and Spain.
Abstract
An increased dissatisfaction and disbelief toward modern democracy resulted in the revival of deliberative democracy and of experiments, such as participatory budgeting (PB). PB is a process of conjoint decision making through which citizens and local governments deicide on the final allocation of new public investment budget in their cities. While the Brazilian experiments of PB have been extensively researched, those in Europe have not. Therefore this research project endeavours to fill the gaps of the literature concerning the nature of PB and its applicability to developed countries, particularly in Spain and France. In so doing, it will compare the experience of French, Spanish and Brazilian cities and attempt to determine the influences of the contexts on their PB experiments. The main results from this comparative analysis are that the effects of contextual variables are mediated by the procedural ones. Therefore, PB can be adapted to different contexts by changing the procedural variables. However, five key PB practices have to be respected for PB to keep its essence. Moreover, this research has also focused on the under-researched but crucial links that exists between PB and deliberative theory and the respective insights that they can convey to each other.
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