Models for Participatory Budgeting

Part III. Models for Participatory Budgeting 

Prepared By: Lawrence Grandpre, 

Director of Research, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle 

When asking about Participatory Budgeting, it’s a bit like a Rorschach inkblot test. You’re 

learning a lot about the person you’re talking to. 

Brian Levy- World Bank 

Participatory Budgeting (PB) has become a schizophrenic term, used as easily by neoliberal 

technocrats as it has been used by leftists seeking redistribution of wealth. As such, examining the 

function of any PB scheme with a critical lens is essential to determine whether it is an attempt to 

redistribute resources and power, or a tool to manufacture consent for the status quo and 

undermine/co-opt forces of resistance. 

While the goal of this analysis is not to delve deeply into the technical minutiae around the 

different processes, there is one clarification which may be useful to make at the beginning of the 

section. Much of what is often called PB could also be considered “participatory urban planning.” 

The distinction is that while budgeting denotes an explicit focus on allocating a discrete set of 

funds, planning seeks to take a more comprehensive survey of people's feelings, needs and 

problems, and generates a list of interventions based upon that feedback. Many straddle the line 

and include elements of both. This section will focus on processes which allocate revenue directly, 

will help explain why some interventions (Baltimore City Children and Youth Fund) will receive 

more direct attention and others (New York Cities Participatory Planning sessions) might receive 

less. 

An analysis of the most famous example of PB serves as a framework from which we can 

begin to interpret the variability of PB models and isolate best practices. The most influential form 

of PB was established in Porto Alegre, Brazil in the 1980s. After years of rule by a military 

dictatorship, open elections lead to leftist governments taking power locally. They sought to 

produce a new form of participatory governance which attempts to establish open, democratic 

meetings which would help determine where civic resources are allocated. While the process has 

evolved over the years, Boaventum de Sousa Santos gives a detailed overview of the functioning 

of a PB council in Brazil which can serve as a starting point for understanding the model: 

“...rodadas are open to the individual participation of any inhabitant of the city, as well as 

to the delegates of civic organizations and associations, even though in the Regional 

Assemblies only local residents are entitled to vote. They are coordinated by members of 

the municipal government (CRC, CROP and GAPLAN) as well as by PB delegates and 

councilors. Before the annual assemblies, there are preparatory meetings of the citizens 

that ordinarily take place during the month of March, in total autonomy and without the 

interference of the municipality. The aim of these preparatory meetings is to collect the 

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demands and claims of individual citizens, grassroots movements, and community 

institutions, concerning regional or thematic issues; they also initiate community 

mobilization to select regional delegates. These meetings are crucial to ventilate 

community demands and to discuss their relative priority. These meetings are convened 

and chaired by the popular councils or by the community leaderships and are at times very 

conflictual, since the different political orientations of the community organizations 

surface in the identification and formulation of demands, and tend to impregnate the whole 

debate. Below, I shall deal with the issue of the autonomy of these meetings, as well as the 

autonomy of the intermediate-meetings mentioned next. 

The first rodada of assemblies, held in March and April, has the following objectives: a 

rendering of accounts, by the executive, of the Investment Plan of the previous year and 

presentation of the Plan approved for the current budget; the evaluation, by the citizens 

(by region or themes) and the executive, of the Investment Plan of the previous year; the 

first partial election of the delegates to the Fora of Delegates (regional and thematic); the 

remaining regional or thematic delegates will be elected during the next step of the process. 

The regional assemblies are open to the public but only the registered inhabitants of the 

region have the right to vote. The evolution of the criterion to determine the number of 

delegates to the regional and thematic fora bears Witness to the increasing involvement of 

the citizens in the PB… 

This option reflects the Prefeitura’s concern with getting -more people 

involved in the PB. The delegates elected in the first round of plenary assemblies and then 

in the “intermediary meetings” are usually indicated by the leaders of the associations 

present at the meetings. Thus, a citizen not integrated in a collective structure does not 

have much chance of being elected delegate (more on this below). 

Between the first and the second rodada of the assemblies, March through 

June, the so—called intermediate preparatory meetings take place. They are 

organized by the community or thematic organizations and associations, 

though now “coached” by the regional or thematic CROP and other rep— 

resentatives of the executive...The levels of conflictuality depend on the level of community 

organization and on the level of political polarization among the leaderships. At these 

intermediate meetings each region or theme hierarchizes the sectorial priorities. ...On the 

basis of these priorities and hierarchies, adding up the grades of the different priorities in 

all the regions the executive establishes the three first priorities of the budget in 

preparation. In the course of years, housing, sewerage, paving and land legalization 

(regularization of landed property) have been the commonest themes of the three main 

priorities, the order of priority oscillating amongst them. For instance, for the 2001 budget 

the three priorities were: paving (34 points), housing (32 points), and sewerage (27 points). 

