Abstract
Participatory budgeting is an innovation, starting in Porte Alegre in Brazil as a result of efforts made by the Brazilian Workers’ Party at the end of the 1980s. In that city, later referring to itself as the ‘Capital of Participatory budgeting’, it was seen as the first step from representative democracy towards that of direct democracy, calling participatory budgeting a case of radically democratising democracy; a practice in which the until then marginalised people from poor neighbourhoods were allowed to deliberate with the municipality how to spend part of its budget. It proved to be a powerful instrument as was seen in the widespread diffusion of participatory budgeting and becoming sometimes a standard practice in cities all over the world. This introductory chapter introduces the concept of participatory budgeting and defines questions to be answered by country chapters with the aim to provide more insight on the significance of participatory budgeting processes, to give recommendations to improve them, and to add to the theoretical understanding of such democratic practices.
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de Vries, M.S., Nemec, J., Špaček, D., Genro, T. (2022). The Diffusion of Participatory Budgeting: An Introduction to this Volume—With an Intermezzo by Tarso Genro, the Mayor of Porto Alegre Between 1992 and 1996. In: De Vries, M.S., Nemec, J., Špaček, D. (eds) International Trends in Participatory Budgeting. Governance and Public Management. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79930-4_1
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