Participatory budgeting: Let's make it happen in Scotland

PEOPLE'S understanding of how society works is now completely disconnected from the reality of how society works.

According to YouGov, 40% of young people in the UK felt their vote was not important to the 2019 General Election results.

House Of Commons Library research found that low income, women, BAME and disabled people feel politically disengaged.

Local election turnout is often worryingly low – for one example, last year’s Manchester City Council elections recorded only 24%.

Alienation is a step on the road to the absolute failure of democracy and therefore of society as we know it.

In a wellbeing economy, democracy runs far deeper than just politics.

A core element is expanding democratic inclusion and ending the alienation from the democratic process that most voters experience.  

There are three key solutions to democratic exclusion. 

1. Localisation of democracy, where solutions to problems are sourced from the people closest to the problem.
2. Electronic voting, which offers secure and instant access to the democratic process and importantly will encourage mass participation in democracy from young people.  That will change everything. 
3. Participatory Budgeting, which directly gives citizens democratic control over how Government and council budgets are spent. This is more common than you might think but it’s not gaining enough traction in the UK or Scotland.
   
   Let’s explore participatory budgeting today by looking at three major international examples of participatory budgeting. 
    

Porto Alegre, Brazil 

Often cited as the birthplace of participatory budgeting, Porto Alegre in 1989 was a struggling industrial city, suffering from rampant poverty, inequality, crime and corruption. 20.5% of the population lived in favelas.

Olivio Dutra (Workers Party) was elected mayor and recognised that he had to find a way to engage the disenfranchised. Tens of thousands of citizens became involved in the process, where district representatives created a list of recommendations that would improve their community and then hold the government to account to implement them.

Over time, it grew from smaller projects like building play parks, paving direct roads and paths to a much larger scale, like oversight of the city’s transportation system.

The participatory budget expanded to make up around 20% of the city budget by 1999. 

The programme resulted in higher participation from low income and ethnic minority groups. It challenged corruption and promoted transparency, with city neighbourhood associations doubling.

The case of Porto Alegre provided a blueprint for the Worker’s Party’s "radical democracy" – democracy for the people, by the people. 

Paris, France

Let's look at a modern European participatory budgeting approach in Paris.

2023 Parisian participatory budgeting proposals open to public vote include renovating a sports centre, refitting buildings to make them more environmentally sustainable, new school library construction and measures to encourage pedestrianisation. 

In 2019, 5% of the city's budget was allocated via participatory budgeting. At €100 million, that's the largest ever project in cash terms. In 2019, 140,000 people voted to fund 11 large and 183 smaller scale projects out of 430 proposed.

Young people who make up 26% of Parisian voters are overrepresented, making up 41% of the voters. If that doesn't sell it to you, nothing will.  

Reykjavik, Iceland

Unsurprisingly, Reykjavik provides one of the best examples of widespread participation in budgeting. Around 5% of the city construction budget of the Icelandic capital is decided via participatory budgeting.

Some 70,000 people out of a total population of 120,000 have used a platform which has approved more than 600 projects.

The online crowdsourcing platform My Neighbourhood allows for citizens to make suggestions via an online forum to improve their community.

Participatory Budgets in Scotland

There have been around 7000 public budgets across the globe but politicians have little incentive to give up their power and control.

There are small scale examples already in Scotland, notably in Dunfermline, Orkney, Glasgow and Paisley.

The lack of larger projects does make it difficult to measure the positive outcomes above the immediate community level and so we need to test some large scale trials in city and council areas as part of our transition to a wellbeing economy. 

The Scottish Government has the Scottish Participatory Budgeting Framework that aims to have 1% of local authority spending allocated via participatory budgeting.

Although some good work is being done in those pilot schemes, 1% is simply not enough. Unless it hits 5% I’ll still call it a tick box exercise. 

Is it sustainable?

In Porto Alegre, eventually, as the city's economy and social structure vastly improved, the power hungry politicians slowly diminished the role of participatory budgeting.

This will always happen where it's seen as a stand alone project or a rapid solution to crises and not embedded as a core element of an overarching value system such as the wellbeing economic approach. 

It can and will work in Scotland and should become part of the fabric of our society but it can't be optional; it needs to be built into the framework of how our nation works, preferably in a written constitution following independence.

Let's test it now via a large-scale pilot, in city, rural and island communities and let’s make it a foundation stone of the better, fairer and more successful nation we all want Soctland to become.

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp is the CEO of Business for Scotland, the chief economist at the wellbeing economics think tank Scotianomics, the founder of the Believe in Scotland campaign and the author of Scotland the Brief.