Whose Budget? Our Budget? Broadening Political Stakeholdership via Participatory Budgeting

Authors

Celina Su, City University of New YorkFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2012

Abstract

In this thought piece, I attempt to contextualize New York City’s inaugural participatory budgeting (PB) process in the larger landscape of American political participation. I discuss how the bottom-up way in which stakeholders wrote the process’s rules in the first place, alongside the core role played by the two lead organizations, helped to broaden notions of stakeholdership among constituents. Ultimately, the first year’s primary achievement regarding political participation was not a specific set of outcomes, but a debut as an unfinished form of governance—one that began to engage traditionally marginalized constituents, to trigger their political imagination, and to prompt them to demand more.

Comments

This work was orignally published in the Journal of Public Deliberation, available at http://doi.org/10.16997/jdd.149