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ABSTRACT:Participatory Budgeting has by now been widely discussed, and often celebrated, now instituted in at least 1,500 cities worldwide. Some of its central features -its structure of open meetings, its yearly cycle, and its combination of deliberation and representation are by now well-known. In this paper, however, we critically reflect on its global travel and argue for more careful consideration of some of its less well-known features, namely, the coupling of the budgeting meetings with the exercise of power. We disaggregate PB into its communicative and empowerment dimensions and argue that its empowerment dimensions have usually not been part of its global expansion and this is cause for concern from the point of view of emancipation. In this paper we thus discuss the specific institutional reforms associated with empowerment in the original version as well as its analytic dimensions. We also address some of the specific dangers of a communication-only version of PB as well as some suggestions for reintroducing empowerment.

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From its inception in Brazil in the late 1980s, Participatory Budgeting has now been instituted in over 1500 cities worldwide. This paper discusses what actually travels under the name of Participatory Budgeting. We rely on science studies for a fundamental insight: it is not enough to simply speak of "diffusion" while forgetting the way that the circulation and translation of an idea fundamentally transform it (Latour 1987). In this case, the travel itself has made PB into an attractive and politically malleable device by reducing and simplifying it to a set of procedures for the democratization of demand-making. The relationship of those procedures to the administrative machinery is ambiguous, but fundamentally important for the eventual impact of Participatory Budgeting in any one context.