During the past few years, education and health care have emerged as priorities. 

The second rodada of Regional and Thematic Assemblies held in june and 


July is coordinated and chaired by representatives of the executive in conjunction with the 

popular organizations of the region or theme. 

The structure of the meetings is as follows: the executive presents the most 

important principles of the fiscal and revenue policies and expenditure 

policies that will have a bearing on the preparation of the budget for the fol 

lowing year; the executive also proposes the general criteria for the 

distribution of investment resources. 

The delegates of the communities present to the citizens and the executive the hierarchized 

demands approved in the intermediate meetings (regional or thematic). I in these 

assemblies two effective councilors and two substitutes in every region and theme are 

elected for the COP (participatory budgeting council). The councilors are elected for a 

one—year mandate and can be re—elected only once. ...The Fora of Delegates are 

collegiate organs with consulting, controlling, and mobilizing functions. The Fora meet 

once a month and the two major tasks of the delegates are to supervise the works and to 

act as intermediaries between the COP and the regions or thematic areas. As we will see 

below, the information flows are not without problems. 

The COP is the main participatory institution. It plans, proposes, super— 

vises, and deliberates on the budget’s revenue and expenditure (Budgetary 

Proposal). There the elected citizens get acquainted with the municipal 

finances, discuss and establish the general criteria for resource allocation, and 

defend the priorities of regions and themes. At the Council sessions the insti— 

tutional mediation between citizens and community organizations on one 

side and municipal government on the other concerning budgetary decisions is conducted 

at the most concrete and intense level. Once inaugurated in July/August, the Council meets 

once a week on a set day, usually from 6 to 8 pm.” (Santos, 2007). 

While Santos provides detail, we can take a few overarching themes from Brazil’s PB 

process found in the work of Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Ernesto Ganuza. In their book, “Popular 

Democracy,” they attempt to isolate a few key threats from the Brazilian experiences. First, Porto 

Alegre explicitly framed democratic participation through a liberal lens, explicitly framing 

individuals in the assemblies as individuals and not recognizing them as representatives of 

institutional affiliations (Baicchi and Ganuza, 2017). This was designed to extend democratic 

participation beyond those who are affiliated with groups which articulate their interests to power. 

The powerfully entrenched civil society institutions have sought to monopolize access to decision 

makers. In a country emerging from years of military rule, PB was selected as a mechanism to 

prevent factionalism from overwhelming politics and to create a new outlet for democratic citizen 

input. Community facilitators guided conversations, with a focus on articulating a popular mandate 

for political prioritization over closing down conversations due to an abstracted notion of 

“technical expertise” (ibid). 


As the 80s turned into the 90s, Porto Alegre backed the nascent PB with robust 

administrative reform. Processes used to democratically allocate resources via PB allowed officials 

to push through a regional tax hike, creating robust administrative reform to match the 

communicative information flow established in the assemblies. Indeed, Baiocchi and Ganuza note 

that given these administrative reforms that used popular pressure to substantially increase tax 

revenues, Porto Alegre’s PB sessions were not just about citizen participation. They were about 

meeting a leftist government’s popular mandate for economic redistribution, as they write: 

“The years of 1990 and 1991 were devoted to recuperating the financial and investment 

capacity of the municipality. Expenditure control combined with municipal fiscal reform 

and larger federal and state transferences allowed by the 1988 Constitution were the 

policies that increased investment percentage of the budget to 10 per cent in 1990, 16.3 

per cent in 1991, and 17 per cent in 1992. As regards the municipal fiscal reform, 

progressivity was introduced in the tax on urban property (IPTU, Property Tax on Urban 

Land and Homeownership), the ISSQN (literally, tax on any kind of service), and several 

tariffs concerning municipal services were updated (for instance, garbage collection) and 

indexed to inflation (then skyrocketing) at the same time that the surveillance of tax and 

tariff payments was made more efficient. The most dramatic change concerned the IPTU 

and the ISSQN. In the case of the former, in 1990 it amounted to 5.8 per cent of municipal 

revenue, in 1992 it reached 13.8 per cent, and today it varies between 17 and 18 per cent. 

