Giovanni Allegretti
Department of Town Planning, Faculty of Architecture, University of Florence
1. Introduction
Many
examples of PB have instead pointed to an inversion of the mechanism: the Local
Authorities make the first move, offering citizens spaces for decision-making,
and in exchange try to obtain the commitment of residents and their
organisations to undertake innovative policies centred on new forms of
responsibilisation towards the common ‘assets’ of an area.
1) The first is that the objective of sustainability is not reached only
through actions aimed at realising its principles (reduction of the ecological
footprint, precautionary principle, energy saving, closure of natural cycles,
protection of biodiversity and sociodiversity, etc.) but requires citizens to
consciously adhere to those principles, to change cultures and lifestyles;
2) The second concerns ‘good
governance’. Despite the fact that many South American states find themselves
subject to the impositions of structural adjustment, and their cities are
compelled to adopt decentralised transparency and reorganization procedures
aimed at the attainment of financial accountability, stability and credibility,
‘good governance’ has not been ‘pivotal’ to the practices of PBs. On the
contrary, in most cases it has not been ‘the aim’ of the adoption of
participatory routes, but a means by which to spread a culture of democratic
alternatives to those traditional forms of ‘governance’ responsible for a ‘low
intensity’ democracy, and for serious threats to the ‘demodiversity’ of the
planet (De Sousa Santos, 2002).
In a
framework of ‘asymmetrical subsidiarity’ increasingly marked by the phenomena
of the growth and articulation of the role and structure of cities, the
tendential growth of decision-making tends to ally itself almost naturally with
the creation of space for the direct participation of citizens in
decision-making. Involving citizens in discussion about choice is almost a
consequent necessity to the crisis of
thought and of sole rationality:
in order to provide differentiated answers to the growing complexity of social
demands, to cope with the need for continuous cuts in public investment, and to
rebuild the trust of citizens in politics. A factor motivating the opening up
of local government towards participative paths is also the push given by
privatistic conceptions of the New Public Management, that have tended to
favour a new consideration of the role of citizens-customers-consumers, especially
in relation to the utilization of monopolistic services where the ‘exit’ option (= going elsewhere) is not
practicable.
It
is mainly in peripheral or developing countries that practices have begun to
develop that can broaden and enrich the experiences of simple consultation of
citizens already in use since the 70s in some European cities. The multiplicity
of channels through which the experiments have received attention in the old
continent has been the root cause for the different perceptions with which the
experiences have been observed in the different countries. This multiplicity is
also responsible for the different ‘prevalences’ (on political or technical
issues, on communication mechanisms, on aspects of institutional modernisation
or on those linked to the ability to fight social exclusion) that the first
critical emulations in Europe have shown.
In
particular, in Europe the issue of Participatory Budgets has gained a central
place in discussions on decentralisation, on governance and on the reform of
relations between local contexts and ‘global flows’. It has also allowed us to
rediscover, develop and enrich ‘autochthonous experiences’ independently
developed in different Parts of Europe, creating dialogue between them and
sometimes ‘hybridising them’ constructively and with the management practices
and routes tested in the countries of the Global South.
To
date, there is no universal way of describing Participatory Budgets, also
because there are no reputable models, but only different families of
experiments. The name is not an indispensable factor. Amongst its objectives
may be the ethical growth of the institutions, an increase in the civic spirit
of residents and in their ability to maturely interpret the complexity of the
local territory, but also the rebalancing of the distortions generated by the
market society, the extension of ‘rights to the city’ to all those who inhabit
it and the spreading of forms of ‘negotiated solidarity’ (Abers, 2000) that
allow the fair redistribution of public resources in favour of the most
culturally, socially and economically disadvantaged categories.
The
republican tradition of the French has always been dominated by the idea that
elected members represent the general will in the best possible way. Starting
from this perspective, it was in high places that the idea of an official
policy took a stand on “proximity democracy”. In 2002, the “Vaillant” Law
obliged the creation of District Councils in all cities with over 80,000
inhabitants. In the majority of cases, their role is merely advisory and links
them closely to city institutions, not considering them to be autonomous spaces
for the self-organisation of residents. Furthermore they deal with micro-local
issues concerning the management of transport, housing, urban planning, safety,
use of public spaces, etc. In some places, ‘district portfolios’ have
introduced more ‘solid’, but not more radical, forms of joint management at the
micro-local scale. Citizens, gathered in open assemblies or through meetings of
representatives named in a different way, may decide upon apportioning a sum of
money (usually marginal and often subject to the careful consideration of the
District Councils) towards infrastructural investments or for specific local
projects.
