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  • Delegates and Councillors evaluate PB in Porto Alegre
  • The financial crisis and PB
  • Update from Porto Alegre
  • Brazilian Participatory Budgeting Network
  • Participatory Budgeting on Facebook
  • National PB Conference in UK
  • Porto Alegre’s Participatory Budgeting at a Crossroads
  • UK releases draft national participatory budgeting strategy
  • Irish Government Calls for Participatory Budgeting
  • AFRICAN REGIONAL SEMINAR ON PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING

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  • Gianpaolo Baiocchi: Militants And Citizens: The Politics Of Participatory Democracy In Porto Alegre

    Gianpaolo Baiocchi: Militants And Citizens: The Politics Of Participatory Democracy In Porto Alegre

  • : Radicals in Power: The Workers' Party and Experiments in Urban Democracy in Brazil

    Radicals in Power: The Workers' Party and Experiments in Urban Democracy in Brazil

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Delegates and Councillors evaluate PB in Porto Alegre

A new report out from CIDADE in Porto Alegre:

Delegates and Councillors evaluate PB
2009-01-14 11:11:00
Delegates and Councillors evaluate PB and indicate goals to improve the process

In partnership with Cooperative Strategies for Sustainable Community Transformation (ETCS), from Barcelona (Spain), the NGO Cidade organized and carried out a participatory conference titled “Reflections on PB”, August 9 and 23, in the Sindiágua Auditorium in Porto Alegre. The principal objective of the meetings was to build a reflection on the principles, experiences and challenges of Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre, at the same time thinking about alternatives to improve the experience. The sociologist Ernesto Morales, one of the members of ETCS, coordinated the work done in the meetings and developed methodologies to secure the active participation of the 36 people present.
PB councillors, ex-councillors and delegates were the target audience of this activity.

Read more: http://www.ongcidade.org/site/php/noticias/noticias.php?area=noticias&completa&id_noticia=1115

Posted by joshlerner on January 23, 2009 at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The financial crisis and PB

There is a new Interview with Sergio Baierle (of the Porto Alegre NGO CIDADE) in Lumpen Magazine, about the financial crisis and opportunities for PB:

http://www.ongcidade.org/site/arquivos/noticias/lumpenbaierle4919b65903790.pdf

Could PB inspire a solution for the global financial crisis?

Posted by joshlerner on November 20, 2008 at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Update from Porto Alegre

Sergio Baierle, from the NGO CIDADE, just published a critical report on the status of Porto Alegre's PB. See the summary below, or the full report at:
http://www.ongcidade.org/site/php/noticias/noticias.php?area=artigos&completa&id_noticia=1021

Whittling down the Potential of Participatory Budgeting?
by Sérgio Baierle
2008-08-19
“PB is still alive!”, The government repeatedly and publicly claims, as if it is trying to convince itself. There are doubts about the validity of its statement, the most serious of which have been pointed out by participatory budgeting council members themselves. How can one defend the idea that PB still exists, they say, if 1) The decisions made by people do not translate into more resources being allocated in the Investment Plan?; 2) The neighborhoods that haven’t prioritized certain themes receive more of those resources than those that prioritize them?; and 3) When it comes to implementation, the city government cherry-picks initiatives that suit its needs without paying any attention to the priority scales that are voted on in each neighborhood and without setting up collective management teams to preside over the public works?


Posted by joshlerner on August 19, 2008 at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Brazilian Participatory Budgeting Network

The Brazilian PB Network has a nice new website (http://www.pbh.gov.br/redebrasileiraop), including some content in English, such as this interview with a PB consultant:
http://www.pbh.gov.br/redebrasileiraop/newsletter/ing/ing_13.htm

Posted by joshlerner on August 18, 2008 at 03:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Participatory Budgeting on Facebook

For those of you on Facebook, there's now a participatory budgeting group:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=22229870351
There are around 300 members so far!

Posted by joshlerner on August 09, 2008 at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

National PB Conference in UK

Coming up soon, for those interested in the rapidly increasing popularity of PB in the United Kingdom:

Making Spending Count?
A national conference on Participatory Budgeting and its role in Community Empowerment. Organised and hosted by the Participatory Budgeting Unit and supported by the Department for Communities and Local Government. Keynote speaker: Rt. Hon. Hazel Blears MP, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.