The ISSQN represented 20 per cent of the municipal revenue in 1998. 

The tax reform, which was crucial to relaunch the popular administration, had to be 

approved by the Cfimara de Vereadores. Because the Popular Front did not have the 

majority in the Cainara, the PT and the executive promoted a massive mobilization of the 

popular classes to pressure the legislators to approve the tax reform law. As Tarso Genro 

recalls, the rightist and centrist legislators, taken by surprise, could not understand why 

the people would pressure them to raise taxes (Harnecker, 1993: 10).” (Ibid). 

During the 90s, the Porto Alegre model became known worldwide and began to be exported to 

other countries as an innovative new approach to civic participatory governance. 

It is in the context of how this model was exported that we find the seeds of the limitations, 

critiques and potential cooptions of participatory budgets. In 2001, the world social forum was 

held in Porto Alegre for the first time. Progressively-oriented lawmakers, activists, staff, 

consultants, and think-tank employees from all over the world heard firsthand from people on the 

ground about their PB and the successes they had in the town. But it is in the seeds of this 

transmission of information where the seeds for the misappropriation of the methodology lie. At 

this moment, the brand of neoliberalism exemplified by Clinton and Blaire, called New Public 

Management (NPM) had led to perceived increased efficiency but a decline in democratic 

participation. Disenchantment with NPM’s focus on viewing the government through the lens of 

the 3 Ms (markets, managers and measurement) had opened space for a new theory of public 

management, Public Governance. While NPM argued that technocratic management was in part 


creating a better consumer experience for the citizen and was critical to overcoming the malaise 

of Big Government, public governance argues it was not the size of government, but its 

relationship with the people which mattered. As such, consultants and advocates began to pitch a 

variety of measures to increase citizen involvement with the government. Rather than turning to 

the theories of radical grassroots democratization from the 1960s, public governance theorists 

turned toward new theories of democratic innovation. These theories meant to embed citizens into 

the existing government apparatus in an antagonistic relationship, rather than accede to calls for 

the people-powered civil society formations to supersede government in an antagonistic “hostile 

takeover.” With this ideological background in place, Western and European technocrats and 

liberals took the Porto Alegre model and placed it into the democratic innovation mold, ignoring 

the more antagonistic economic redistribution demanded by grassroots advocates which birthed 

the model in the first place. Thus, when the director of Porto Alegre’s PB efforts spoke on the issue 

in the early 2000s, he was interpreted through the lens of “good governance,” “democratic 

innovation” and incorporating citizens into the machinery of government, while the radical leftist 

roots of the PB effort were literally “lost in translation”: 

“Perhaps the most striking element of the trip were the public presentations, in particular 

those of de Souza, the director of planning in Porto Alegre. Of course most attendees were 

thrilled and proud to share their modest experiences with the radical administrators from 

the Global South. But de Souza’s talk was free of leftist platitudes or utopian gestures. In 

fact he was highly technical and down-to- earth, focusing on the “how” and not the “what” 

or “why” of participatory democracy, as one attendee recalled. His presentation, at times 

in bureaucratic tones, followed the steps of composing a yearly budget, allocating it to 

departments, and coordinating between them. Rather than invite participants to dream of 

a just society, the talk explained how to reconcile efficient administration, open 

participation, and the implementation of policies based on social justice. As Mayor Pont 

would say later, this was the utopia of reconciling apparently opposing ideas. 

The talk in Córdoba was emblematic of the way Porto Alegre officials framed their project 

at the time and typical of the international presentations: a series of slides that connected 

rational efficiency and social justice in a dense, sixty-minute speech. Several of the slides 

were concerned with the mundane details of the various administrative reforms, such as 

property tax increases, the reassignment of technical staff, and most of all the creation of 

a new planning department. But as the experiment began to spread beyond Latin America 

and Spain, this part of the talk became increasingly less prominent. And as others began 

to translate Porto Alegre’s story into a set of applicable lessons, it dropped out 

altogether.” (Baicchi and Ganuza, 2017) 

Later in their book, Baicchi and Ganuza expound upon this analysis, arguing it was the 

malleability of PB which allowed its exportation into liberal Western countries, writing: 


“If PB traveled in the 1990s as a centerpiece of a political strategy, as a standard-bearer 

for a new kind of electoral left-wing politics, in the 2000s it traveled isolated from the 

comprehensive administrative reforms that linked it to the original political project in 

