A Football Club tries Participatory Budgeting?
In the UK, a mass of football fans has banded together to pool their money, buy a football club, and democratically decide on all major club spending and decisions. From a BBC report: "Fans’ community website MyFootballClub has agreed a deal to take over Blue Square Premier outfit Ebbsfleet United. The 20,000 MyFootballClub members have […]
Toronto Community Housing PB Update
Toronto Community Housing (the city’s public housing authority) recently posted on its website a new overview of its participatory budgeting process. This is probably the clearest description of a PB experience in North America, and of PB in public housing. See: http://www.torontohousing.ca/key_initiatives/community_planning
A couple of Resources on Participation
In response to some recent requests, I am posting here a couple of resources for thinking about participation. One is the article by myself, Patrick Heller, and Marcelo K. Silva, called Making Spaces for Civil Society.. Also, a course on participatory democracy and community development I taught last Spring at MIT. There’s also a nascent […]
Conference: Learning Democracy by Doing, October 2008
This conference will have a strong focus on participatory budgeting and other emergent practices of participatory democracy: Learning Democracy by Doing: Alternative Practices in Citizenship Learning and Participatory Democracy An international conference organized by the Transformative Learning Centre (TLC)Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto (OISE/UT) October 16-18, 2008Ontario Institute for Studies in […]
Global spread of PB
According to the Worldwatch Institute, roughly 1,200 cities had developed participatory budgets by 2006. This rapid growth is at least party due to the increasing number of national governments passing (if not always thoroughly implementing) laws that make participatory budgeting obligatory for local governments: Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, and now the Dominican Republic, amongst others.
The Church Likes Participatory Budgeting
The Church of England recently came out in support of participatory budgeting, following the UK government’s white paper "Planning for a Sustainable Future" (which itself calls for PB). From The Church’s Urban Bishops Panel: “We have recently welcomed the Secretary of State’s announcement regarding participatory budgeting at neighbourhood and local authority level and would hope […]
Seminar in Porto Alegre on the Future of Participatory Democracy
On October 25-27, 2007 there will be an international seminar in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on participatory democracy and participatory budgeting in particular. The seminar is titled "The Future of Participatory Democracy: Technical Fix or Popular Sovereignty" and its aims are: a. To analyze and debate the place of the state and the urban popular classes […]
US PB Network and US Social Forum sessions
As a result of two sessions on participatory budgeting at the US Social Forum, a new United States PB Network is forming. To be involved in the discussions, please join the network’s listserv at http://groups.google.com/group/participatory-budgeting-us or by emailing participatory-budgeting-us-subscribe@googlegroups.com See below for a reportback on the workshops at the US Social Forum. Stay tuned for […]
New OECD/World Bank paper with PB case studies
The OECD / World Bank paper "Beyond Public Scrutiny: a stocktaking of social accountability initiatives in OECD countries" profiles 40 government accountability programs, including interesting examples of participatory budgeting in Belgium, Germany, Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK.http://www.zebralog.net/open/BeyondPublicScrutinycoverandtext.pdf
PB in Germany
There is a nice new website on PB in Germany: http://www.buergerhaushalt.de