Participatory democracy has come a long way since its inception in Porto Alegre in Brazil back in the 1980’s. Despite this progress however, the movement has not really gained traction in large, western democracies yet. There are signs that this is changing however.
In Chicago for instance, there are already benefits emerging from greater civic cooperation. The cities five P-TECH high school/college hybrids for teaching science, technology and math got off the ground thanks to the combined efforts of the mayor’s office, the public schools, city colleges and IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, Motorola Solutions and Verizon.
Arguably the most exciting move however is in San Francisco, where they are launching a first stab at participatory budgeting. It will be the first American city to allow citizens to vote directly on portions of the budget via the web. The scale of things will be small to begin with, with each city district opening up around $100,000 of expenditure to the public vote, but hopefully in time it will scale up.
Citizens will get to choose from a list of options, with experts providing their own opinion to help them decide. It brings about a notable shift in how democracy is traditionally supplied, and links to the notion of epistemic democracy, which suggests that the most valuable thing citizens can bring to a democracy is their knowledge and expertise. So just as employees can drive corporate strategy making, citizens can drive policy making.
Such thinking formed the basis of Richard Pascale’s theory of positive deviance. He found that when problems require behavioural change rather than technical change, it tends to work much better when you find out from people on the front line what is happening.
It’s a form of intelligent crowdsourcing, and no doubt the policy makers in San Francisco will be hoping to replicate the success that has been seen in Brazil.
I have been fearing the arrival of participatory democracy and advances in technology may provide the impetus it needs to destroy us. I have only to look at the product of the California ballot initiative process to prove my point. Voters legislating democratically craft bad laws. Thankfully, most are struck down as unconstitutional. However, a few make it past ever more liberal justices and we are forced to live with them.
Think about it. Have you ever voted on a ballot initiative? How well did you research and study it? Or, did you depend on sound bites that you heard on the media to make your decision? We're supposed to have a representative democracy. We elect representatives and provide them with salaries and legislative assistants to make these decisions for us. Sure, many make bad decisions, but we can boot them out and elect new ones. That is, of course, if we don't just vote the "party line"…
Hi Jack. I manage budgets both personally and professionally, and always make sure they're as well researched as possible. It's my money after all, and money that was hard earned, so for sure I'm going to ensure it's spent wisely. I would much rather be responsible for my own decisions and choices in life right now, than wait four years to choose between two groups of people, neither of whom represent me and my choices in life.
A long way to go before we truly get control over the money we are forced to hand over, but progress is progress I suppose.
Seems that participatory budgeting increases the tax take
http://publications.iadb.org/handle/11319/6699?lo…
This paper provides the first experimental evaluation of the participatory budgeting model showing that it increased public participation in the process of public decision making, increased local tax revenues collection, channeled larger fractions of public budgets to services stated as top priorities by citizens, and increased satisfaction levels with public services. These effects, however, were found only when the model was implemented in already-mature administratively and politically decentralized local governments. The findings highlight the importance of initial conditions with respect to the decentralization context for the success of participatory governance.
Nice to hear, and from Russia of all places. Good find Nick.