Brian Wampler, a professor in the School of Public Service, co-authored a blog post on Open Budgets Blog, which is hosted by the International Budget Partnership.
The post is titled, “Paradise Lost? The crisis of participatory budgeting in its own birthplace,” and analyzes cities’ embrace and subsequent disengagement from participatory budgeting, a process that allows citizens to propose and vote on local investment projects that will be funded by their municipality.
“What the data show is a steep increase until about 2004-05 and a subsequent substantial decline, which saw the number of cities with a functioning PB process fall by more than half in about a decade,” Wampler writes.
He then explores potential reasons for the decline and proposes lessons to be learned from the process.