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Hybrid Participatory Budgeting: Local Democratic Practices in the Digital Era

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Citizen’s Right to the Digital City

Abstract

Participatory budgeting (PB) is an innovative democratic practice that consists of giving citizens in a local community the power to identify spending priorities, put forth and develop concrete proposals, finalize them into feasible projects, and select which projects are worth financing and implementing. It gained attention for its capacity to include people in policymaking at the urban level. Begun as a face-to-face participatory process, PB today is shaped by ICT that combines online and offline participation venues. This chapter presents this new wave of “hybrid” PB and analyzes citizen participation data from nine recent Italian case studies in six municipalities that have benefited from a Web platform specifically developed for PB processes.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Recent research (Allegretti and Dias 2015) shows that these forms of PB are more likely to fail.

  2. 2.

    This was not the case with other significant, Italian PB initiatives, such as in Rho (dirolamia.it/) and Capannori (comune.capannori.lu.it/node/9066).

  3. 3.

    In both the editions, the sample of citizens who attended the face-to-face meeting and who ultimately voted on the projects during balloting fell from 80, initially, to 20–30 citizens, in later sessions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Università Di Milano, Via Comelico 39/41, 20135, Milan, Italy

    Stefano Stortone & Fiorella De Cindio

Authors
  1. Stefano Stortone
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  2. Fiorella De Cindio
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Correspondence to Stefano Stortone .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Urban Informatics Research Lab, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Marcus Foth

  2. Participatory IT Centre, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Martin Brynskov

  3. Computer Science and Engineering, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Timo Ojala

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Stortone, S., De Cindio, F. (2015). Hybrid Participatory Budgeting: Local Democratic Practices in the Digital Era. In: Foth, M., Brynskov, M., Ojala, T. (eds) Citizen’s Right to the Digital City. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-919-6_10

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