In this context, the PB has presented itself as a strong
political-ideological project promoted by some parties of the Parliamentary
Left, in the effort to halt the local haemorrhaging of votes through a concrete
struggle against the traditional ‘centralism’. The point of reference is Porto
Alegre that - in times of neoliberalism – has become the symbol of a possible
alternative way to govern. Its experience has spread through a series of
movements, particularly the international network DRD - Démocratiser Radicalement la Démocratie.
Synoptically the French cases show three main objectives:
1)
The enhancement
of public management and ‘local governance’, throughout integrating daily
experiences in local politics and promoting horizontal links between social actors.
2)
The
transformation of social relations. PB often find especially fertile ground in
cities that have a high incidence of the most disadvantaged social strata
(particularly in the Metropolitan area of Paris). The objective of social
dialogue is to create consensus and to strengthen conviviality, solidarity and
to defuse social tensions through a constructive use of ‘conflict’.
3)
The third
objective directly refers to the issue of participatory democracy, trying to
underline the difference between it and the simple ‘proximity politics’ of the
traditional republican approach. What is lacking when trying to reinforce this
perception, however, is a true recognition of the role of participating
residents as joint decision-makers.
Participation often tends to be directed towards investments in the
urban area, discussed during local assemblies held in the various districts and
in the complimentary theme meetings held on issues of transport, social issues,
education, the environment etc. Another trait linking the different French
experiences together is the fact that participation is founded mostly on the
creation of open assemblies. At the micro-local level, citizens may make some
decisions about district funds, but at the higher level of municipal budgets
discussions are only consultative. The official acceptance of the requests
depends above all on political will.
Nowadays, among the cities experimenting processes of PB there are Saint
Denis (pop. 85,000), Bobigny (pop. 45,000), Morsang-sur-Orge (pop. 19,500) and the
OPAC in Poitiers, a public agency that manages the entire social buildings park (7500
lodgings) and involves tenants in deciding part of the investment projects
(17%).
Even though the dialogue between delegated democracy and routes of
direct democracy is still not totally smooth everywhere, in France the PBs
structure allows forms of deliberation where the decision-making power is
shared between the citizens and the municipality, thanks to intermediating bodies that gather
together a small number of delegated participants in order to examine and to
detail arguments and requests to be made in larger assemblies. In France,
sometimes, citizens are even consulted on the setting up of the rules governing
the participatory processes. Over time, in some cities, independent Observation
Posts have been set up to imitate the example of similar structures developed
in Cameroon. They guarantee increasing autonomy for citizens to control the
efforts made by the institutions to carry out the proposals of residents, that
they can follow throughout the entire course of approval and realisation,
reporting and explaining any delays on appropriate independent magazines.
To date, one of the biggest problems is the
low number of participants. It seems still difficult to profit from the
participation in the debates on the entire Council budget because people have
still not managed to give it a precise function. Furthermore,
often the procedures for hierarchizing the proposals are confused, and
this can weaken the credibility of the process.
Germany, to date, represents the European country in which there have
been the greatest number of experiences of PBs (between 15 and 20 according to
the interpretation chosen). It is, furthermore, the place where experiments
have lasted the longest and where there has been the greatest number of
wide-ranging political coalitions promoting them.
The context in which the first experiences took root was characterised,
especially, by the progressive loss of the social legitimacy of political
parties. Reunification pushed many of the 16 Länder to open up the regulatory
framework to a more active involvement by residents in the formation of
political decisions. The various ‘Constitutions of the Councils’ made it
possible to directly elect mayors, to liberalise the preferences given to the
municipal councillors, to introduce popular initiative laws and the referendum.
The idea of the “Bürgerengagement” (the engagement of citizens through
associationism or directly in public services) had meanwhile been growing in
importance and diffusion, often taking the form of volunteer work by residents
for the benefit of the council and the local community. The purpose is to
optimise the use of public resources and to contribute to restoring the hopeless
economic situation of German cities, many of which are provisionally
administrated by the Länder because they weren’t able to achieve financial
equilibrium.
