The Participatory Budget is a tool for the City of Antwerp to give citizens autonomy to spend 10% of the city’s budget annually on projects that could enrich their lives. The main feature of their approach is the focus on deliberative practices based on face-to-face debate, consensus decision-making and reaching marginalized and hard-to-reach residents. It is an excellent case for cities looking to engage citizens in concrete ways in public life and decision-making, allowing also for multiple forms of engagement.
The participatory budget fosters active, deliberative and connected communities of neighbourhoods, engaged and empowered in civic life. Citizens are equipped with an awareness of each other’s needs, what resources are needed to satisfy these needs and the competences to prioritize, plan and implement solutions in a collaborative way.
Title
Brief description
Participatory budgeting is recognised internationally as a way for people to have a direct say in how public money is spent. It has proven to be an excellent deliberative democracy tool for governments to actively engage citizens in civic life. While following a similar basic pattern, the ways participatory budgeting is implemented is manifold and shaped by the surrrounding context (political, social, cultural, economic). Antwerp’s Participatory Budget is unique for its use of consensus-based decision making that values face-to-face debate and discussion.
Keywords
Participatory budget; deliberative democracy; consensus-making; participative finance; policy tool
City/Country
Time period
From 2014 to present
Lever(s)
Technology: While most participatory budgets use digital platforms as a primary tool of participation, Antwerp’s participatory budget uses technology as a means to encourage in-person participation. The reason behind this is to allow for more meaningful discussion and deliberation. The digital platform is used now for communication, registration for the different phases, and to vote for their favourite projects. Online votes however are only given a weighting of 20% compared with 80% of offline votes. In this way, residents who would like to participate but don’t have the time or resources to come to offline events can participate but are pushed to attend. Offline votes are weighted more to give value to the deliberative character of the process. Technology is in essence a stepping stone for offline participation.
Methodologies
Participatory budget is a form of participatory finance and deliberative democracy that enables citizens to identify, discuss, and prioritise public spending priorities, and gives them the power to make real decisions about how money is spent.
Done well, it can meaningfully involve citizens in allocating resources, prioritizing policies, and proposals, and monitoring public spending. Any place can implement a participatory budget.
World Region
Scale(s) of the case analysed
Target audience and dimension
Domain(s) of application
Context addressed
Solution applied
Challenge addressed/ Problem-led
Barriers addressed
Main Practices
Impact
Co benefits
Engagement Journey
Impact to climate neutrality
Context & Public policy of reference
Innovative approach(es) addressed
Governance: The Participatory Budget is organized by the City of Antwerp but the decision-making power of how the budget is spent is 100% in the hands of the participants. Citizens do not have an advisory role but an executive role. The city has an advisory role in the sense that they provide informative material to guide the decision-making process (e.g. costs, regulations, current budget, etc.).
Communication: Citizens deliberate over the budget process in small tables. In order to ensure informed decision-making and an effective use of resources, the city provided visual theme cards with cost information as well as the budget. The use of poker chips also helped provide tangibility and structure to the investment decision-making process. The use of both online and offline touchpoints allowed for different user groups to be engaged. In addition, the city office also specifically met with organizations working with the more marginalized to ensure that these groups were being reached.
Network-of-Networks: Citizens are engaged in the participatory budgeting process in each of the four phases. While each phase has its own objective, participants are generally engaged in a small table to deliberate and make select choices from a larger pool of options. To preserve the consensus-based value of the process, offline participation is encouraged. Online participation is reserved mainly for communication reasons and as a gateway to more meaningful and deeper engagement offline.
Long-term Engagement and Empowerment: The participatory budget is an annual process. While the final goal of the activity is to allot the budget, the process has several long-term learning outcomes:
- Citizen Learning:
- citizens learn about city budgeting and the tensions and cost of different choices;
- citizens learn about the needs of others;
- citizens learn how to talk with each other and advocate certain issues while also listening and taking into consideration other perspectives and needs;
- citizens learn about city budgeting and the tensions and cost of different choices;
- City Learning:
- city officials learn more about the real needs of citizens and the local neighbourhoods (fostering opportunities for outside-in organizational change);
- city officials learn about different public departments in the process and how their work is related to each other (working to break down silos and create opportunities for outside-in organizational change).
- city officials learn more about the real needs of citizens and the local neighbourhoods (fostering opportunities for outside-in organizational change);
Initiator
The participatory budget was initiated by the city of Antwerp’s newly appointed Chairman of the Participation Office in 2013. The first edition was launched in 2014 in the city center with approx. 200,000 citizens. It has since taken on a more neighbourhood approach to encourage participation and to be more inclusive of the marginalized.
