If you have not already heard the term participatory budgeting, or its abbreviation PB, you are likely to come across it with increasing frequency in 2009 and beyond.
In its broadest definition, PB is defined as the participation of citizens in the allocation of public resources. In other words, the public gets to decide, or help decide, how public money is spent, in a more direct way than simply deciding which politicians to elect to make spending decisions on their behalf.
The practice began in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 1989, with another Brazilian city, Belo Horizonte, also an early pioneer. But there are now some 1,500 cases around the world, with some public bodies having made PB a compulsory part of their budgeting exercises.
A more recent development is electronic PB, or e-PB – the use of the internet or other technologies to enhance the process of budget debate, deliberation, voting and decision-making.
One of Europe’s leading authorities on both PB and e-PB is Tiago Peixoto, a research associate at the University of Zurich e-Democracy Centre. Peixoto has recently described the use of e-PB in Belo Horizonte as “one of the most significant initiatives in the world in the domain of e-democracy,” given its extraordinarily high take-up levels of internet voting, at 10 per cent of all electors (see E-Government Bulletin, issue 273, http://www.headstar.com/egblive/?p=155).
Addressing a workshop on PB at the recent World E-Democracy Forum in Issy, Paris (http://www.edemocracy-forum.com/) Peixoto said that one of the reasons for such a high take-up was to be found in the efforts made by the authorities in Belo Horizonte to ensure no-one was left out, and that the process was not skewed by the existence of a digital divide.
The city provided 178 public internet access points manned by trained personnel, “so if you had never seen a computer before, there were people to help,” Peixoto said. Other measures included a mobile unit in a bus, and access at churches in what is a strongly Catholic country, “so when people left mass, they could vote.”
The result was that not only was there no evidence of socioeconomic bias in the electronic budget vote, but that the city’s poorest regions were among the top five neighbourhoods that voted the most. “It seems that those most in need of public goods were voting,” he said.
Areas of possible weakness included the fact that despite the high numbers voting, relatively few people used an online budget discussion forum, “so people will say there was no deliberation, so the vote was no good because people are just going to vote on first impressions,” Peixoto said. “But just because people didn’t use the forum, doesn’t mean people were not thinking about their reasons for voting.”
The Brazilian model was used as inspiration for the UK’s fledgling efforts at PB, when a delegation of local councillors was sent to Porto Alegre to see how it worked at first hand. The trip was supported by government funding channelled through the Participatory Budgeting Unit (PBU – http://www.participatorybudgeting.org.uk/), a project run by the Manchester-based charity Church Action on Poverty which has a hand in much current UK activity in this field.
The fact-finding mission was followed in 2004 with the launch of five PB pilots, in Lewisham, Harrow, Newcastle, Salford and Manchester, and today there are around 50 projects.
Ruth Jackson of the PBU told the workshop that the UK is unique in receiving support from central government for local PB projects, with a current champion in Communities and Local Government Secretary Hazel Blears, whose constituency is in Salford where the unit started work.
In all, around £10 million of UK public money has been allocated through PB since 2004, Jackson said. Most projects have involved residents voting at community or neighbourhood level on how to distribute small grants to voluntary and community groups.
An example was the ‘Udecide’ project in Newcastle, a two-year, £115,000 project in which children and young people were involved in deciding which of a group of local charity projects aimed at young people would receive funding (see http://www.newcastle.gov.uk/udecide).
The initiative saw “disadvantaged children voting, who would not normally get involved,” Jackson said.
The value of PB to engage people in the democratic process generally, often for the first time, can be seen even more starkly in the case of a project run in the Manton estate in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, where residents voted on how a £50,000 fund would be spent (see http://www.participatorybudgeting.org.uk/case-studies).
Turnout for local elections in Manton is just 22% of people entitled to vote, which means that most people have never voted at all, and distrust the entire political system, Jackson said.
By using real ballot boxes and asking people to post in monopoly money to show their spending priorities, the project attempted to build confidence in democracy, and the results seem positive: 61per cent of participants surveyed said they now felt more involved, and 59per cent said they felt they had made a difference.
In 2008 the Manton project has received £10,000 of extra funding from the local health service, which sees PB as a positive way of encouraging people to make positive choices about their health, Jackson said.
To date however, she said the UK projects have not involved much online activity, and e-PB as opposed to PB through physical meetings in halls and face to face debates and votes has yet to take off here.
There are a number of reasons for this reluctance, she said. First, despite the Brazilian experience, Jackson said there is concern in the UK that e-PB would lead to unfair representation among certain groups. The cost of providing access through mobile units and manned access points would also be high, she said. There were also concerns that online participation would not be as engaging as face to face debate; and in any case, with neighbourhood projects, gathering people together in a local venue was not a problem. “As we move to rural areas, however, the use of e-PB could be beneficial,” she said.
One of the hardest barriers to overcome is the feeling among many politicians that it would be in some way wrong or illegitimate for them to divest themselves of the responsibility for controlling all public spending.
“It takes time to embed a new concept. There is a feeling that they may be giving up power, or power of the electors they represent,” she said. “Overcoming that is something we deal with every day.”
NOTE: A new report on PB in the UK by Anja Rocke of the European University Institute in Florence has been published by the PBU (see news, this issue). In part two of this report, next issue, we will examine how e-PB was implemented in the City of Hamburg.
Part Two is available here http://www.headstar.com/egblive/?p=172.