The influence of the financial crisis closely linked the development of
PBs to the modernisation of the local public administration. Transparency
became the dominant objective; the need to make the residents truly
participants in public decisions (especially through the consultation of
citizens as ‘users’ or ‘consumers’) was secondary almost everywhere. Therefore
these are ‘cut off’ processes that view the Participatory Budget not as much as
a decision-making body, but as an instrument that should provide extra grounds
for the optimisation of the decisions by the City Councils. In this perspective
the most frequent reference point is not Porto Alegre, but rather Christchurch,
New Zealand, a ‘good governance’ prize winner (1993).
A similar framework explains why, in Germany, the main actors of the PB
are the foundations and organisations working on the issue of the institutional
modernisation. The greatest effort and the most visible at the national scale
is that of the Bertelsmann Foundation. Together with the Hans Böckler Trade
Union Foundation and the KGSt Local Government Research Institute, in 1998 it
launched a preliminary PB pilot project that included 6 cities, concentrated in
the area near the Black Forest. In 2000, the Bertelsmann Foundation started up
a second pilot project together with the North-Rhine Westfalia Land centred on 6 different cities. In
this case, promoted with incentives offered by a public institution at the
supramunicipal level, the existence of a resolution passed by the City Council
became an indispensable condition for legitimising the setting up of the PB.
Unlike in other countries, the Participatory Budget was still not at the centre
of the interest of civil society, nor was it characterised as a political project
owned and carried forward by individual parties. The situation began to change
after a representative of the Council of Porto Alegre and a member of the NGO Solidariedade (made up
of popular representatives of Participatory Budgets from the same city) made an
information tour of more than 18 cities. From that moment on, PBs started to be
requested and defended by popular German organisations and movements in an
increasing number of cities.
Today in Berlin all the political parties have started to dialogue in
order to prepare a motion on the organising of a PB at the scale of the Land, starting from experiments in a few
of its districts. The result is still ‘open’ and the model is all still to be
built.
The organisation of the PB in the German cases tends to be split
generally in three stages. In the first citizens receive the necessary
information about the city’s revenue and expenditures, with detailed
explanations of local taxes, of transfers from superordinate institutions and
on how inflexible expenditures (personnel, ordinary management) take away
increasing resources under the item ‘investments’. The second phase consists of
citizen consultation, which usually takes place during public assemblies, with
the help of questionnaires that are often also available on the Internet. The
third stage is represented by reporting, following the voting on the budget at
the City Council. The Participatory Budget usually corresponds to an
organisation set up by the administration (often only by the Councillorship for
Finance or for the Budget) and is considered to be a sort of supplementary
route to traditional policies.
Within these three stages, the different models applied in reality have
a certain degree of creativity. In Vlotho (pop. 20,533) school pupils were
involved in an integrated project aimed at working out the budget policy, and
the majority of their suggestions were adopted. In Groß-Umstadt (pop. 21,620),
PB is integrated in the financing of the Local Agenda 21. In Emsdetten (pop.
35,000), since 2001 the administration organises a public seminar, whose participants
(about a hundred of them) are chosen by a draw. At every stand, the
participants can get information on taxes and management costs, and can make
proposals on the increase of taxes or on cuts in expenditure. The
Administration may choose whether to take on the suggestions or not but at the
budget-reporting phase they must explain why they have taken on the popular
proposals and all the political parties must accompany any refusals with
comments and notes.
In Rheinstetten (pop. 20,000) the consultation phase is carried out with
the help of a questionnaire (also distributed in schools), which asks the
citizens for their point of view in order to understand their degree of
satisfaction with public services and to collect proposals for improvement in
order to reduce expenditure. In Esslingen (pop. 92,000) the city has set up
Internet centres in the districts, where anyone can be trained on the use of
computers. On this basis, in 2003 an Internet discussion on the budget was
launched, with a professional moderator.
In German experiences, the relations
between the City Councils and the participants seem not easy. The Councils
tend, from time to time, to perceive PB as a competitor rather than an
excellent source of data that can improve the decision-making processes.
Citizens remain full of doubts on the real impacts of their proposals, being
unaware of the reasons why only some of their suggestions were accepted. This
may lead to frustration and lower mobilisation.
