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Participatory budget

Dernière mise à jour le 5 September 2019

Definition

Participatory budgeting is a process by which the population defines the destination of public resources, usually some or all of the investments.

Ubiratan de Souza, a former member of the Workers’ Party in Porto Alegre, defines it as “a process of direct, voluntary and universal democracy, through which the population can discuss and define the budget and public policies. The participatory budget combines direct and representative democracy”.

A great diversity of experiences

In 1989, Porto Alegre, a city of one million inhabitants in southern Brazil, took on the challenge of a participatory budget between local government and the population. In its wake, many other cities will draw inspiration from it to reproduce it, adapt it to local particularities, dedicate it to a particular group of the population…

Film El PresupuestoParticipativo in Porto Alegre – Brazil.

Several hundred experiences exist today in all continents. Beyond common elements, each context builds its own way of doing things. The result is a wide variety of modalities, each one inspiring in its own way. For residents and social movements, Participatory Budget rhymes with a new mode of democracy closer to the needs of citizens, making it possible to better understand and decide at the local level. Educational Video “Re-InventingDemocracythroughParticipatoryBudgeting”

Common ingredients

Among all these experiences, there are several permanent aspects

  • The existence of political will, based on a logic of effective public action or social motivation or a choice of democratization.
  • Financial resources: from a part (sometimes limited to a few percent) to the entire entity’s budget.
  • A mobilization of the population, which can be done directly (everyone) and/or through organizations linked to specific themes, stakeholder groups or territories.
  • Regular (usually annual) review of operating rules with the presence of all stakeholders.

Each experience is articulated in the form of a sequence of moments, among which we often find: the definition of criteria for the distribution of resources according to neighbourhoods/groups, the emergence of requests or proposals from the population, the construction of priorities among all these requests collected, the choice between all the priorities retained, the construction of the budget matrix, the vote on the budget by elected politicians.

Interview with Professor Yves Cabannes to better understand the challenges and ways of making several participatory budgets in the world:  Interview Y. Cabannes (ENG)

At the Africities 2012 summit, many social movements and local elected officials expressed their interest in such an approach, even if some perverse aspects were also pointed out. To avoid these negative effects, it seemed obvious that there were certain conditions to be met. The ASSOAL association in Cameroon is an important actor in the development of this process in West Africa. https://www.africaresearchinstitute.org/newsite/blog/jules-dumas-nguebou/ The first agreements between South America and Africa were signed to strengthen each other’s practices.

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