participatorybudgeting.org

Participatory Budgeting with Young People in the UK

The UK consulting organization The Campaign Company has been working on a project for the East Sussex County Council to help young people decide how to spend £20,000. You can read a brief report on the project here.

PB at the Movement Vision Lab

I contributed a piece on PB for the Movement Vision Lab's blog, which is focusing on participatory democracy this week:

Money Talks: How Participatory Budgeting Can Transform Politics
Josh Lerner
January 28, 2008

Money may be killing democracy, but it can also bring it back to life – if we learn new ways to manage it. Progressives often complain that the influence of big money has corrupted politics, leaving us with elite politicians that don’t represent most Americans. Once in power, these politicians decide how to spend our taxpayer money, often in unwanted ways. Community groups are forced to fight for budgetary scraps, be they for social services, housing, schools, health facilities, or other services or infrastructure. This is an exhausting and often demoralizing struggle. It encourages competition rather than collaboration and reliance on politicians rather than democratic community control. For most people, this struggle is not very appealing, so they choose not to participate.

It doesn’t have to be this way. [Read more]

Participatory Budgeting in India

News update from India:

Pune citizens to decide how the municipality spends money

Pune, Oct 23 - If all goes well, Pune's residents will become the first in India to play a major role in deciding how the city municipality should spend its budget.
Read more: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/128795.html

A Football Club tries Participatory Budgeting?

In the UK, a mass of football fans has banded together to pool their money, buy a football club, and democratically decide on all major club spending and decisions.

From a BBC report:
"Fans' community website MyFootballClub has agreed a deal to take over Blue Square Premier outfit Ebbsfleet United. The 20,000 MyFootballClub members have each paid £35 to provide a £700,000 takeover pot and they will all own an equal share in the club. Members will have a vote on transfers as well as player selection and all major decisions."

See the MyFootballClub website for more info, or to join the club yourself!
Any volunteers to research this and report on its progress?

This reminds me of a like-minded website - PledgeBank, which lets people pledge to contribute a certain amount of money (or anything else) to some purpose, but only if a certain number of other people do the same. If enough other people sign on, the pledge becomes reality. An interesting model for bottom-up decision-making...

Toronto Community Housing PB Update

Toronto Community Housing (the city's public housing authority) recently posted on its website a new overview of its participatory budgeting process. This is probably the clearest description of a PB experience in North America, and of PB in public housing.

See: http://www.torontohousing.ca/key_initiatives/community_planning

A couple of Resources on Participation

In response to some recent requests, I am posting here a couple of resources for thinking about participation. One is the article by myself, Patrick Heller, and Marcelo K. Silva, called Making Spaces for Civil Society.. Also, a course on participatory democracy and community development I taught last Spring at MIT. There's also a nascent wiki on some of those themes that we never finished: www.urban-democracy.wikispaces.com.

Conference: Learning Democracy by Doing, October 2008

This conference will have a strong focus on participatory budgeting and other emergent practices of participatory democracy:

Learning Democracy by Doing:
Alternative Practices in Citizenship Learning and Participatory Democracy

An international conference organized by the Transformative Learning Centre (TLC)
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto (OISE/UT)

October 16-18, 2008
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
252 Bloor St. West, Toronto, Canada

This conference, which celebrates the 15th anniversary of the Transformative Learning Centre at OISE/UT, will provide a space for mutual learning and critical reflection about innovative and inspiring international initiatives. The conference will take place in Toronto, one of the most diverse cities in the world, and it will build on Canadian experiences in social action learning and participatory democracy, including indigenous models of democratic self-governance, the Antigonish Movement of Nova Scotia, the Citizens Forum, the Citizens Assemblies in British Columbia and Ontario, the Practicing Democracy initiative in Vancouver, and the emerging participatory budgeting initiatives in municipalities, public housing units and schools.

See http://tlc.oise.utoronto.ca/tlc2008/info.html for more information and the call for proposals.
 

Global spread of PB

According to the Worldwatch Institute, roughly 1,200 cities had developed participatory budgets by 2006. This rapid growth is at least party due to the increasing number of national governments passing (if not always thoroughly implementing) laws that make participatory budgeting obligatory for local governments: Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, and now the Dominican Republic, amongst others.

The Church Likes Participatory Budgeting

The Church of England recently came out in support of participatory budgeting, following the UK government's white paper "Planning for a Sustainable Future" (which itself calls for PB).

From The Church's Urban Bishops Panel: “We have recently welcomed the Secretary of State’s announcement regarding participatory budgeting at neighbourhood and local authority level and would hope that some consideration can be given to similar participatory processes being in place for community planning."

See the full article in Christian Today.

Seminar in Porto Alegre on the Future of Participatory Democracy

On October 25-27, 2007 there will be an international seminar in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on participatory democracy and participatory budgeting in particular. The seminar is titled "The Future of Participatory Democracy: Technical Fix or Popular Sovereignty" and its aims are:

a. To analyze and debate the place of the state and the urban popular classes in the emerging urban landscape of the 21st century.
b. To evaluate the limits and possibilities of:
(1) participatory budgeting experiences;
(2) community-based organizations’ direct management of social policies; and
(3) sectoral councils for co-management of public policies.
c. To provide a space for analyses and discussion of existing alternatives around the theme of participatory democracy as social emancipation and social transformation.
d. To raise suggestions and guidelines for building an international network of grassroots-based participatory democracy activists.

For more information in Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French see:
http://www.ongcidade.org/site/php/seminario/arquivos/folder.pdf
and
http://www.ongcidade.org/site/php/seminario/seminario.php