The impact of participatory budgeting on health and wellbeing: a scoping review of evaluations

Abstract

BackgroundParticipatory budgeting (PB), citizens deliberating among themselves and with officials to decide how to allocate funds for public goods, has been increasingly implemented across Europe and worldwide. While PB is recommended as good practice by the World Bank and the United Nations, with potential to improve health and wellbeing, it is unclear what evaluations have been conducted on the impact of PB on health and wellbeing.MethodsFor this scoping review, we searched 21 databases with no restrictions on publication date or language. The search term ‘participatory budget’ was used as the relevant global label for the intervention of interest. Studies were included if they reported original analysis of health, social, political, or economic and budgetary outcomes of PB. We examined the study design, analysis, outcomes and location of included articles. Findings are reported narratively.ResultsFrom 1458 identified references, 37 studies were included. The majority of evaluations (n = 24) were of PB in South America, seven were in Europe. Most evaluations were case studies (n = 23) conducting ethnography and surveys, focussing on political outcomes such as participation in PB or impacts on political activities. All of the quantitative observational studies analysing population level data, except one in Russia, were conducted in South America.ConclusionDespite increasing interest in PB, evaluations applying robust methods to analyse health and wellbeing outcomes are scarce, particularly beyond Brazil. Therefore, implementation of PB schemes should be accompanied by rigorous qualitative and quantitative evaluation to identify impacts and the processes by which they are realised.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12889-018-5735-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Methods and Evaluation Criteria for Apps and Digital Interventions for Diabetes Self-Management: Systematic Review

“…Evidence shows that involving individuals in the assessment of different health interventions has a positive impact on health [ 58 ]. We found few articles (n=31) in this review that involved patients in the evaluation of apps and digital interventions for diabetes self-management.…”

Mortality from Homicides in Slums in the City of Belo Horizonte, Brazil: An Evaluation of the Impact of a Re-Urbanization Project

“…There are also difficulties in analyzing how revitalization projects in vulnerable territories modify their physical and social tissue and health indicators. However, projects and evaluations of policies in this direction already indicate that physical and social environment modifications in slums influence the urban determinants, morbidity, inequality and social problems, such as homicides [16,28,30,31,33,34,41,43,44,45].…”

“…As previously said, many possible factors of slum re-urbanization projects may indirectly affect homicide rates [14,28,30,31,33,34,38,41,42,43]. Some of them are hereby listed: the transference of the residence’s secure ownership, modifications in the physical and social environment as an increase in leisure and coexistence spaces, a decrease in stress and other mental health indicators, an increase in feelings of belonging to a territory, and pride of being part of the transformed environment of enhanced social cohesion and collective efficacy.…”

“…The international literature presents some conceptual models, different projects of urban interventions, as well as proposals for evaluations of urban revitalization policies that are associated with the reduction in criminality and other health indicators [16,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34]. Nevertheless, evaluation experience and even intervention projects are still scarce in Brazil.…”

Rethinking Representation and Diversity in Deliberative Minipublics

“…Participatory budgeting was first developed in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and is now used around the world (Campbell et al 2018). Participatory budgeting is a form of deliberation in which members of the public deliberate over the allocation of some portion of a public budget (Pin 2016;Pinnington, Lerner, & Schugurensky 2009).…”