As a citizen engagement activity, participatory budgeting has a great deal of potential. It allows participants to clarify their priorities and explore how one spending decision may affect another. Budgets – particularly for governments and local councils – are a controversial area where it is common for decision-makers to be accused of wasting money or making cuts in the wrong areas.
By conducting a participatory budgeting exercise, decision-makers can both get a better understanding of what the public want while also educating the public on the complexities of budgetary decisions.
Why public input matters in spending decisions
How governments spend public money is almost always a cause for controversy. What one group may want to spend on road resurfacing, another may want to spend on improved park facilities.
One citizen may believe that there ought to be more community policing efforts – like visits to local secondary schools – while another might feel police resources should be diverted to only the most serious crimes.
Of course as the old adage goes, “you can’t please everyone”. However, by gathering public input, decision-makers can at least ensure that decisions around public spending are generally reflective of the public will and democratic process.
Encouraging citizen participation in spending decisions has two more important effects:
- It demonstrates transparency on the part of decision-makers; by taking the time to gather public input, understand the views of citizens, and then demonstrating how public input has shaped decisions.
- It allows decision-makers to develop a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of what the public want to see through participatory democracy.
Improved decision-making and greater transparency has the effect of building public trust. When citizens don’t have a voice in spending decisions, it’s easy to focus only on the gaps. This can lead to resentment or disenfranchisement.
When citizens have a clear way to take part in spending decisions, they are more likely to feel listened to, fostering a feeling of community empowerment. That way, spending decisions are something that is happening with their consent, rather than something being done to them from on high.
Understanding the priorities of the public isn’t just for governments. It is also important for any non-governmental organisation which makes significant spending decisions that may affect the general public. For example:
- Utility companies, like gas or water companies.
- Any Private Finance Initiative (PFI) managing public contracts.
- Charities and non-profits, particularly those who give large grants or fund community campaigns.
Challenges in traditional engagement with budgeting
Traditional engagement in a public budgeting initiative would typically involve providing participants with a complex dossier of reports relating to a specific sector.
For example, if citizens were to be consulted on police budgets, they might be provided with a list of costs associated with each police station alongside local crime statistics, targets and available resources. The problem with this type of participatory budgeting process is that often, there is a huge amount of information to absorb.
It would often be difficult for anyone to understand without devoting a great deal of time to reading through hundreds of pages of documents. This would severely limit the number of people who would take part in a given engagement activity, often skewing results.
Engagement that requires a pre-existing understanding of a topic is not inclusive. Engagement that needs every participant to have a great deal of spare time is rarely accessible. This is one of the many reasons that policy-makers have turned to new technology in order to engage a wider range of citizens.
Participatory budgeting
Participatory budgeting has existed since at least the 1980s, when it was first trialled in Brazil. In brief, a participatory budgeting initiative allows citizens and community groups to influence how public funds are spent. Usually centred on specific sectors or communities, it invites people to suggest and then vote on how public money should be spent. In most countries, including the UK and Canada, it is usually carried out at a local level.
It has been used intermittently by governments across the world for decades. However, these projects were often few and far between due to the high administrative costs and resource requirements associated with any participatory activity. This has changed rapidly in recent years however, following the increasing ubiquity of GovTech tools like Simulator.
Learning from real world participatory budgeting
Participatory Budgeting in Canada
Toronto has many great examples of citizen engagement within Canada. In 2015, the city piloted participatory budgeting as a way of engaging residents in how municipal funds are spent. The pilot was trialled in Don Valley East, an area with approximately 95,000 permanent residents.
The trial – which was run using an online participatory budgeting toolkit – was enormously successful. There were over 2,500 resident interactions resulting in over 700 suggestions. 37 capital projects were chosen, amounting to spending of just under $2 million dollars. By 2019, almost all of these projects had been completed.
When British Columbia faced a major budget deficit, they sought public input on their fiscal choices. Using Simulator, the government engaged citizens in an online budgeting exercise. Over 1,500 people participated within 24 hours and more than 3,000 overall, giving policy-makers better insight into their citizens spending priorities.
Participatory budgeting in Australia
Mitchell Shire in Victoria is one of Australia’s fastest-growing areas, which has sometimes meant making difficult decisions about where to prioritise funding and growth with a limited council budget.
