Participatory Budgeting (PB) incorporates citizens directly into budgetary decision-making. It continues to spread across the globe as government officials and citizens adopt this innovative program in the hopes of strengthening accountability, civil society, and well-being. Governments often transform PB’s rules and procedures to meet local needs, thus creating wide variation in how PB programs function. Some programs retain features of radical democracy, others focus on community mobilization, and yet other programs seek to promote participatory development. This book provides a theoretical and empirical explanation to account for widespread variation in PB’s adoption, adaptation, and impacts. The book first develops six “PB types,” then, to illustrate patterns of change across the globe, four empirical chapters present a rich set of case studies that illuminate the wide differences among these programs. The empirical chapters are organized regionally, with chapters on Latin America, Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and North America. The empirical chapters demonstrate that there are temporal, spatial, economic, and organizational factors that produce different programs across regions but similar programs within each region. A key finding is that the change in PB rules and design is now leading to significant differences in the outcomes these programs produce. We find that some programs successfully promote accountability, expand civil society, and improve well-being, but, that we continue to lack evidence that might demonstrate if PB leads to significant social or political change elsewhere.

This chapter introduces the reader to PB’s core principles and basic institutional design. The core principles include voice, vote, social justice, social inclusion, and oversight. All PB programs adhere to these principles, but each program gives different weights to each principle, which helps to account for the differences in program design around the world. The chapter provides a detailed explanation of PB, based on the Porto Alegre model, which emerged as the early example that other governments sought to replicate. The chapter also introduces three guiding questions that shape the rest of the book: How has PB transformed during the past thirty years as it spreads around the globe? What are the causal mechanisms through which PB programs may produce social and political change? To what extent have PB programs actually generated this social and political change? The authors emphasize these questions as critical for advancing theoretical and empirical debates surrounding PB as well as participatory democratic institutions in general.

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This article focuses on the unlikely success of Peru's top-down participatory budget experience. As part of democratization and decentralization efforts in the early 2000s, Peruvians mandated participatory budgeting in all subnational governments. The article suggests that, while success is constrained in many ways, Peruvians can point to two important accomplishments: 1) engaging a significant number of civil society organizations in debating public resources; and 2) an increased focus on "pro-poor" projects. The article concludes that the current challenge in Peru is to improve the process and engage an even more diverse array of participants. Only then will the process have real potential to improve local governance.

As institutions are created to engage citizens and civil society organizations more directly, who participates, and what effect does participation have? This article explores two of Peru's participatory institutions, the Regional Coordination Councils and the participatory budgets, created in 2002. Specifically it asks, once these institutions are set up, do organizations participate in them? and what effect does this participation have on the organizations? The data show that the participatory processes in Peru are including new voices in decisionmaking, but this inclusion has limits. Limited inclusion has, in turn, led to limited changes specifically in nongovernmental organizations. As a result, the democratizing potential of the participatory institutions is evident yet not fully realized.A s institutions are created around Latin America to engage citizens and civil society organizations directly, who participates? What effect does this participation have? Increasingly, local, regional, and national governments around Latin America are designing new institutions that allow citizens and civil society organizations (CSOs) to participate directly in policy decisionmaking with voice and vote. Participatory institutions (or PIs), such as development councils, participatory performance monitoring, and participatory budgets, have been implemented around the region in countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Peru. 1 Often, these institutions are created to complement existing representative democratic institutions that are failing to meet the needs and demands of citizens. Reformers hope to increase transparency and accountability, as well as to encourage a more active and engaged civil society. However, we do not yet know how "participatory" these institutions really are.As a result of this trend, there is a growing scholarly literature on participatory governance. Yet the nature of participation remains understudied, and several questions remain unanswered. Who is invited and who comes to the meetings? Do design decisions about what kinds of actors are invited to participate-civil society organizations or individual citizens-affect the nature of participation? Do participants represent the same powerful groups that dominate political decisions, or are

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This chapter develops a framework to explain how and why governments adopt and adapt PB as it spreads around the world. The chapter identifies three waves of adoption: 1989 through the mid-1990s; mid-1990s through mid-2000s; and mid-2000s through 2020. Within each wave, the authors identify where PB is adopted and who is driving adoption. They identify and explain key transformations in the areas of scale/place of adoption, decision-making rules, and social justice considerations during each wave. This chapter also provides a typology to help categorize the global patterns of change that we see across the PB landscape. The chapter identifies six types of PB programs, including: Empowered Democracy and Redistribution; Deepening Democracy through Community Mobilization; Mandated by National Governments; Digital Participation; Social Accountability and Development; Efficient Governance. The typology links PB’s core principles and the political motivations of the main actors promoting adoption. The typology then also captures the differences across the cases and helps the reader better understand the diversity of PB programs and outcomes.