Participatory budgets have played a key role in the field of democratic innovations. Portugal is considered as a case for holding one of the highest rates of local participatory budgets and pioneered ...national and regional initiatives. Such a patchwork raises interest in the ways in which Participatory Budgets function on multiple scales. In-depth examination of institutions, constituencies, and policy areas helps unveil evident pitfalls and emerging potentialities. Against pitfalls, this article acknowledges emerging potentialities in establishing agreements between institutions to improve the efficiency of public funding allocation; intermediary bodies to increase inclusion of citizens; and combined policy areas to foster the synergy among Participatory Budgets.
Participatory Budget, as a process for democratic decision-making in allocating public funds, has gained traction globally since the initial experiences in Porto Alegre, Brazil in the 1980s. This ...article analyses the 2022 and 2023 experiences of participatory budget (PB) in the city of Monterrey, Mexico. Based on a comparative analysis of secondary data of Monterrey’s two-year programme, the study illustrates the obstacles and potentialities of implementing PB. Some of the limitations revolve around intergovernmental coordination, spatial limitations and limited impact on changing power relations concerning urban interventions. In assessing the programme’s implementation, we seek to highlight that while participation indeed increased from 2022 to 2023, the conceptualisation of the programme differs from the original one in Porto Alegre, and distribution of projects and resources remains uneven. By critically evaluating Monterrey’s PB initiatives, the article aims to contribute to the broader discourse on the complexities and challenges of participatory budget implementation.
The paper critically evaluates the urban climate change adaptation policy and practise in Central Europe using Polish cities as an example. The study focused on local policy documents and a scoring ...system was elaborated and applied for their analysis with particular attention to ‘green’ adaptation concepts. The link between the time of adoption and the scores received by cities' Strategies and Programmes for Environmental Protection demonstrates innovation flow from science into urban policy. We revealed that many of the proposed measures in Urban Adaptation Plans represent rather mitigation than adaptation implying substantial knowledge gaps in differentiating between them. A portfolio of projects implemented in 2014–2020 within EU funding programmes and Participatory budget was compiled with further classification into ‘green’, ‘grey’, or ‘soft’. More than 80 % of the selected projects in each of the cities were classified as ‘green’, but only one studied city demonstrated an upward trend in the number and cumulative budget of the adaptation projects. The examined Polish cities, similarly to other Central and Eastern European ones, experiencing fast economic growth have featured a profound contraction of green areas over the last decades. Partially it might be compensated by local environmental programmes that promote application of nature-based solutions.
•Urban Adaptation Plans often failed to separate mitigation and adaptation measures.•Time of adoption of policy documents shapes their link with novel adaptation concepts.•Most of the identified bottom-up adaptation projects are ‘green’.•There is no steady increase in adaptation projects' number and budget revealed.
•TOPSIS method for ranking of participatory budget projects is proposed.•Inexact and vague projects descriptions are modeled as fuzzy variables.•PIS selection is modified due to relative preferences ...of the individual participants.•Distance measure for category classification is proposed.•An example of the ranking is presented.
In this study, a fuzzy technique is proposed for order preference based on the similarity to an ideal solution for the personalized ranking of projects in a participatory budget (PB). A PB is a group decision-making process where citizens distribute public resources among a set of city investment proposals. The dynamic growth in the popularity of PB during the last 10 years has been due to a significant increase in the number of projects submitted and the demonstrable weakness of the traditional majority vote. The rationality of decision-makers is restricted by the large number of possible options from which voters can choose only a few within a limited amount of time, and thus there is no opportunity to review all of the projects. Appropriate decision support tools can assist with the selection of the best outcome and help to address the growth of PB processes. The ranking of PB projects is a specific problem because multi-criteria comparisons are based on non-quantitative criteria, i.e., nominal and fuzzy criteria. The “Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution” (TOPSIS) method aims to minimize the distance to the ideal alternative while maximizing the distance to the worst. In a fuzzy extension of TOPSIS, the ratings of alternatives and the weights of the criteria are fuzzy numbers or linguistic variables. The major modification required to the TOPSIS method for PB is that the perfect objective solution does not exists among the maximum and minimum values for the criteria. Thus, the subjective choice is the ideal solution for the decision maker and the negative ideal solution is the most dissimilar solution. This study describes the application of fuzzy TOPSIS with a modification for PB based on an empirical example from a Poznań PB project (Poland).