Porto Alegre. This made it a more malleable tool, compatible with any number of political 

projects. Another clear consequence of this transformation is the marginalization of social 

justice principles that inspired the initiative in the first place. In this way participatory 

budgeting, as a politically polyvalent method to improve governance from outside, first 

became an attractive idea in both Europe and the United States.” (Baicchi and Ganuza, 

2017) 

Additionally, focusing on the technical functioning of PB in Porto Alegre ignores the specific 

cultural conditions which birthed it. PB did not create a forum for citizen participation in Porto 

Alegre out of nowhere. In fact, it was the exact opposite; Porto Alegre was the reflection of the 

city’s long-standing traditions of popular mobilization and citizen participation. Boaventum de 

Sousa Santos remarks on this when he writes: 

“Porto Alegre is a city of ample democratic traditions, a strong, highly organized civil 

society. The military dictatorship met with fierce political resistance in Rio Grande do Sul, 

especially in Porto Alegre. For example, because of the pressure exerted by the democratic 

opposition against the repressive institutions of the dictatorship, political prisoners could 

not be “safely imprisoned” in the city and were often sent outside the city, usually to $510 

Paulo. The opposition was led by intellectuals, labor unions, and the only legalized 

opposition party, Movimento Demiocratico Brasileiro (Brazilian Democratic Movement, 

henceforth MDB). The MDB attracted all the clandestine organizations—whether 

socialist, communist or revolutionary—Christian—opposed to the military dictatorship. 

Since the political situation rendered unviable almost all political struggle at the national 

(macro—political) level, the above mentioned organizations focused their activity on 

strengthening the unions and on such community movements as neighborhood and street 

associations, soccer clubs, cooperatives, mother’s clubs, cultural groups, and so on. These 

movements and organizations were either of a general nature or concerned with specific 

demands, such as the struggle for bus lines, the struggle for sewers or street paving, the 

struggle for housing or health centers, and so on. A powerful, diversified, popular 

movement thus emerged, one that in the early 1980s became deeply involved in local 

government. (Santos, 2007) 

The Marxist-Leninist roots of this community organizing and their resistance to military 

dictatorship supported by the CIA, is obscured as the Porto Alegre model is exported. 

But a deeper look at the demographics of Porto Alegre reveals another possible, more 

nefarious potential critique of the Porto Alegre model. Eighty percent of the population of Porto 

Alegre is categorized as white; in a country where over 40% of the population is categorized as 

multiracial, that is a notable fact. One wonders if the ethnic heterogeneity of the population could 

help smooth the PB process, as the process was not seen as inherently providing resources to those 


outside of larger social groups, but more of a division of resources within it. Finally, the politics 

of the PB process, though stemming from Leftist roots, were found to be malleable enough to fit 

within conservative political frameworks. Indeed, with its intentional focus on undermining the 

established organizations and community groups, many of which came from a leftist perspective, 

PB in many ways effectively served the interests of the right. It effectively served as a containment 

vessel for left-wing concerns, as these diverse groups were forced to send individual 

representatives to advocate for their group interests at the assemblies. In addition to potentially 

pitting leftist groups against each other, it put them in contact with people who were not held 

accountable to an institutional formation. Individual citizens were engaging PB like a consumer 

product to get their personal grievances heard rather than demanding changes for community good. 

Indeed, when conservatives took power in 2004, they kept the increasingly bureaucratized PB 

process in place and proceeded to gut the deeper administrative changes to ensure the process 

benefit favored political patrons and the local elites (ibid). 

This leads to the ultimate question of the deeper political resonance on PB: if PB could 

create a larger democratic participation in Brazil and spread through the country, how could Brazil, 

the land which birthed PB, also birth the sort of reactionary, biased and bigoted social movement 

which could lead Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency of the country? According to the Washington 

Post, despite their malleability and deliberate intent to prevent capture by the left, many still 

perceived PB as an instrument of the left. In the face of Bolsono, some of the PB assemblies are 

essentially reforming themselves as instruments of the right, further watering down the 

administrative changes in the Porto Alegre model and stacking the participatory bodies with 

Bolsonaro supporters (Lima, 2019). 

As PB spread outside of Brazil, other theorists attempted to tweak the model and apply it 

to particular circumstances, including attempting to smooth some of the conflictual tendencies of 

PB with experiences from a seemingly unrelated domain. 

