A Better World is Possible: Strengthening Civic Participation and Local Democracy Through Participatory Budgeting

By Art Keene

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Note: This is the second of two articles  exploring participatory budgeting (PB) as a way to build greater civic participation and inject more creativity and diversity into local governance. Our previous article on how to start a participatory budget program can be viewed here. 

This article offers three case studies of participatory budgeting, two from the United States and one from Brazil, in order to give a bit more information about how it works and what it can offer in terms of meeting community needs and strengthening democracy. Because the range of applications and practices is considerable, I also provide a reading list with links to other participatory budgeting case studies and resources.

More than a decade ago, I attended a participatory budgeting expo in Park Slope, Brooklyn, at which residents viewed presentations on proposed projects from  a variety of community groups in advance of a local vote to determine which projects would receive funding.  The amount set aside for participatory budgeting varies from community to community and from year to year. In 2022 it was $1.5 million in Park Slope, and this is a function of the larger budgeting process The project proposals I saw were creative and diverse, and addressed a wide range of community needs.

The Amherst Home Rule Charter Section 10.11 mandates the formation of a commission to propose “a measure to adopt participatory budgeting or other similar method of resident participation in the budgeting process of Amherst.” The commission was to have presented their report to the Town Council by December 1, 2020, but because of COVID precautions, they did not meet for several months and received an extension to June 1, 2021. On June 28, the commission issued a final report concluding that the town did not, at that time, have the financial resources to adopt a participatory budgeting process and should seek other ways  to increase citizen participation. More recently, the League of Women Voters Amherst, recommended that the town follow through on the charter mandate to adopt participatory budgeting.

Review: What is Participatory Budgeting?
Sources: Participatory Budgeting Project, Wikipedia; Participedia.org

PB is a democratic process in which community members decide how to spend part of a public budget. It gives people real power over real money. PB started in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989, as an anti-poverty measure (see below). Since then, PB has spread to over 7,000 cities around the world and has been used to shape budgets from states, counties, cities, housing authorities, schools, and other institutions.

PB varies considerably across the globe in terms of the kinds of projects supported, the civic sectors where it is applied, the amount of money allocated, and the segments of local residents involved. Details of protocols vary but most programs share these features.

1. The municipality determines how much it will make available to the public to spend on projects important to them and defines the areas of public spending to which projects may be proposed (e.g. transportation, education, recreation). This is typically incorporated into the annual budget cycle.

2. Proposals for civic/municipal projects are solicited from residents.

3. Proposals are refined and a shortlist of proposal is developed.

4. The public votes to determine which projects are to be funded.

5. Projects receiving the most votes are funded and implemented.

The New York Times called PB “revolutionary civics in action.” It deepens democracy, builds stronger communities, and creates a more equitable distribution of public resources.  

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Of interest to local readers might be the way that PB has been used elsewhere to address current and sometimes contentious concerns in Amherst like youth empowerment, fair and affordable housing, sustainability, and distribution of ARPA funds. PB has also been shown to broaden and diversify public participation and has been especially effective at significantly increasing participation of members of communities that are not well represented in government.

Here, we consider three prominent uses of PB, offering a glimpse of its possibilities: Boston; Vallejo, California; and Porto Allegre, Brazil, where it originated. 

The Case Studies

Youth Empowerment in Boston 

Source: boston.gov

In 2014, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino sought a way to empower youth (age 12–25) to become active participants in local civic affairs with the creation of Youth Lead the Change, a participatory budgeting program designed to empower young residents to directly determine annually the allocation of $1 million in city funds. As the first youth-focused participatory budgeting initiative in the United States, this program invited young people to identify community needs, propose innovative solutions, and vote on projects that would positively impact their neighborhoods. Through this process, participants gained valuable civic engagement experience while fostering a sense of ownership and responsibility for their community. By involving youth in the decision-making process, the program not only empowered them to take an active role in shaping their communities but also helped build a more inclusive, responsive, and equitable city.

Each year city youth are invited to submit proposals that meet the following criteria:

• It is a “capital” expense, meaning it calls for building or creating something physical. Example: Adding shelter beds, not hiring additional staff)
• It’s something the City of Boston government can do. (Example: Happens in schools or on streets, not on the MBTA.)
• It would cost up to $1 million. (Example: Renovating an existing space, not building one from scratch.)

Examples of projects that were funded are: free public wifi (Wicked Free Wifi), renovating neighborhood basketball courts, installing solar-powered benches in parks, and painting murals on Boston Housing Authority properties. 

In the 2024 cycle, more than 450 ideas were submitted, 14 made it onto the ballot, and seven were selected by the city’s youth for implementation. The top two vote getters were:

Boston Shelters 2.0. Funding improvements to emergency shelters with renovations to enhance the quality of life for those sheltering there.

Next Level Sports: Upgrading youth sports facilities such as gyms, pools and other spaces at Boston Community Centers

The program has been so successful that in 2023 Mayor Michelle Wu launched Ideas in Action, a city-wide participatory budgeting program, open to all residents, offering them the opportunity to determine which ideas would receive a portion of up $2 million annually.

