Participatory Budgeting Research

Respect from leaders in power to the citizens who come immediate in the hierarchy of power and government in reference to the laws in addition, act as a prevention of corruption and act as a means of governance of their relationship. Engagement of citizens’ groups and the civil society in the running and management of the public has been seen over the years acting as a means of enabling accountability of public sector and also improvement of delivery of services to the larger public in return. The people have been given greater opportunities which when utilized will trigger processes of making policies and also implement different programs and policies at the same time (Wampler, 2000). Therefore, managing the public affairs by involving and engaging the people is propelled to bringing and maintaining a good governance.

The people’s involvement and participation in the maintenance of public allows their aspirations and various needs to be listened, be given attention to and also be mainstreamed. • Community work -together process for development of policies and budgets with help of representatives elected in order to meet the communities’ needs. • Different way of management of public money together with engaging people in government. Being democratic process, it gives room for members of the community to make decisions directly on use of part of public budget. • Citizen involvement in identification of programs, local priorities and policies requiring resources’ allocation. • Deliberate and negotiable decision-making process by citizens on public resources’ distribution. The practice of participatory budgeting gives the members of the community an opportunity to vote and also propose on the projects such as improvements of libraries, parks, schools public housing and other public places (Ranis, 2001).

This is done after idea submission to Idea Collection Map which allows the Budget Delegates who are the community volunteers, transform the ideas into real proposals which are then presented for a ballot with help from agencies from the city. Community wide vote then follows during the spring. Participatory budgeting can be such an important tool in the whole process of democratization of cities through its broad and deep citizen participation in public resource allocation. It has been seen as the perfect process which is also termed as positive process through which cities are constructed inclusively as the old traditionally marginalized cities break out of exclusion cycle (Wampler, 2000). This included organized meetings by citizens in order to have agreements on different priorities which are part of the local government budget meant to oversee implementation of different projects (Sintomer, 2008).

This paper looks at the PB in different continents and urban centres which ranges from smallest to largest and also projects which has been funded recently. Improvement of basic service management and provision has been improved by PB through good governance which maintains cheap and better projects for the benefit of the community control. Despite improvement of governance and service delivery in most cases, PB does not necessarily bring change to existent relations in power in between citizens and local government. Participatory budgeting programs help in promotion of learning and meaning hence giving meaning to development’s context. Allocated money by a City Council Member which is commonly referred to as ‘discretionary fund’ is used by the community members to propose various projects such as developments of libraries, parks, schools and other public places (Wampler, 2010).

Expense and capital funds are the two types of discretionary funds and are used differently as part of the whole process of participation in governance and delivery of services to the common citizen. While salaries and services are paid by use of expense funds, physical infrastructure such as construction projects and city-owned property’s repair are paid by use of capital funds. Launch of the second youth-led process of Participatory Budgeting in US was announced in July 2015 by Mayor Ed Murray and Licata who was a Council member in the Seattle City and was referred to as Youth Voice, Youth Choice. More than 3,000 young people were engaged in the first year of its formation in the determination of ways of spending a city’s budget of $ 700,000.

These services projects’ proportion do vary considerably between different cities. For instance, in the year in-between 2009 and 2011, 90 to 100 per cent of all presentations, represented basic projects in four cities while 50 to 80 per cent was in another four whereas 20 to 40 per cent was in five and then 10 to 20 per cent was in six. The recent and poor cities tend to have more projects but priority still remains to be basic services. In early years, after meeting basic needs some participating cities such as Porto Alegre or Belo Horizonte shifted to other priorities. In other cities with low basic services projects’ percentage such as the Chilean cities, the focus is on the projects which remain in the seven categories. At the forefront is the African cities which perform mobilization of resources beyond inadequate local budgets while the basic services projects have taken the international funds primarily (Pateman, 2012).

For instance, in Dondo, aid give almost half the investment in PB drainage, roads and paths projects. Various bilateral and multilateral donors or decentralized cooperation such as city to city or region to city fund the projects e. g. Cameroon. References Chesler, M. A. Participatory action research with self-help groups: an alternative paradigm for inquiry an action. American Journal of Community Psychology, 19, 757-768. Shah, A. Sintomer, Y. , Herzberg, C. , & Röcke, A. Participatory budgeting in Europe: potentials and challenges. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(1), 164-178. Lessons from Latin American experience in participatory budgeting. Participatory budgeting, 143, 91-126. de Sousa Santos, B. Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre: toward a redistributive democracy. Politics & Society, 26(4), 461-510. Novy, A. , & Leubolt, B. Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre: social innovation and the dialectical relationship of state and civil society.