On the other hand, Councils and
Committees have a tendency to practice ‘selective hearing’ towards citizens’
proposals, rather than follow the ranking in importance of the guidelines given
by residents. In terms of transparency, progress has been made, but information
often remains superficial and ‘discretionary’ and what is lacking is a training
of citizens that allows them to exercise real and conscious control over the
institutions.
Up to now, PBs in Germany seem to be
dominated by the Administrations; therefore there does not appear to be a
halfway house between institutions and society, but rather a new public space
where exchange can be ‘opened up’ but where a strong asymmetry persists between
the subjects that use it. Currently, the Participatory Budget seems to be
becoming increasingly a fashionable fad; and it remains to be seen whether it
can make budget cuts (almost inescapable in this economic-financial situation)
fairer or whether it will be only transformed into a tool with which to
legitimise the austerity plan of the Government, without interfering with its
contents and with the distribution of the ‘readjustments’.
Watching
the German approach is Eastern Europe, where (also due to the imposition of
International Financial Institutions and of ‘donors’) the issue of the
modernisation of the administrative apparatus is increasingly linked to that of
the struggle against corruption in public institutions (it is precisely in this
way, moreover, that the issue of Participatory Budgets is getting the attention
of some Asian countries such as India and Indonesia, also thanks to the efforts
of international associations such as Transparency International). Recently in
St Petersburg, the institute “Strategy”
launched the initiative “Transparent Budgets” in various Russian cities, and
with the support of the Ford Foundation.
5. Spain
Spain is perhaps the country that most closely
resembles the Latin-American context, and has the most exchanges with it. The
long dictatorial regime has altered the relationship between residents and
local institutions, making it necessary to have a gradual rebuilding of trust
in delegated democracy. Currently, while the City Councils (that nominate the
Mayor) are everywhere elected on ‘blocked’ lists linked to the parties, the
possibility for participation in decisions by residents may be manifold and
very different between them. On the basis of general regulation that spells out
some guidelines, in fact, cities have the possibility of adopting their own
rules on participation. One of the first cities to use these was Barcelona, in
1986. During the 90s sector councils were created in many other cities that
promote themselves as places for consultation on individual issues, but do not
offer any autonomy to civil society, since they are presided over by a member
of the City Council. In 2003, Law 57 updated the basic regulations on participation,
forcing the large cities to identify some local districts and to use new
representative bodies to promote the participation of citizens in the
management of the city. In this dynamic framework, the first experiences of PB
have developed since 2000, with the greatest spread in Catalonia and Andalusia.
The debate on PB is politicised as it is in France and Italy, but there is also
a great deal of interest in the modernisation of the administrative machine
that, amongst others, is supported by the Bofill Foundation, the Independent
University of Barcelona and the Catalan regional administration.
The peculiarity of the Spanish models of PB is their
reference to ‘associative democracy’. In various cities, the associations
(especially neighbourhood associations) are, indeed, the only legal
participants in the processes. The organisational rules are, usually, clearly
pre-established. Several models are supported by their own regulations (that
decree the functions of every actor, the methods for organising and managing
assemblies and even formulae for the territorial distribution of resources
destined for investment), generally jointly created by the council and by
citizens. Often these regulations are approved by the City Council, so that
they risk being rather inflexible instruments against the rapid changes
required by the changing consciousness of residents who participate in the processes.
Today, in Spain there are a dozen of experiences of PBs. Among the
first were those of Rubí and of St. Feliu de Llobregat (in the metropolitan
area of Barcelona) where the Participatory Budget went along with other
processes of citizen participation (particularly those of an urban planning
nature), using new methods such as technical matrices constructed with residents
and choosing citizens from a draw to take part in popular commissions focusing
on some issues that impacted considerably on the budget. These experiences were
of short duration, due to a political change. Other cities like Seville, on the
contrary, are gradually beginning to experiment. In
Sabadell (pop. 185,000) the PB started in 2000 with
the help of the University of Barcelona and using the European Awarness Scenario Workshop methodology. Albacete (pop.
150,000) set great store by its 600 or more strong structure of associations.
In Cordoba (pop. 300,000) the citizens make decisions on investment projects
within a set amount of resources defined by the municipal councillors. There
are 3 levels of participation (neighbourhood, district and city) split up into
a series of assemblies, and criteria for the ranking of the proposals of
residents concerning social issues. Around Cordoba there are other cities that
have experiences of PB underway, like Puente Genil and San Juan de las Cabezas.
