Civic Participation in the State Budget

The blueprints in this guide demonstrate pathways through which citizens can engage with their governments by sharing their priorities and ideas for a better distribution of state resources.This is one of the core ideas behind a public engagement model called participatory budgeting. In its various forms, participatory budgeting follows a participatory process that allows citizens to identify, discuss, and prioritise public spending projects, and gives them the power to make real decisions about how money is spent.

Participatory budgeting as a practice started in Porto Alegre, Brazil and today, boasts of over 2700 instances across the Americas, Africa, Europe and Asia. Increasing civic participation in budgets has been linked to a more equitable redistribution of state resources among citizens and improved accountability from their governments (Hong and Cho 2018).

References

Learn more about participatory budgeting from the folks at Participatory Budgeting Project - https://www.participatorybudgeting.org/white-paper/

Hong, Sounman, and B Shine Cho. 2018. “Citizen Participation and the Redistribution of Public Goods.” Public Administration 96 (3): 481–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12521.