In 1989, one-third of the inhabitants of Porto Alegre, Brazil, lived in impoverished regions on the fringes of the city, cut off from sanitation, clean water, medical facilities, and other essential resources.

In response, the Brazilian Workers’ Party created participatory budgeting (PB), a citizen engagement process that enables community members to decide how to use a portion of public funds. A 2007 report by the North American Congress on Latin America stated that this brought treated water to 99 percent of Porto Alegre’s population, expanded the sewer system’s reach from 46 percent in 1989 to 86 percent of the city, led to the construction of more than 50 schools from around 1997 to 2007, decreased truancy from 9 to less than 1 percent, and helped double the number of students attending university from 1989 to 1995.

More than 120 of Brazil’s largest cities adopted the PB system between 1990 and 2008, the Washington Post states. This enabled a decrease in severe illness and infection caused by poor sanitation, reducing the country’s child mortality rates by almost 20 percent, according to a 2023 article in the nonprofit news organization the 74.

A 2014 paper published in the peer-reviewed academic journal World Development noted that  Brazilian municipalities using PB between 1990 and 2004 “registered a significant drop in infant mortality of between 1 and 2 infants for every 1,000 resident infants.”

Pointing to the other advantages of this model, the paper added, “[P]articipatory budgeting can be an important tool in improving information flows between citizens and their political representatives, enhancing government accountability, and ensuring that citizens’ preferences are reflected in the actual implementation of public policies on the ground.”

This model has gone viral since then. In 2021, the global participatory democracy hub People Powered stated, “PB has become perhaps the most widespread and durable practice of participatory and deliberative democracy, adopted by as many as 11,000 cities, states, nations, schools, and institutions around the world and practiced for over three decades.”

People Powered’s co-executive director, Josh Lerner, co-founded the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP), an organization that “works with communities across the U.S. and Canada to decide together how to best spend public money,” according to its website.

PBP actively supports efforts like Los Angeles Reforms for Equity and Public Acknowledgment of Institutional Racism (L.A. REPAIR). Michael Cusack, PBP’s director of technical assistance, calls L.A. REPAIR “a flagship example of what communities can do when they’re given the power to dream up what community-led programs and service projects can look like.”

Established in 2021, the program allocated approximately $8.5 million to nine Los Angeles neighborhoods impacted by institutional and systemic racism. These REPAIR Zones were identified by the city’s Civil + Human Rights and Equity Department. “In each zone, at least 87 percent of residents identify as BIPOC and at least 16 percent of residents are living below the poverty line,” said Rahel M. Teka, director of strategic communications at PBP, in a 2024 Nonprofit Quarterly article.

During two participatory budgeting cycles, community voting enabled funding for resources such as job training and placement, rental assistance, services for individuals experiencing houselessness, worker-led urban agriculture programs, and medical services for underserved communities.

PBP has also assisted the People’s Budget, which has helped create resources like affordable housing, accessible transit, and safer intersections in neighborhoods throughout Denver, Colorado, from 2022 to 2024.

By investing city resources in the Denver communities that faced the greatest barriers to participation, the People’s Budget helped ensure that the most civically engaged community members were not the only ones involved in this process. Besides city residents “who are checking their local news outlets for updates or have the time to go to public hearings, town halls, etc.,” the program made a strong effort to reach “folks who are working multiple jobs or are non-English speakers, unhoused community members, or incarcerated community members,” Cusack says.

He adds that the program’s leaders invested in interpretation and translation outreach and set up pop-up sites and tables at shelters for unhoused Denver residents. “[The People’s Budget] ran outreach events, idea collection events, and learning events in county jails to ensure incarcerated community members could make this decision just like anyone else.”

PBP also supports PB efforts in areas like Durham, North Carolina, Marin County, California, and Unincorporated King County in Washington. This has brought improvements such as increased pedestrian safety, decreased food waste, and the creation of bus shelters.

Outside the U.S., PB programs have been implemented in areas like Rosaria, Argentina,  Helsinki, Finland, and Taiwan, China. In 2022, international news company SWI  swissinfo.ch cited Switzerland as “the only country in the world where the participatory method is applied as a binding rule,” based on the findings of the Italian research group Politis.

Data that links civic engagement to better physical and mental health suggests that, besides helping improve communities, participatory budgeting may also benefit individuals. Cusack feels this practice can also bring “insight into how it is sometimes brave and risky for elected officials to support something like participatory budgeting and powerful for them to give that decision-making power to the community.”

Cusack notes that at a time when public budgets and government capacities are actively being taken away, participatory budgeting “is a valuable example of what it can look like to double down on democracy and to insist that not only are our public services vital to our communities’ well-being, but that we have the best knowledge about what we need. A couple of wealthy individuals trying to take away these services can’t tell us what we do or don’t need.”

He adds that participation in the PB process “leaves folks with the knowledge and understanding of what it can look like to work together to make these decisions about our collective resources. I think there’s an argument to be made that participatory programs are all the more important to invest in and support in a time when things we thought were safe from the market are being privatized and made into things that are for profit and not for the people.”

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy.

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