Young people, big ideas: participatory budgeting fixes a river

Abstract

Citizen participation in local government budgeting is an important emerging public management
 reform movement in many countries including Canada, Brazil, France, Germany, Spain,
 Australia and now Sweden. ‘Participatory budgeting’ programs bring local communities into the decision-
 making process around formal resource allocation plans, and have the potential to give new
 levels of voice and choice about service and infrastructure expenditure to disconnected or disadvantaged
 and marginalised citizens and groups. This case study explores the form and function of the first tranche
 of participatory budgeting programs in a new major initiative that is sponsored by the central agency
 for local governments (kommuns) in Sweden. The kommun’s program set aside a substantial sum of
 money to be used in a new project around safety or the environment, and used groups of final year
 school students to design the participative processes, produce alternative proposals for a project, and
 vote on a final decision. The paper interrogates how the participatory budgeting program intersects
 with the themes of economic, cultural, social and environmental sustainability. The case study details
 the causes and dynamics behind the unanticipated choice made by the groups to compete rather than
 cooperate, and considers the way in which the final project decided upon was bolstered in funding,
 scope and execution by linking its main strands to other policy objectives. In the end, this engagement
 initiative was as much about strengthening democracy and a sense of community as it was about
 generating, capturing and implementing good ideas.