The organisational logic of the processes
started in Spain has brought to light two forms of tensions: the first concerns
the connection between the individual participants and the associations, and
another occurs between the scale of the neighbourhood and that of the district.
At the scale of neighbourhood, the mobilisation of individuals appears to be
more intense, and tends to create an atomisation of investments that does not
promote the acquisition of ‘real weight’ by residents in decisions about the
resources of the whole city. Proposals easily reach high numbers that surpass
financial capability. Furthermore, socially disadvantaged groups tend to
participate little or gain little advantage from investments. In Cordoba,
people have tried to overcome this problem by applying some ‘social’ criteria
for the distribution of resources, giving greater scores to proposals of
‘positive discrimination’ to favour the weakest groups. In Spain, on the other
hand, there is little control on the commitments that the administrations have
to take on in relation to the decisions coming out of the PBs process. So,
people often do not know to what degree projects that are consensually agreed
have been accomplished. Because of this, sometimes the proposals repeat and
contradict themselves, and the trust of residents in the institutions is slow
to rebuild. The advantage of the Spanish routes to PBs is represented by the
presence of a strong will by the councils to make available the means for
organising participation. In Cordoba, for example, there is a team linked to
the other public services with the objective of organising the Participatory
Budget in the most effective way possible; it also includes officials
responsible for international relations. This guarantees the reinforcement of
links with other experiences and the progressive construction of a group inside
the Council that is responsible for the process, its monitoring and also the
‘research’ of its results and its indispensable transformations.
It was during the 60s that the issue of participation
entered forcefully into the Italian political debate; factory councils,
educational councils and experiences of participatory urban planning were
important social phenomena that – from the subsequent decade – also began to
permeate into the body of legislation. The Neighbourhood Councils, created with Law 278/76 ‘froze’ the many and
varied informal experiences born over the previous 20 years, removing their
ability to truly represent local participation initiatives. The political crisis
of the 90s ensured that the municipal constitutions began to differentiate
themselves, especially after the change in the electoral law of 1993 that led
to direct mayoral elections. The Consolidated Act for Local Authorities of 2000
gave a boost to the multiplication at the local scale of specific instruments
to transform participation from a symbolic
resource to an instrumental
resource. The city of Rome – the first in Italy – transformed its wards
into ‘Municipalities’, with a certain level of autonomy in decision-making on
some sectors of expenditure and with executive councils that have a directly
elected Chair. In the last decade, however, the possibility for citizens to
intervene in the administrative procedure and to stipulate contracts, agreements
and conventions between private individuals and administrations began to
introduce distortions in the concept of participation, often reducing it to
simple ‘negotiation’ between strong players, and sometimes confusing it with an
administrative action that is increasingly being carried out through the
private sector in the form of outsourcing.
This is the framework in which we find the first
Italian experiments in PB, which go against the stream, interpreting
participation in the main options of local government as a right of citizens to
impact on options of general interest. Awareness of the Latin-American
experiences ‘exploded’ with the first World Social Forum in 2001, through
widespread campaigns promoted by NGOs, associations, social forums and by a few
parties of the Parliamentary Left (as Rifondazione
Comunista). After the 2001 council elections, many municipalities (over 20,
among which Naples, Venice and Rome) formalised an interest for the adoption of
forms of PB, nominating a City Councillor delegated for the experiment. But
only a few cities have matched this ‘formalised pledge’ with any concrete
innovations. This situation somewhat reflects the extremely politicised (and in
some cases decidedly ideological) approach with which the PB has taken root in
the Italian imagination. It has often represented an expendable ‘fashion’ in
electoral planning or an instrument of negotiation between political parties;
at best, some administrations have adopted it as a ‘potential horizon’ for the
future, limiting themselves to starting up innovations that may serve as
preconditions that may one day allow it to be tested out. For example, in
various municipalities booklets have been produced that each year publish the
main budget items in simplified form legible by everyone, in others Internet
sites or magazines have been set up that offer information on the phases of
construction of public works, or open assemblies have been created to present
the Council budgets (once approved). The debate has developed in parallel with
that on Social Budgets (interested in measuring the effects in social terms of
public policies). Even for the academic world, until 2003 the principle point
of reference was the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. The actual creation of a
few concrete processes in that country began paths of emulation and exchange
within Italy, also promoted by the birth of the national association Rete del Nuovo Municipio (ARNM) that
puts social organisations, Universities and administrations interested in
routes of participatory local management into the dialogue with each other.