Read more: Youth Lead the Change: Participatory Budgeting. Boston 2016 by Astraea Augsberger, Mary Collins, Whiteny Gecker, Katharine Lusk, and Meaghan Dougher

Economic Revival in Vallejo, California
Sources: Sharable.org, cityofvallejo.gov, Wikipedia, and Participedia.org

In 2011, the city of Vallejo, California emerged from bankruptcy and implemented PB on a city-wide scale. As the city emerged from bankruptcy it faced considerable public distrust due to a lack of transparency and accountability on the part of government and a recent history of little resident involvement. To counter this civic distrust, the city adopted a participatory budgeting process, inviting residents to help decide how to prioritize spending $3 million of revenue from the city’s Measure B sales tax. The program was enacted with the following goals:

• Improve the city’s infrastructure and services
• Engage the community by granting representation to underrepresented groups
•  Promote democracy by granting more decision power 
• Make government more transparent by creating a dialogue between citizens and the local government 

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The city convened multiple budget assemblies, in venues across the city (nine in the program’s first year), where residents could caucus in small groups and generate project ideas. The responsibility for refining these ideas was then handed off to a body of budget delegates that included members of government, representatives from a wide swathe of local civic organizations, and residents at large. The city then held three project expos in which budget delegates presented prospective projects to the public. Finally, the delegates created a ballot of projects (33 in the first year) from more than 800 ideas suggested and each resident aged 16 years or older had the opportunity to vote for up to six projects. More than 5,000 people participated in that first vote. 

Supported projects included community gardens, street lighting, road repairs, park improvements, youth and senior programs, college scholarships, and a spay-and-neuter program.

Impacts were recognized to be far reaching. Vallejo residents who participated in PB reported that their circles of acquaintances grew and they were more likely to cooperate with neighbors to take on community issues. PB has become a catalyst for Vallejo’s transformation, and residents have a restored sense of pride.

Porto Alegre, Brazil,  The Beginning of PB
Source; Local Government Association (UK), Wikipedia

Participatory budgeting was created in Porto Alegre, Brazil, a city of 1.3 million people, in 1989 and continued until 2017. It is widely considered to be the biggest and most successful use of participatory budgeting anywhere in the world with 17,200 citizens involved at its peak in 2002, and distributing around $160 million of public money. It has had powerful redistributive impacts as well becoming embedded in the institutional structure of municipal government.

The process was initially designed to challenge the corruption and clientelism endemic in Brazilian political culture at the time. It was particularly effective at mobilizing the poor and those who are often politically marginalized.

Budgeting happened annually, beginning with the presentation of accounts from the previous year by the city government. The government also presented its investment plan for the current year, which had been decided at the meetings from the year before. 

Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre involved three streams of meetings: neighborhood assemblies, thematic assemblies, and meetings of delegates for citywide coordinating sessions (the Council of the Participatory Budget).

The neighborhood assemblies discussed the funding allocations for the 16 districts of the city for the city government’s responsibilities including schools, water supply, and sewage. The meetings were divided into 16 ‘Great Assemblies’, held in public spaces such as churches and union centers across the city, open to all. These debates decide the criteria for which the budget is allocated in the districts – for example whether it is population, an index of poverty, or a measure of shortages.

City-wide popular assemblies were held in the thematic stream. These were established to deal with issues that are not neighborhood specific, such as environment, education, health, and social services and transportation. 

Each of the 16 districts gave two sets of rankings at the end of the deliberations: one for things that affect the district specifically, such as the building of schools or sewers; and another for things that affect the entire city, such as transport or beach cleaning. They also elected delegates who proceeded to the Council of the Participatory Budget (COP) with the districts’ suggestions. The role of the COP was to refine and apply the budget rules developed by the neighborhood and thematic assemblies and put forward by the government administration beforehand.

At this point, elected councilors accepted or rejected the budget, but in reality they had a fairly limited role. Delegates to the COP convened for two hours once a week, and only served for one year at a time to give as many people as possible the opportunity to participate.

The process was broadly considered an enormous success. Women, ethnic minorities, low-income and low-education participants were overrepresented when compared with the city’s population and consequently funding shifted to the poorest parts of the city where it was most needed. It brought those usually excluded from the political process into the heart of decision making, significantly increasing the power and influence of civil society and improving local people’s lives through the more effective allocation of resources.

Lessons Learned

• Increasing the percentage of the overall budget available for participatory budgeting leads to powerful redistributive impacts.
• Creating tiered meetings gives participatory budgeting the flexibility to work at local and regional levels – in this case, for districts,city, and region.
• Beginning with a government presentation of last year’s accounts increases the importance and legitimacy of the process – raising it to the level of government decisions on spending. 
• The creation of a participatory budgeting council increases deliberation and organizational effectiveness.

Read More Cases
Porto Allegre: Participatory Budgeting and the Challenge of Sustaining Transformative Change
People’s Budget Cleveland
Participatory Budgeting in Cambridge, MA
Community Led Recovery: ARPA Funds in Oregon
Real Money, Real Projects. Participatory Budgeting in New York City.
Where We Live, New York: A City-wide Participatory, Fair Housing Assessment Project.

Participatory Budgeting Resources
The Participatory Budgeting Project
Participatory Budgeting Reaches the Historically Disenfranchised
Participedia: The Participatory Budget Method
Making Participatory Budgeting Work: Experiences from the Front Lines