In 1776, Adam Smith laid out the liberal promise of political economy: a “well-governed society” implementing the policies that Smith painstakingly outlined (secure property rights, competitive markets, etc.) could herald in a heretofore unrealized “universal opulence.” Ever since, analysts and practitioners have been debating Smith’s promise in the light of a wide range of actual liberal policy programs and an equally wide range of outcomes.
Similarly, the “participatory promise” (William Nylen, “Participatory Institutions in Latin America,” Comparative Politics, 43 [4], 2011), first unveiled in 1989 in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, in the form of its now-famous commitment to participatory budgeting (PB), has generated thousands of real-world PB programs, each dedicated to improving on representative democracy or, at the very least, to fostering more efficient and more transparent governance. True to form, analysts and practitioners of PB have been weighing in ever since concerning the outcomes of this commitment.
Participatory Budgeting in Global Perspective, cowritten by three political scientists with decades between them of highly regarded research on the topic, represents a meticulously organized and highly successful effort to review and build on much of the extensive PB literature, both theoretical and empirical. The authors focus on the basic questions that anyone would ask of any public policy package that has managed to spread across the planet: What is it? Where did it originate and why? How and why did it diffuse so broadly and to what effect on the individuals and communities embracing it? Throughout the text, the authors make an admirable effort to explicitly build on existing literature, giving credit where credit is due, while adding their own original contributions (summarized in the conclusion as “six broad contributions to academic and policymaking debates” [p. 181]).
One of those noteworthy contributions is their definition of PB as a set of unifying principles that undergird, in varying degrees, the wide range of practices and institutions that have come to call themselves PB: voice/empowerment, vote/legitimacy, social justice, social inclusion, and oversight. This principles-based definition avoids unproductive debates over “real” versus diminished “imitation” versions: all PBs are versions of the unifying principles. The resulting variance is the empirical field for the authors’ analysis.
The “participatory promise” is operationalized as three potential outcomes of PB processes—clearly rooted in the defining principles—that could affect participating individuals (citizen-participants and public officials) and their communities: democratic learning and community well-being, empowerment and strengthening of civil society, and representation and accountability. To what extent do real-world PBs measure up, and why or why not?
Briefly describing and explaining PB’s origins in Porto Alegre specifically and Brazil more broadly (mostly in historical-institutionalist language), the authors turn to the policy diffusion literature to explain its worldwide spread and growing diversity/variance. Noting that there is “no single impulse driving adoption” (p. 49), the authors stress the need to uncover the way that the PB idea first found its adopters/proponents: “normative” adoption (based on belief in the participatory promise), “mimetic” adoption (following the latest “best practices” techniques), and “coercive” adoption (following “external” promoters’ choices to adopt). The perceived needs and interests of PB adopters in being drawn to PB in the first place—solving “context-specific problems” (p. 81)—is also important, including a hoped-for uptick in public support, electoral or otherwise. Patterns of adoption over time, in terms of both policy design and the relative degree to which each of the five PB principles gets emphasized or deemphasized, help the authors construct a typology of six types of PB: Empowered Democracy and Redistribution (the Porto Alegre model), Deepening Democracy through Community Mobilization, Mandated by National Government, Digital PB, Social Development and Accountability, and Efficient Governance.
Based on this typology of real-world cases of PB, the authors hypothesize how each one, given its design and underlying value orientation, is likely to generate—or is recognized as having actually generated—the individual- and community-level outcomes associated with the participatory promise. The Empowered Democracy and Redistribution type, for example, although it is the most likely to deliver on all dimensions of the participatory promise, is also the hardest to implement because of its demanding and exceedingly rare social, economic, and political “prerequisites.” No wonder, then, that the authors see governments moving away from or increasingly not even considering such designs. Meanwhile, the Social Development and Accountability type has become “the most prevalent in the Global South and/or in rural areas” (p. 188) but offers only “moderate to low impacts” for reasons outlined throughout the book and illustrated across multiple cases.
Although the entire book represents a clear effort to link conceptual and theoretical discussions with empirical illustrations, at least half of the volume—four chapters—is dedicated to describing the diffusion of PBs in Latin America, Asia, Europe and North America, and sub-Saharan Africa (including “meaningful trends within each region” [p. 190]) and then illustrating and testing the many hypotheses/theories presented in the introduction and in the first two chapters: Why diffusion? Why the chosen type of PB and to what effect on participants and their communities? The authors claim that their book “is the first cross-national, cross-regional analysis of PB programs that employs a single framework to assess the likely parameters of change generated by PB” (p. 187). An additional plus is that, at multiple points throughout the book, the authors indicate where evidence is lacking and where further research is needed.
In addition to summarizing case study findings and relating them to the concepts and theories discussed in the first part of the book, the conclusion “looks ahead” to explore such “unresolved issues” as PBs being adopted in authoritarian and semi-authoritarian contexts, as well as “the different dynamic at play” (p. 199) in cases where external actors like the World Bank or international NGOs are PB’s primary proponents. The book ends by offering practical lessons to policymakers and civil society activists who are considering adopting PB or adapting the model they have to better fit their own social and political conditions.
This is an essential book for PB practitioners and graduate students wishing to step into the extensive and often bewildering literature on PB and on the underlying participatory promise. PB scholars are likely to see it as an extremely useful summary and reconceptualization of the literature to date.