Today in Italy there are around 20 experiences, very different from each
other, which refer to PB principles. Many today have
a ‘soft’ character, but it makes no sense to demonise them as mere ‘simulations
of democracy’ as indicated by the radical approach of some movements. Some of
them, in fact, were born hastily in 2003 but with the idea of having evolving
and progressively broadening propositions. And many, already in 2004, are
continually structuring and reformulating themselves also in order to allow a
greater decision-making role for the citizens. This is the case for some towns
in the Milan area such as Vimercate (pop. 25,020), Trezzo d’Adda (pop. 11,600)
and Inzago (pop. 8,920). In the same area we find Pieve Emanuele (pop. 18,000)
where experiments in participatory processes have been started gradually since
’94, after years of urban planning folly, corruption scandals and arrests of
administrators. The PB was proposed in 2002 as an experimental continuous
evolving project lasting three-years. From the start it made explicitly
reference to Brazilian experiences, fixing a set minimum quantity of requests
from residents that the Council must accept each year. In the experimental
three-year period, it must be gradually increased from 33% to 75% in 2005.
In Grottammare (pop. 13,887), the oldest and most ‘autochthonous’ of the Italian experiments the process (born in 1994) has been transformed in the last two years, hybridising successfully with similar other ones. A third interesting experience can be found in Rome, in the 11th Municipality (pop. 138,949), split up into 8 homogenous areas, where since 2003 open Local Assemblies are held to elect representatives, in the proportion of 1 for every 15 persons present. Here, the participatory route finds it difficult to be reflected in the technical structure of administrative decisions and therefore the public works decided by the citizens are delayed.
Politically, the Italian PB processes suffer from a
difficulty in escaping from the sphere of ‘proclamations’ in order to transform
themselves into daily management practices. A further critical point can be
linked to the habit of fragmenting participation into a thousand different
issues, which substantially weaken it leaving management based only on
‘delegated’ power unchanged. To date,
citizens do not seem to be very attracted by this innovation that is still not
able to communicate its reforming nature: rarely have people been able to
surpass the threshold of 1-2% of citizens, and so ‘mild’ deliberative
procedures were created for not concentrating on moments of decision-making,
but rather on common growth during debate.
7. An open
conclusion
The
European experiences emphasise - perhaps - also a 5th key element
for guaranteeing the success of participatory routes: the existence of a strong
need at the basis of the experiments.
In Latin America, the needs cementing the will to experiment are often social
in nature: i.e. the need to rebalance economic gaps constructing fairer procedures
for the redistribution of resources. In Europe, often the needs that have given
a boost to the activation of Participatory Budgets are political (especially in
Latin countries), or are to do with modernisation and the improvement of the
efficiency of the public apparatus (especially in the north-eastern area).
An
overall analysis further reinforces the interpretation according to which PB
are more a “way of rethinking the
connection between direct democracy and representative democracy”, than a mere model for undertaking the former. Despite
this, a large part of the European political class continues to perceive them
as being a hypothetical ‘threat’ to the legitimate sovereignty of the
institutions of representative democracy. There is also scepticism fed by many
expressions of organized associationism (trade unions, professional and sector
associations, research institutes, NGOs, etc.): their ‘distance’ from the
processes is furthermore caused by the fear of losing the contractual power
acquired whilst working as counterparts of institutions for over 40 years of negotiation practices. In fact, the
majority of European PB have been betting on the involvement of citizens as
individuals; and organized associationism – sensing it was being pushed into
the margins – often reacted corporatively, taking no interest in or even
opposing the experiments. The organisational force of the Third Sector
(together with the habit of political delegation) could be a considerable
‘brake’ preventing processes similar to PB taking root. Changing the lobbyist
or corporate behaviours of organised associationism is not an easy task
however: it requires a cultural change that puts the associations ‘at the
service’ of the participatory processes, and not vice versa. But it also requires
a change in the political culture, used to finding a strong ally in the Third
Sector, due to the persistence of forms of clientelism and to the habit of
counting on forms of social involvement that are just planning between actors invested with different forms of
‘representation’ from the various segments of society, pre-existing and
external to the activation of participatory processes.