Date: Monday 15th September 2008

Venue: Midland Hotel, Manchester

More info:
http://www.participatorybudgeting.org.uk/events/national-participatory-budgeting-conference

Posted by joshlerner on August 06, 2008 at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Porto Alegre’s Participatory Budgeting at a Crossroads

Mike Fox recently published an update in NACLA on the situation of participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre:
"Porto Alegre’s Participatory Budgeting at a Crossroads"
http://nacla.org/node/4566

Posted by joshlerner on May 19, 2008 at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

UK releases draft national participatory budgeting strategy

The UK Secretary of Communities and Local Government has released a draft national participatory budgeting strategy, and is now seeking feedback on the plan.
See http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/communities/participatorybudgeting

The plan adopts a fairly strong definition of participatory budgeting: "Participatory budgeting engages people in taking decisions on the spending priorities for a defined public budget in their local area. This means engaging residents and community groups to discuss spending priorities, make spending proposals, and vote on them, as well giving local people a role in the scrutiny and monitoring of the process."

The strategy also includes a few case studies and models of PB, and proposals for launching pilot programs, with the goal of having PB used in every local authority by 2012.

Posted by joshlerner on May 07, 2008 at 06:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (52)

Irish Government Calls for Participatory Budgeting

Last week, Ireland's Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, John Gormley, launched a Green Paper "Stronger Local Democracy" which calls for participatory budgeting, amongst other local democracy measures.
Read the paper more on the Ministry's website.

Posted by joshlerner on April 27, 2008 at 06:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

AFRICAN REGIONAL SEMINAR ON PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING

From 10 to 14 March 2008, 150 delegates from several Sub-Saharan Africans countries, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and North America will gather in Durban, South Africa to share views and experiences on how to improve citizens’ participation in budget setting at sub-national levels in Africa. The Seminar will be held at Ethekwini Municipal Council and participants will include: Ministers, government officials, heads of local authorities, and representatives of development agencies.

The Seminar is designed to provide opportunity for participants from African to get to know each other, learn about each other’s interests and about the kind of progress that is being made on issues of Participatory Budgeting. Besides, they will have the opportunity to hear from their counterparts from other Latin America, Asia, Europe and North America about their experience with Participatory Budgeting.

As democratization and decentralization reforms advance around the globe, State and non-State actors are creating new channels of dialogue in local governance. Under this context, Participatory Budgeting (PB) is rapidly gaining attention from governments, civil society, and international development agencies as an effective platform and tool for strengthening transparency, voice, and accountability in revenue generation, expenditure planning, and delivery of public services and infrastructure. From an experimental innovation in Brazil, PB initiatives have been growing exponentially in many countries in Latin America, Europe, and Asia, and more recently in Africa. Lessons from these experiences have shown that PB is an effective mechanism to increase transparency, voice, and accountability in local governance. PB, thus, opens real opportunities in Africa towards enhancing trust between state and non-state actors in public resource management, with the potential to improve tax compliance, fight corruption, reduce poverty, and promote economic growth.

The overall objective of the Seminar therefore, is to bring together key representatives from African institutions which are committed to participatory budgeting in the continent, offering an opportunity to share experience, strengthen dialogue, and build lasting peer-to-peer collaboration efforts. The Seminar will give specific attention to policy reforms that increase budget transparency and demystification, voice, and independent oversight and monitoring in public expenditure.

During the Seminar, a Peer-to-Peer Mutual Learning Program will be launched. The Pilot will see African local authorities, civil society organizations, and academic institutions establishing partnerships with their counterparts especially from Latin America in the area of participatory budgeting. In the past 20 years, Latin America has made significant progress in the area of participatory budgeting and local authorities are eager, not only to share their experience and learn about the Africa’s experience, but are also ready to participate in capacity building programs and exchange of information in participatory budgeting. It is envisioned that the delegates from the African continent will partner with each other to form clusters, and each cluster will subsequently pair up with one or more Latin American institutions to develop a preliminary work plan proposal on a peer-to-peer mutual learning activities.

The Conference is organized by the Harare based Municipal Development Partnership Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office (MDP-ESA), with support from The World Bank; The World Bank Institute; Trust Fund for Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development; Swiss Development Cooperation; CommGAP; ANSA-Africa; UN-HABITAT; New York University - Wagner School Of Public Administration; and The Africa Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF) and will be hosted by Municipality of Ethekwini (Durban),

For further information, please visit: http://www.worldbank.org/africanpbseminar/ or http://www.asaaf.org.zw Or contact: George Matovu [email protected]; or Dr. Takawira Mumvuma [email protected] Municipal Development Partnership for Eastern and Southern Africa, Tel.: +263 4 774385/6.

Posted by joshlerner on March 03, 2008 at 07:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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