Models for Participatory Budget Deliberation

Vienna.
The next speaker at EDEM 2009 is César Alfaro, who shifts our interest to projects for participatory budgeting in the UK, Spain, and Brazil. Such projects aim to involve citizens in budgetting decisions, based on dialogue and participation. This was trialled first (offline) in 1988 in a number of Brazilian cities, and is now in place in some 100 municipalities in Europe, involving some 4 million citizens; the UK is likely to implement participatory budgetting in 2012. However, the models uses differ substantially, on the percentage of the budget which has been allocated to such models, on the number of participants and the structure of participation, on the number of discussion and approval rounds and their rules, etc.

Benefits of such models are greater legitimacy and transparency of public decisions, which are made publicly; this brings decisions closer to the citizens, and addresses citizen apathy and alienation. Such models are also to draw on important local knowledge, and help educate politicians as well as citizens about the process. However, so far these processes have been mainly based on physical meetings, and preferences are established through voting; this means that there is a certain myopia as it handicaps less communicatively skilled participants. The model also creates extra work for staff needing to compile information and manage the process, and participation may be delegated to specific representatives, so there is only a limited about of real participation here.

Common tasks in such models include problem structuring, debating, preference modelling, negotiation, voting, arbitration, and sampling. In the online version of this process, there are a number of roles: the problem owner, who aims to solve a participatory budget problem; the participants, who provide input to the participatory budget decision process; and the technical staff, who support the process software development.

How this process takes place in practice, however, may differ from location to location: in Salford in the UK, for example, the steps are for staff to collect information for citizens, for participants to present their proposals, and for City Council to decide how to spend the budget; in Porto Alegre in Brazil, the third step is for participants to vote to assign priorities to projects, and elect two delegates from each district; in Getafe in Spain, it is participants who submit proposals and vote on their preferences, and these proposals are then forwarded to the borough assembly for final decision-making.

Each of these variations can be represented in a general flow diagram, however, which has allowed for the development of a generic Java-based support architecture for each of these cases. This architecture has been put through its paces in a small-group experiment, with what appear to be encouraging results. This is a promising example for participatory democracy, then, with relatively limited IT requirements, and there are good opportunities here for methodology and technology developments.

Technorati : EDEM 2009, budget, e-democracy, government, participation, policy, social media, support architecture
Del.icio.us : EDEM 2009, budget, e-democracy, government, participation, policy, social media, support architecture