The
best comparative research conducted to date (as Villasante/Garrido, 2003) shows
that the PB processes do not take off when they are conceived as Associationism
Councils. Two main problems therefore remain to be resolved: how to invest in
forms of communication and in rules of organisation that favour an increase in
the response of citizens to convocations, and – at the same time – how not to
lose the added value that the already organised social networks represent.
Every experience today is gradually providing the answers that it believes are
most suitable to its context; but there is still a lot to do. The construction
of Observatories on the Commitments of PB may be an interesting solution. In
many countries of Mediterranean Europe there continues to be a curious paradox:
organised civil society has made a large contribution to the dissemination of
the examples of Participatory Budgets tested in the Global South, but it often
shies away from direct engagement in the processes put into action in some
cities of the old world, and it leaves the Councils to take the lead role in
their creation.
This
problem should not take away from another widespread limitation in the European
experience: the difficulty of involving the weakest parts of the social network
in the public debate on the budget priorities of the administrations.
Unfortunately, to date, the only forms of ‘positive discrimination’ carried out
during the PB route seem to be those that benefit children and adolescents,
categories that can be most easily involved through the cooperation of education
establishments. What is lacking instead are measures to support immigrants and
disabled people (multilingual material or written in Braille, sign language
translators, meetings in places that have ramps and elevators, etc.). There are
also few cases that try and reflect on weaker social groups in terms of
‘gender-mainstreaming’. Even technological instruments (email, votes via
Internet, etc.) are often not used to build a true e-democracy, but end up reinforcing
the digital-divide and cultural and age differences (the case of Esslingen is
an almost a unique experience, perhaps equal only to that of the small Spanish
town of Jun).
In
this light - that it still does not manage to work on truly ‘inclusive’ forms
of participation – it is extremely important that the workings between
delegated democracy and instances of direct democracy do not take the form of
‘erosions of responsibility in decision-making’ by the institutions. There is, in fact, the risk that decisions –
left only to those present during the different phases of the processes of PB –
may produce an increase in the exclusion of those who are not represented on those occasions.
The ‘matrix’ project elaborated by Community Pride
also acquires the important role of being an
innovative technical instrument for guaranteeing transparency in
decision-making. In this light, it aims to halt a further weakness that emerges
from many of the European experiences, and especially those of the European
Latin countries: namely the scant level of attention paid to administrative
reforms that should accompany the execution of PBs in order to make the
modernisation of the public machine a multiplier of the effects obtained. In
the majority of cases the opposite happens: the inability to act on the reform
of bureaucratic procedures and the poor level of commitment shown in promoting
change in the culture of public officials translates into a large obstacle to
the success of the participatory route.
The
structures do not manage to reflect in themselves the novelty of the means of
reforming the socio-political culture, and the slowness in practically carrying
out the choices made consensually creates disappointment for the citizens and
lowers the level of involvement in the Participatory Budget. They thus expose a central fact: that
participation is not an independent variable, rather it is a hypersensitive
phenomenon, whose success is strictly connected to the results it produces, and
to the times in which it manages to produce them.
These
limits certainly do not obscure the great value of processes that – even where
they struggle to become spaces of joint-decision making for administrators and
citizens – have the fundamental role of reintroducing the value of daily life
skills and knowledge in local planning. And they do not do so considering users
only to be potential modernisers of public services, but by showing a strong
level of faith in social intelligence. From this point, PBs allude to an
interpretation of the principle of subsidiarity that turns the one indicated at
the beginning of this text ‘on its head’, suggesting that the institutions must
not remain indifferent or outside the initiatives and proposals
that protect the general interest, autonomously promoted by citizens and their
organisations, but have the obligation to support their development.
They
therefore refer to a meaning of ‘circular
subsidiarity’ that underlines how state and society must collaborate
permanently in order to achieve the common interest through a relation based on
cooperation and partnership ‘ with equal rights and responsibilities’. On this
issue, the Active Citizenship Network (supported at the local level by
movements such as the Italian Cittadinanzattiva)
has carried out an important cultural battle trying to bind the results of brave
and ‘provocational’ local experiments with the establishment of the new
European Constitution. It has suffered a temporary defeat, but the results of
the various experiments remain, suggesting that the battle will have to
continue.
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