To understand the priorities of residents for their Capital Works budget, the council used Delib’s Simulator. Hundreds of citizens shared views on roads, recreation and public spaces, which were then used to shape the draft budget. The engagement activity was so successful that it was repeated the following year.
“Our community has assisted greatly in setting our Budget. We had a great result [from Budget Simulator] and the information has been used by Council when drafting the Budget and Strategic Resource Plan to ensure the Council was prioritising with community expectations.”
– Cr David Lowe, Mayor of Mitchell Shire
Participatory budgeting in the United Kingdom
When needing to make over £27 million in savings over three years, Powys County Council in Wales needed a more cost-effective, wide-reaching way to consult their residents on difficult budget choices.
Previous engagement had struggled to reach all demographics, particularly young people. It was vital that every citizen was given a voice, however with limited resources they would struggle to find funding for extensive face-to-face activities. They decided to use Simulator. They were therefore able to reach a wide range of citizens without excessive additional spending. The decisions citizens made had a real impact on budgetary decision-making.
Participatory budgeting is not just for governments and local councils, however. In 2019, the New Gorbals Housing Association (NGHA) in Scotland delivered a year-long programme of community engagement, including participatory budgeting. The activity was targeted in a diverse area with persistent inequalities, where previous engagement had mainly been unsuccessful. Using a variety of citizen engagement activities, NGHA engaged 1,300 residents as part of their Gorbals Speaks programme. They delivered three participatory budgeting activities, which were used to distribute £35,000 across 38 community projects. Around 500 residents took part in PB voting.
How participatory budgeting improves citizen engagement
Participatory budgeting – specifically participatory budgeting in the digital age – is a highly effective citizen engagement activity. It gives citizens a more direct, hands-on role in shaping how resources are allocated. Instead of just responding to survey questions about their priorities, the public can more easily see how one choice may affect another.
Simulator is an accessible, intuitive platform for anyone running a participatory budgeting exercise:
Making complex information accessible
Budgets are rarely fun. Whether it’s an individual working out how much they have left for their holiday savings after paying the bills, or a local authority figuring out how much is left in the public purse after their statutory obligations. Budgeting is often perceived as difficult, unintuitive and complex.
However, technology can do a great deal to challenge this. Just as individuals now have access to a huge number of user-friendly budgeting tools, so too do those facilitating budget-based engagement. Digital platforms like Simulator have made understanding budgets simpler. Through easy-to-use user interfaces and contextual information, complex information can be made accessible for all.
Demonstrating difficult real-world trade offs
Decisions around government spending almost always involve trade offs. Unless income has increased, for one thing to have a funding boost, something else must be cut. Participatory budgeting seeks to demonstrate these trade offs to citizens while learning more about their priorities. When using Simulator, participants have to work within fixed budgets, which mirror the pressures faced by decision-makers.
When a participant adjusts a slider, the system shows the consequences of that change straight away. The activity encourages pragmatic and well informed responses, as people are asked to consider what they would choose when faced with limitations.
Understanding public priorities
Digital budgeting tools like Simulator encourage participants to demonstrate their priorities to facilitators. If participants are reflective of the population as whole, these decisions can show decision-makers what the general public would want. This approach works better than simply asking citizens for their funding priorities, as it requires the participants to be more informed about other spending areas. By reviewing responses, organisations can identify:
- What services and projects citizens want to protect from cuts.
- Areas that citizens are willing to compromise on if it means services elsewhere may benefit.
- What specific projects would citizens like to see funded more.
- Differences in how specific groups answer questions. For example, what are the priorities of young people?
Structured outputs and additional comment boxes for deeper understanding
While asking participants to use sliders to show their budget priorities is useful data in of itself, the ability to add additional comment boxes can offer valuable context. Here, participants can explain not only what they want to see, but why they want to see it. This may involve highlighting specific local issues, or raising concerns that may not otherwise be reflected in the sliders.
By using a blend of structured outputs and quantitative data, decision-makers are given a more complete understanding of public priorities and concerns.
“Simulator has helped us to engage and involve our residents in a very complex and difficult process. The comments that we got back from residents show that those who participated got a real insight into the decision-making process that touches so many people’s lives.”
– Matt Jukes, Chief Executive, Hull City Council, UK
Simulator is the go-to govtech platform for engaging citizens in participatory budgeting. If you’d like to learn more about how our software can be used to conduct participatory budgeting activities, book a free demo today.
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