Over the last 25 years, Participatory Budgeting² has steadily expanded from a couple of local governments in Brazil to a diverse range of cities in a large number of countries. According to our estimates, in 2014 at least 1,700 local governments of all sizes from over 40 countries from all continents are experimenting with some form of PB.

Most of the existing literature and research focuses on the political and social contributions that PB is bringing to social justice and participatory democracy. Much less work quantifies and qualifies the tangible benefits that PB brings (or not) to common citizens in...

The 20 local research teams identified, compiled and analysed around 20,000 individual basic services projects, funded through 74 Participatory Budgeting annual or bi-annual cycles. Based on the suggestions of these teams and the experts they interviewed, six sub-categories of basic services, as noted, were added to the seven proposed by goLD study.⁶ The addition of these extra categories made it possible to better capture the priorities of citizens and the scope of what basic services means for cities involved in PB processes:

Basic services and infrastructure for local economic development

Neighbourhood level equipment and facilities

District level health facilities

New...

In order to put the various cities in perspective — see Figures 4 and 5 - their annual budget is divided by the number of their inhabitants. one of the complexities of comparing cities is that available data can refer to three different budgets:

(i) Planned or expected budget. It is usually on this budget that PB announced resources are debated.

(ii) Actual budget that corresponds to the actual resources that a particular city can count upon. In most cases this budget is less, or much less, than what was expected, primarily because transfers from central governments were less than...

The central argument in this section, largely suggested by fieldwork and interviews, is that PB changes the relations between local governments and citizens, and at the same time generates citizens’ empowerment and new forms of local governance.

On the one hand, it triggers the emergence of new forms of community and peoples’ organisations during the budgetary decision-making process (cycle 1 of the PB) and its implementation (cycle 2). It contributes to the emergence and strengthening of a fourth power in local democracy (in addition to the executive, legislative and legal powers) — that of citizens and the community. It weaves...

One of the conclusions of the research is that PB has contributed significantly to improving basic service delivery management in cities. At the same time it has developed innovations in ways to deliver these services, with higher awareness of spatial and social justice, the democratisation of governance and the modernisation of local governments. However, what PB provides can be and should be up-scaled in order to meet citizens’ and low-income neighbourhoods’ needs and aspirations for better living conditions. The issue of scaling up is however a tricky one as some PB cities are either quite new to the process or...