Technology support for participatory budgeting

Participatory budgeting is a reasonably well-established governance practice, particularly in South America. It is information and communication rich - making it well suited for modern technology support; in addition, the widespread participation of many citizens is difficult to achieve without this support. Participatory budgeting is associated with eParticipation, where much is already known about the kinds of technologies supporting citizen participation and how they are used. This paper identifies (from the existing literature) basic processes which are common to most participatory budgeting initiatives and couples them together in a generic process model. Two cases studies are examined for different purposes. The well known Porto Alegre case is analysed to show how the generic process model is implemented in a practical example. The more recent Berlin-Lichtenberg initiative, however, is integrated with a purpose-built internet platform; here we use the analysis to understand how the internet-based technologies are used to support the various participatory budgeting processes. We identify a range of these technologies which are currently used to support different eParticipation activities and match them to the generic participatory budgeting processes. This results in a comprehensive picture of how known eParticipation technologies can be used to support participatory budgeting. The next research question (unfortunately beyond the scope of this article) is how to choose - which technologies fit which local circumstances and conditions?