Theoretical background: Participatory budgeting enables the co-creation of local budgets through discussions between residents and local authorities. Thanks to this, it is possible to implement those ...investments that are important for the local community. By voting, the citizens may participate in the process of creating local development. Purpose of the article: The purpose of the article is the diagnosis of the concept of public governance and tools used within the framework of co-management, with particular emphasis on the participatory budget on the example of the city of Lublin in 2015–2021. Research methods: The analysis covered existing data from budget resolutions of individual cities, reports from the Lublin Research Group and from Internet sources. The publication includes both quantitative and qualitative research. Main findings: The participatory budget of Lublin is characterized by a relatively high share of funds allocated to the implementation of tasks in total budget expenditure compared to other provincial cities in Poland. For several years, there has also been a noticeable decline in the turnout of people voting for projects under the participatory budget. Thanks to a detailed analysis of the functioning of the participatory budget of the city of Lublin, compared to other provincial cities in Poland, there is a need to promote the idea of social participation more strongly.
Theoretical background: Participatory budgets (PBs) have become a widely known innovation used to engage citizens in policymaking. Since 2011, citizens in Polish municipalities can decide on how a ...portion of local budget can be spent. In Germany, PBs originally served the purpose of getting feedback from citizens in the context of fiscal strains. However, since about 2015, German PBs are increasingly taking after the model established in Poland, establishing fixed pools of funds. Does it present a case of between-country convergence in the functionalities of PBs and their quality? So far, such comparative questions remained mostly unanswered in the field of PB-related studies. Purpose of the article: The aim of the paper was to investigate this possibility of convergence in PB-quality by comparing the state of and changes in the quality of PBs with fixed funds between Poland and Germany. To evaluate the quality and scope of functionality of PBs, the amount of planned PB-funds per capita and participation rates (voter turnout levels) were inspected. Two research hypotheses were formulated. The first one stipulates a higher performance level of Polish PBs by the two criteria, across a variety of municipality types. The second hypothesis posits that the differences in the quality of PBs tend to diminish over time, as the latest to innovate launch their first experiments. Research methods: Works on the diffusion of PBs in both countries were reviewed to provide background for the study. Two datasets were constructed containing data on the two measures of PB-quality, the population size, and the status of innovator. The data were first compared graphically. In a later step, statistical methods were applied, including variance analysis for the two dependent variables related to PB-quality at once (MANOVA) and for each of them separately (ANOVA). Results of the study were presented and discussed in the context of interactions between innovators and potential adopters in social networks, as well as political agendas in the two countries of interest. Main findings: Research findings allowed to confirm the research hypotheses. PBs in both countries have been mostly simple innovations of limited quality, but those in Poland tended to perform better, judged by the two chosen criteria. The gap, especially for PB-funds, is closing, but that does not mean that in the course of innovators’ and regulators’ actions a unified innovation model has emerged. PBs in both countries utilize their functionalities in diverse ways, based on specific experiences and traditions in policymaking. Thus, PBs in Poland and Germany have different trajectories of development with fixed pools of funds as the simplistic innovation core that makes them highly adaptable in different policy contexts.
Celem pracy jest ukazanie wpływu realizacji projektów z budżetu partycypacyjnego (BP) na zagospodarowanie i kształtowanie przestrzeni publicznych w mieście. W pierwszej części artykułu przedstawiono ...założenia ogólne i modele budżetowania partycypacyjnego, a następnie podstawy prawne oraz zasady wdrażania i finansowanie BP w Polsce. W drugiej części skonfrontowano je z implementacją BP (obywatelskiego i zielonego) w Lublinie w edycjach 2015–2019. Zawarte w trzeciej części szczegółowe analizy edycji 2015–2017 wykazały, że 86% inwestycji zgłoszonych i 87% zwycięskich dotyczyło bezpośrednio działań w przestrzeni publicznej. Ponadto ukazano rozkład przestrzenny i zakres tematyczny tych inwestycji w 27 dzielnicach Lublina w odniesieniu do 10 kategorii wydzielonych przez autorki, a także motywacje i aktywność mieszkańców dzielnic w aplikowaniu o projekty. W czwartej części przedstawiono zmiany w przestrzeniach publicznych Lublina wywołane realizacją projektów z BP, a następnie doświadczenia lubelskie odniesiono do innych miast w Polsce. W podsumowaniu zamieszczono rekomendacje, jak efektywnie wdrażać BP, aby kreować wysokiej jakości przestrzeń publiczną w miastach. Wyróżniono trzy aspekty: 1) organizacyjno-proceduralny, 2) aktywizacji interesariuszy i 3) realizacji inwestycji.
