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Ballarat St permanent park providing green space for the people of Yarraville (Melbourne). 
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Democracy is often posited as government for the people, by the people. The purest form of classic democracy is one in which citizens of a community directly decide on laws and policies that they follow, and how their resources are to be applied. In ancient Athens, citizens all were able to come together to debate and vote on the laws of the city-state. They literally dropped what they were doing, assembled, discussed, and voted. They were, in effect, a legislature made up of all of the citizens of Athens.
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From
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Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget. It gives ordinary people real power over real money, letting them work with government to make the budget decisions that affect their lives.
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Known as “the capital of participatory democracy”, the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre will become subject for a lab in the World Forum for Democracy.
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It intends to be the first major US city to allow citizens to directly vote on portions of budget via the web. While details are still coming together, its plan is for each city district to vote on $100,000 in expenditures. Citizens will get to choose how the money is spent from a list of options, similar to the way they already vote from a list of ballot propositions. Topical experts will help San Francisco residents deliberate online
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When it comes to the relationship between participatory institutions and development outcomes, participatory budgeting stands out as one of the best examples out there. For instance, in a paper recently published in World Development, Sonia Gonçalves finds that municipalities that adopted participatory budgeting in Brazil “favoured an allocation of public expenditures that closely matched the popular preferences and channeled a larger fraction of their total budget to key investments in sanitation and health services.” As a consequence, the author also finds that this change in the allocation of public expenditures “is associated with a pronounced reduction in the infant mortality rates for municipalities which adopted participatory budgeting.”
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Workers co-ops, public banks and participatory budgeting have all been shown to be successful and efficient. It's time to take democratic control of our economy.
David Week's curator insight,
August 16, 2014 7:55 PM
All kinds of new social and economic forms are currently emerging. The key is to tie the new social forms to the new urban processes.
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We don’t need social scientists to tell us that young adults are too cynical to be politically engaged. Just ask any young person you meet. The recent findings of Harvard’s Institute of Politics — that Americans ages 18 to 29 possess a record low trust in government — shouldn’t be a shock to anyone.
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For the uninitiated participatory budgeting (or PB) is a two-and-a-half decade old innovation of direct citizen involvement in decision-making over the allocation of public finances. In simple terms, PB refers to ordinary citizens, instead of public officials, deciding on public spending at local and regional levels (Lerner, 2011). But there are many different variations of PB which range from merely consultative to genuinely participatory, empowering and inclusive (see Sintomer et al., 2008 for descriptions of various models). PB can also be more or less democratic, and not all PB processes contain a democratic component (which suggests that attention to the content and practice of what is often called ‘PB’ is paramount).
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