Citizen Participation And Pro Poor Budgeting

"This publication is an output of Ad Hoc Expert Group Meeting on Civil Participation in Fiscal Policy, held in March 2004 in New York Headquarters"--Pref.

Articles by various authors arranged in 2 parts.

This book provides rigorous and provocative understanding of the art and practice of participatory budgeting for those interested in strengthening inclusive and accountable governance.

Although citizen engagement is a core public service value, few public administrators receive training on how to share leadership with people outside the government. Participatory Budgeting in the United States serves as a primer for those looking to understand a classic example of participatory governance, engaging local citizens in examining budgetary constraints and priorities before making recommendations to local government. Utilizing case studies and an original set of interviews with community members, elected officials, and city employees, this book provides a rare window onto the participatory budgeting process through the words and experiences of the very individuals involved. The central themes that emerge from these fascinating and detailed cases focus on three core areas: creating the participatory budgeting infrastructure; increasing citizen participation in participatory budgeting; and assessing and increasing the impact of participatory budgeting. This book provides students, local government elected officials, practitioners, and citizens with a comprehensive understanding of participatory budgeting and straightforward guidelines to enhance the process of civic engagement and democratic values in local communities.

In countries where governments are striving to reduce poverty, the so called pro poor budgets are becoming the order of the day. Often times, in these budgets the central aspect is that government expenditure has to be geared towards addressing the real needs of the people. The question that has to be asked is what is the people's involvement in the budget making processes? 'Nothing for us without us' should be the way to go. In this small book, Kizito Tenthani is exploring the notion of citizen partitipation in the budget processes. A must read for students of public finance, the book explores how the citizen can meaningfully take part in budget processes.

Participatory Budgeting continues to spread across the globe as government officials and citizens adopt this innovative democratic program in the hopes of strengthening accountability, civil society, and well-being. Governments often adapt PB's basic program design 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. Participatory Budgeting in Global Perspective provides a theoretical and empirical explanation to account for widespread variation in PB's adoption, adaptation, and impacts. This book develops six "PB types" to account for the wide variation in how PB programs function as well as the outcomes they produce. To illustrate the similar patterns across the globe, four empirical chapters present a rich set of case studies that illuminate the wide differences among these programs; chapters are organized regionally, with chapters on Latin America, Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and North America. By organizing the chapters regionally, it becomes clear that there are temporal, spatial, economic, and organizational factors that produce different programs across regions, but similar programs within each region. A key empirical 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, too often, researchers do not have any evidence tying PB to significant social or political change.

Can participatory budgeting help make public services really work for the public? Incorporating a range of experiments in ten different countries, this book provides the first comprehensive analysis of participatory budgeting in Europe and the effect it has had on democracy, the modernization of local government, social justice, gender mainstreaming and sustainable development. By focussing on the first decade of European participatory budgeting and analysing the results and the challenges affecting the agenda today it provides a critical appraisal of the participatory model. Detailed comparisons of European cases expose similarities and differences between political cultures and offer a strong empirical basis to discuss the theories of deliberative and participatory democracy and reveal contradictory tendencies between political systems, public administrations and democratic practices.

Significant efforts have been made by Government, NGOs, LGIs in Bangladesh since its independence but its poor, marginalized and excluded groups are yet to be reached with basic services. Researches shows that most of the time absence of participatory planning, budgeting and monitoring is leading to mismanagement and mis-allocation of resources. This Paper presents analysis on how Demand led approach is playing critical role in encouraging participatory budgeting and inclusive development for the pro-poor. This paper reports findings from comparative case study analysis using UP's Public Expenditure Tracking and Citizen Report Card from pocket areas. The paper examines that service providers are often less aware about their roles & responsibilities, mandates and the right holders also lack their ability to claim services. Even though mechanism for encouraging participatory budgeting in place as per GoB acts and policies, participation of the marginalized in decision-making is not properly ensured &therefore transparency & accountability of service providers are not guaranteed. Finally, some results are outlined, where sensitizing service providers, citizens on participatory budgeting, capacity building, coordination has encouraged better access to services. Findings from this Paper will help understanding the shifting approach of power dynamics in local level decision-making to make it inclusive from illusive.