Participatory Budgeting as a tool for social, political and institutional tranformation. A balance in the recent Argentine scene.

Abstract

The 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s were a period of deep structural and political changes in Latin America, where many countries returned to democratic regimens, while neoliberal policies were developed and the concept of “public“ was broadened due to the strengthening of non-state public space, which included greater citizen involvement in matters related to their immediate surroundings. It is in this framework that the Participatory Budget was born in Argentina. Its development over more than a decade shows that the dynamics and intensity of citizen participation varies both in relation to the particular features in the different experiences and in relation to the ways the mechanism is implemented. This paper is aimed at examining the distinctive features that characterize the political-institutional, participatory, intraburocratic, and distributive-financial dimensions, in the different cases where the participatory budget has been implemented in Argentina. The foregoing is done with the purpose of identifying the potential and the tensions arising from the relationship between the local government and the citizens, such as their ability to incorporate innovative topics to the public agenda, promote a wide range of participatory policies, and favor municipal decentralization processes and the problems related to the conflict between a transverse and participatory management logic resulting from PB and a traditional, hierarchical, and compartmentalized logic, as the one commonly used in many local governments.