The Power of Ambiguity: How Participatory Budgeting Travels the Globe

Abstract

From its inception in Brazil in the late 1980s, Participatory Budgeting has now been instituted in over 1500 cities worldwide. This paper discusses what actually travels under the name of Participatory Budgeting. We rely on science studies for a fundamental insight: it is not enough to simply speak of “diffusion” while forgetting the way that the circulation and translation of an idea fundamentally transform it (Latour 1987). In this case, the travel itself has made PB into an attractive and politically malleable device by reducing and simplifying it to a set of procedures for the democratization of demand-making. The relationship of those procedures to the administrative machinery is ambiguous, but fundamentally important for the eventual impact of Participatory Budgeting in any one context.

Keywords

Diffusion, Citizen Participation, Translation, Participatory Budgeting

How to Cite

Ganuza E. & Baiocchi G., (2012) “The Power of Ambiguity: How Participatory Budgeting Travels the Globe”, Journal of Public Deliberation 8(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/jdd.142

3222

Views

938

Downloads

23

Citations

Share

Authors

Ernesto Ganuza (IESA (Instituto de Estudios Sociales Avanzados))
Gianpaolo Baiocchi (Brown University)

Download

Issue

Publication details

Dates

Licence

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

Identifiers

Peer Review

This article has been peer reviewed.

File Checksums (MD5)

  • PDF: 59f24fa90c86c7d207fad445fe370e71