Participatory Budgeting involves people (part 2)

From:  Examining Participatory Budgeting (Part II), by Sandy Heierbacher, Director of the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD)  |  AmericaSpeaks

• (Continued from Part 1)

• The Participatory Budgeting Conference in New York brought together a number of the champions of the PB process across the globe.

• Yves Cabannes spoke first, explaining his role in the early PB experiments in Brazil and elsewhere, and noting that "participatory budgeting is a good way to have democracy and people’s control over what is theirs to begin with – public money.”

• PB has since spread to hundreds of cities in Latin America, and dozens of cities in Europe, Asia, Africa, and finally North America.  More than 1000 municipalities are said to have initiated participatory budgeting.  Approaches differ significantly, and are shaped more by their local contexts than by a pre-set structure.

• Jez Hall described PB as “using money to create new deliberative spaces to exchange technical, political, and local knowledge.”  He further explained that PB is all about connecting people getting people to take small actions in their local communities.  Jez noted that PB brings people into an almost ritual space where they can share positive stories about how they can do something in their communities.