Participatory Budgeting World Atlas 2019

Year
2019
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Coordination & Edition
Oficina e Epopeia

Funding
Câmara Municipal de Cascais, Portugal

Partner
ENDA ECOPOP

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Presentation
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The World Atlas of Participatory Budgeting represents the widest compilation of data, to date, on the situation of these processes on the planet. This is the result of collaborative work and the enormous generosity of more than 70 authors, who voluntarily made themselves available to collect and analyse information that would enable to understand the reality of these initiatives in very diverse quadrants.
One of the main motivations of this initiative is to assess the disseminator outreach of participatory budgeting and to understand the main trends, over the last 30 years, ensuring a first-level analysis on the data of each country, and in a second moment, on the different continents.
Assuming this as the main desideratum of the Atlas, it seemed appropriate to enrich the results with the introduction of more qualitative elements, to allow tracing of the profiles of the territories where participatory budgeting processes occur. This is the reason why the use of four international indices, referring to themes related to the most classic objectives of these processes, over which there is a fairly broad consensus. This bid made it possible to hierarchize the positioning of the different countries, where experiments were identified, with regard to the levels of commitment they have with the promotion of democracy, the fight against corruption, human development and the happiness of the populations.
In the following pages, the reader will find many reasons of interest, unreleased data and surprising results. The Atlas coordination team understood that it would be equally useful to launch a set of challenges and new lines of research, as a way of exploring dimensions so far marginal or poorly explored in the literature devoted to the topic.
The Atlas is a product, patent in this publication, but it is also a process under construction. The dynamics of a collaborative network of authors, triggered in previous works and reinforced with this one, allowed to mobilize contributions from 71 countries. It is the desire of the entire team to broaden this dynamic to more states in future editions, thus reinforcing the joint capacity for understanding and analysing participatory budgeting in the world.