Participatory Budgeting in Europe: Potentials and Challenges

Abstract

The 'transfer' of participatory budgeting from Brazil

¿Participar para transformar? La experiencia de los presupuestos participativos en la provincia de Barcelona

“…Los casos de Barcelona se asemejan a la mayoría de experiencias conocidas a nivel internacional (Sintomer, 2005;Sintomer et al, 2008) en el sentido que la participación se centra en el gasto y no en los ingresos municipales y también en el sentido que, mayoritariamente, la participación concierne a las inversiones municipales, excluyéndose otros capí-tulos (Tabla 3) 10 .…”

“…También en Europa empezaron a llegar las primeras experiencias de Presupuestos Participativos a finales de los años 90. Una investigación realizada en 2005 contaba por aquel entonces 55 experiencias en Europa, el 25% de las cuales se estaban desarrollando en España (Sintomer et al, 2008). Ganuza y Gómez (2008) identificaron 22 casos en España con anterioridad a las elecciones municipales de 2007.…”

Involving citizens in public decision making: the case of participatory budgeting in Lithuania

“…-Encourage citizen participation in public decision making in an organized and enduring way. -Study the process of participatory budgeting that has been successfully implemented in Brazil and some experiments in European countries: Spain (Cordoba, Albacete and Sevilla), Italy (Pieve Emmanuele, Grottammare), Belgium (Mons), and others (Sintomer et al, 2008).…”

Peru’s Participatory Budgeting: Configurations of Power, Opportunities for Change

“…PB-experiences need time to mature; some scholars have correctly warned that a meaningful assessment of PBs impact can only be undertaken after circa 8-10 years, or two government terms [18]. In the current article we will, hence, not attempt to provide an impact assessment; rather we will attempt to interpret the trends that can be discerned in the implementation of PB in Peru 3 . We will do so by contrasting the origins and PB-rules and regulations as developed in Peru with its source of inspiration: the Orcamento Participativo from Porto Alegre, which is also the case on which most expectations of PBs transformative potential are based.…”

“…Cabannes [1] estimated that at least 1000 out of Latin America's 16.000 municipalities have introduced participatory budgeting. Recently published case-studies on civic participation in sub-national budgeting show that experiments with Participatory Budgeting are becoming wide-spread, ranging from countries as wide apart as Bangladesh, Russia, South Africa, The Philippines, India, Thailand and the Ukraine [2] to over 100 municipalities in seven European countries [3].…”