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).
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.
