Shelterforce issue on participatory budgeting in North America
The summer issue of Shelterforce magazine has several articles on participatory budgeting experiences and campaigns in North America, and it’s now available online at http://www.nhi.org/ or http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/sf146.html Budgeting for Democracy By Alma B. Couverthie and Marianna Leavy-Sperounis Citizen engagement is changing the way one city develops its budget. Let The People Decide By Josh Lerner […]
Participatory Democracy in Catalunya
Since its transition from Francoism, Spain has been home to a number of experiences in local democracy. Some of the first ones are well-described in the writings of Jordi Borja, Manuel Castells, and others in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But in the last 5 years there has been a real ressurgence of activity, […]
PB in Montreal
An article was recently published in the Montreal Gazette on the PB experiment in one of the city’s boroughs: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/editorial/story.html?id=2e7df5be-8d2b-4bbd-8c9b-cc71e0285169 More information about the PB process is available in French at http://www.ville.montreal.qc.ca/plateau/budgetparticipatif
PB networking session at WUF
There will be a participatory budgeting networking session at the World Urban Forum in Vancouver: Date: Wednesday June 20, 2006. Time: 16:30-18:30 Location: MR 12 Co-organizers: Municipalities of Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre, CIGU from Ecuador and PDM from Harare
Porto Alegre after the PT
Daniel Chavez has written a very insightful piece on the changes in Porto Alegre under the new administration, which has kept the form, but “watered down” the substance of PB. It’s in the most recent Red Pepper. For those who read portuguese, CIDADE has been reporting about the precisely this, and importantly, how civil society […]
PB in New York
New York Participatory Budgeting Initiative is a new coalition of community organizations, activists, and otherwise interested individuals working towards economic security and fulfillment of human rights by increasing accountability and participation in the city budget process and other public budgets. NYPBI is committed to public education on the budget, facilitating direct involvement in the budget […]
New Forum in Boston Review
The site is finally up, basically functional, if not aesthetically perfect yet. In the coming days we’ll fix the formatting on the main and subsidiary pages. Please let us know if you find broken links. Boston Review has just published an essay of mine, The Citizens of Porto Alegre, as part of a symposium on […]
Midwest Social Forum
MIDWEST SOCIAL FORUM 2006 JULY 6-9, 2006 Milwaukee, WI University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Student Union http://www.mwsocialforum.org Preparations for Midwest Social Forum (formerly aka RadFest) 2006 are well under way. See below for updates on how you can get involved in this annual gathering of grassroots organizations, community activists, and others committed to social justice movement building. […]
Links and Resources
Participatory Budgeting has captured the imagination of policy makers, political activists and academics. The list of organizations, resource sites, and advocates of participatory budgeting is extremely varied, and runs all the way from “socialists for participatory budgeting” in Buenos Aires to the Bertelsmann foundation, in Germany, which advocates transparency and free markets. The academic literature […]
Examples of PB
There are hundreds of municipalities and institutions implementing PB, and it is impossible to keep track of them all. The following is the best available running tally of programs that are or can be described as participatory budgeting. Please email us if you know of others. Latin America Argentina – Brazil – Chile – Dominican […]