Stakeholder networks and organisational model
| Stakeholder (Group) | Role |
| City of Antwerp's Participation Office | Initiator and Funder |
| Citizens | Project leader, stakeholder coalition and funder |
| Organizations | Project leader and stakeholder coalitions |
| University | Evaluation and advice |
Democratic Purpose
Participant Recruitment
Interaction between participants
Resources
Key enablers
1. Consensus-based, face-to-face participatory budget in which citizens play an executive role in resource allocation through deliberation
2. Demonstrated how digital technology can be used to promote meaningful offline civic participation
3. Illustrated in its different iterations (through several editions) how to ensure diversity in participation and reach the hard-to-reach
Key inhibiting factors
How to engage all citizens equitably: the city had to refine many touchpoints of the process in order to include and account for specific user constraints (e.g. digital competences, time to attend events, language barriers, etc.)
The lack of a mapping of funded projects makes it hard for citizens to check the progress of funded projects
Engaging different departments in an agile way to implement rapidly selected projects required the city’s staff to prepare these offices to accommodate and carry out the projects, as well as to refine criteria in the feasibility check of the project selection process
Drawbacks/pros/cons of the solutions (after implementation)
Scalability
Key lessons
The main result of the Participatory Budget is of course the budget itself with the list of funded projects per theme. The projects are planned to be implemented within the year. However, it is not clear how many are actually implemented per year and what impact these have. Further research is needed to investigate this.
A secondary (or perhaps even primary) result of the process is the new relationships and learning that emerge from the deliberative character of the activities.
The project had five objectives:
- Citizens understand each other’s needs through dialogue;
- Citizens are given the opportunity to decide how a portion of the budget is spent;
- Public money is spent efficiently based on the citizen’s knowledge of local needs in a neighborhood;
- Building awareness on the cost of different choices (i.e. determining where money spent, how much, on whom with limited resources); and
- Increased satisfaction with participation by clearly showing at each phase their decision making power (i.e. not advisory role but executive: they hold the power to decide).
The main phases of the project are as follows:
Start Meetings: In this phase, citizens are charged with deciding which themes they think are the most important for the entire district. Participants are divided into tables of 6 individuals. Together they must select 5 themes out of 93 through consensus. The themes are abstract enough to avoid debating over concrete projects ready to be implemented yet concrete enough to be meaningful (e.g. “green spaces” is too abstract, options in this policy domain are: “pop up parks” or “more trees on the street” etc.). On order to make these decisions, participants get informative material (e.g. what the budget looks like without the 10% governed by the Participatory budget; “price cards” that go with each theme – a tree costs X, incl. work on the pavement, etc.). The 12 most chosen themes advance to the next stage, the Forum.
The Forum: During this stage, the participants 1.4 million euros over the 12 selected themes. Participants are divided into tables of 8 this time. The distribution is done again in an a discursive manner but in a game format. Each participant receives 12 poker chips worth €10,000 each. Each participant places his/her/their chips on the themes he/she/they want to invest in. There are two rules: (1) a theme is considered valid if at least 4 different participants invest; and (2) money I allocated to the theme only if it raises €60,000 of investment. This is meant to encourage participants to work together and to provide arguments to put focus on a particular theme. Similar to the first phase, good information is also key. Participants are provided with the budget and all the projects that will already be implemented. Together with the costs, this allows participants to make more informed choices on what to place their money on. The final budget per theme is calculated by averaging the amount allotted by all the tables.
Ideation: In this stage, citizens and organizations are given the opportunity to submit projects for the selected themes within the budget defined in the previous stage. Projects are submitted online. In addition to this, project labs are organized to help individuals who need or want help from others in developing their project idea. Both online and offline, project proposers must answer 7 questions, e.g. project description, value added, pitfalls, step-by-step plan, who carries out the project, etc. All projects submitted are then tested for feasibility: if they are within the district authority, fit the theme, respects the budget, etc.
Participatory Budget Festival: In this final event, citizens select which projects are executed with the 1.4 million euro budget. Residents are divided into tables who then decide on 5 most valuable projects per theme. All the selected projects from each table are then presented. The top ranking project of each theme is selected to be carried out. Projects are then chosen until the money allotted to the theme runs out. All projects are implemented with a 1-year timeframe.
Indicators
# of participants (and the diversity between them)
External link
Bastiaensen, H. (2017, June 15). Participatory Budgeting in Antwerp. The Action Cluster ‘Citizen Focus’, welcomes you to the webinar on Participatory Budgeting: a tool for Inclusive Smart Cities. https://smart-cities-marketplace.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/Presentation%20Webinar%20PB.pdf
Cook, A., Bastiaensen, H., & Basford, M. (2019, February 28). Antwerp’s consensus-based take on Participatory Budgeting. https://www.demsoc.org/resources/antwerp-s-consensus-based-take-on-participatory-budgeting
Eurocities. (2017). Antwerp introduces participatory budgeting (Cities in Action). Eurocities. https://nws.eurocities.eu/MediaShell/media/Antwerp_participatory_budget.pdf
Sobol, A. (2021). Deliberation as a Path towards the Development of Participatory Budgeting (a Case Study of the
City of Antwerp). In J. Podgórska-Rykała & J. Sroka (Eds.), Citizen Participation in Budgeting and Beyond: Deliberative Practices and their Impact in Contemporary Cases (pp. 51–64). Wydawnictwo LIBRON.
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