Participatory budgeting: Adults and young people making investments in their communities

This paper takes a practitioner’s perspective of the transfer and development of participatory budgeting (PB) processes from their Latin American roots in the late 1980s to becoming a part of the local regeneration and empowerment policies championed by New Labour in the UK, typified by the launch in 2008 of a National PB Strategy. It describes some of the reasons for this transfer of ideas, and the models of PB being experimented with in England by an increasing number of local authorities. The author sees PB as an innovative mechanism for increasing citizen participation in local democratic decision making and one effective in strengthening civil society at the local level. It is argued that PB can stimulate innovative investment in local community groups and organisations, and contribute to a better distribution of public investments while also building up social capital and community learning. The paper describes a number of situations where PB has been piloted in deprived communities in England. Towards the end, it focuses on how some young people have been able to learn about democratic decision making through PB. The author argues that they develop greater confidence about taking part in democratic processes and gain budgeting and literacy skills that can contribute to their becoming more active and engaged citizens in later life. It is proposed that processes like participatory budgeting will continue to grow and evolve in the UK and elsewhere, and some requirements are listed that need to be met to avoid PB processes becoming tokenistic, marginal in their effect, or manipulated by vested interests.