The Local Self-Government Act has given explicit legal ground for the use of optional participatory budgeting (PB) on the municipal level in Slovenia since 2018. This means municipalities and their ...inhabitants have absolute discretion regarding the nature of proposed and later (if chosen) implemented projects in a certain municipality if the projects fall under municipal authority. The article presents research results that reveal that a legislative soft approach to PB, resulted in small municipal engagement in PB projects. They on average spent up to one percent of budgetary expenses for PB purposes, resulting mostly in inclusive, peoplecentered projects promoting facilities for socializing, and different kinds of public infrastructure capacities (sports infrastructure, etc.). The projects implemented in Slovenia so far are prevailingly "public infrastructure projects " in line with the municipal social sustainability agenda promoting equality and diversity, social cohesion, democracy and governance, and quality of life in a certain municipality.
The basic research objective of this study was made the question of whether the applicable provisions of Polish law protect the legal interest of a citizen who submitted a winning proposal for a task ...in the civic budget procedure, when this was not included in the municipal budget resolution. In order to provide an answer to the research question posed in this way, an analysis of the Polish legal system with regard to the regulations on the civic budget was carried out, focusing only on the legal regulation of the municipal level, using the dogmaticlegal method as the most appropriate method used in legal sciences, taking into account the assumed problem and research goal. The research was supplemented by the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court and administrative courts. The main conclusion that could be drawn from the conducted research was that the basic conclusion that could be drawn from the conducted research emphasises the fact that the legal regulations on the civic budget do not provide direct and unambiguous protection of the legal interest of the author of the winning project in the case when it was not included in the budget resolution of the municipality. The lack of substantive legal provisions on the participatory budget means that the legal interest of the author of the winning project can only be attempted to be decoded from the constitutional provisions. The legal institutions analysed in this study (petitions, complaints and applications, supervisory proceedings) did not provide a clear answer as to whether, through their use, the author of the winning task could impartially and independently pursue the protection of his or her legal interest. Only the institution referred to in Article 101(1) of the Act on Municipal Self-Government – a complaint against a resolution to an administrative court – could fulfil the attributes of impartiality and independence in resolving the case. The issues raised in this article have not been the subject of more extensive reflection in the science of administrative law. They are also not the subject of numerous judgments. At the same time, it should be emphasised that the failure to adopt the concept of legal interest in the participatory budget procedure, in particular with regard to the failure to include the winning task in the municipal budget resolution, could result in the exploitation of the stronger position of the municipality in relation to citizens. Therefore, until the legislator takes appropriate legal steps regulating the above issue, it was necessary to discuss the available possibilities of protecting the legal interest of the author of the winning task and, in the opinion of the Author of this study, such a solution was indicated in Article 101, paragraph 1 of the Act on Municipal Self-Government. In pursuit of the set research objectives, the dogmatic-legal method was used, supplemented by an analysis of selected decisions of administrative courts.
The participatory budget is an important element of the catalogue of tools for involving residents in the local decision-making. The positive effects of involving many citizens in the decision-making ...process slowly bear fruit in attempts to transfer p.b. into other spheres. This article analyses how these well-known patterns are adapted to new conditions – at universities. Several of them decided to introduce their own participatory budget. A comparative analysis of the local government model and solutions adopted by three universities provides the answer to this question. The hypothesis assumes that the civic budget at universities and polytechnics is, for the most part, a modification of the model used in cities with district status. As shown, the municipal participatory budget is a proven basis for creating its own regulations. However, the available schemes should be modified.
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