Making “Democracy” Fun- Incorporating Elements of Gaming as PB Spreads Worldwide 

In the Argentinian city of Rosario, the city planners had a problem. The attempts to 

incorporate the slums in the center of the city came with serious disruption of people's lives. People 

would have to be moved, houses built without documented or official property rights established 

would have to be destroyed and new community architecture planned. In other parts of the slums, 

full-scale violent resistance broke out in response to attempts to clear and rebuild the slums. In 

2005, lawmakers sought to radically redesign the process, which followed traditional notions of 

“participation” but got limited buy-in, with principals from radical leftist theater and a 

participatory design using designed dynamics from classic games such as Tetris, to “gamify” urban 

planning. 

Josh Lerner, director of the Boston-based nonprofit “Participatory Budgeting,” wrote a 

book attempting to extol the virtues of what he sees as an “evolved” PB process which seeks to 

use design “tricks of the trade” to increase participation and feedback on PB projects (note: the 


Argentinian example might be more akin to participatory planning). In his book, “Making 

Democracy Fun,” Lerner presents Rosario as an example of two different applications of game 

design to PB and planning: 

1st - City of the Children. Plaza of Dreams. Officials worked with youth to use theater as an 

information-gathering tool. Using the theories of Augusto Boal, author of the book “Theater of the 

Oppressed,” youth acted out scenarios reflecting their everyday lives and struggles with service 

provision and authority in their neighborhoods. The goal was to use these as information-gathering 

sessions for the construction of various plazas throughout Rosario which would be used as spaces 

to meet the desires of youth. 


2nd- The authorities used participatory games to produce maps for service provision and the 

establishment of land rights. With the Rosario Hábitat process, the city used maps and transparent 

puzzle pieces designed to fit together like a puzzle. The authorities sought to allow participants to 

design their own living arrangements and to determine how the community would have to change 

with the installation of urban infrastructure, sewage, water and other amenities impacting land 

availability. Lerner argues that with proper guidance, this process can smooth the tensions inherent 

in planning choices. 

Lerner provides an in-depth description of one process he observed, which provides context as to 

what it involves. 

“After the initial planning workshops, staff hold rule-making workshops in 

each sector of each villa, using a participatory process to establish clear program 

rules. One Tuesday morning, I observed a rule-making workshop in 

Villa Itatí, at a health center recently built by Rosario Hábitat. Inside the 

meeting room, staff arranged 25 plastic chairs in an oval, leaving a scuffed 

white table in the middle. As they posted flipchart paper and maps on the 

walls, residents began to arrive, each one receiving a folder with handouts. 

By 9:45, 20 people were waiting in their chairs, so the lead facilitator 

started the workshop. Despite his young face, Juan spoke with an unusually 

calm and clear Spanish. He explained that today the residents of villa sector 

A would start deciding which of their houses would relocate and to where, 

so that new roads and infrastructure could be built. Their specific tasks: pick 

criteria for determining who stays and who leaves, and start to map out passageways 

in the new block. 

Paula, another facilitator, pointed to a poster on the wall, labeled Fixed 

Rules. “Eleven basic Rosario Hábitat rules are outlined here,” she clarified, 

“and in your handouts.” As she explained, passageways were necessary so 

that all houses would have direct and safe access to the roads. Juan went 

over the other rules and explained their rationales: each new lot must be at 

least 100 m2 large (to ensure equality and basic living standards), no more 

than 30 percent of the families could move from the villa (to ensure that 

people’s livelihoods were not disrupted excessively), and so forth. People 

asked a few questions of clarification, nodding as staff responded. 

“These rules are a good start,” Juan concluded, “but now it’s your turn 

to decide on new ones.” If there were three families living in a space that 

only fit two 100-m2 lots, how would they decide who would relocate? Juan 

explained that people in other workshops had suggested several criteria for 

making such decisions: for example, length of tenancy, how precarious the 

house is, number of inhabitants, family members with disabilities, chance, 

and mutual agreement. Juan posted on the wall sheets of colored paper 


presenting these criteria. 

Paula asked if anyone had other criteria to add. Yasmín said that she 

wanted to stay near her brother’s family, so maybe they could add “family 

members nearby” to the list. Juan nodded and posted it on the wall. Maxi 

joked that “whoever serves the mate gets to stay.” Others suggested a few 

more serious criteria. After 15 minutes the discussion died down, so Juan 

called for a vote to set the order of the criteria. Paula handed each family a 

paper strip with the numbers 1 to 10 printed in a column. Juan explained 

that everyone should think about which criteria mattered most, and then 

come up to the wall to label them in order of importance. After some discussions, 

people tore their sheets into 10 pieces and, armed with glue sticks, 

stuck the numbers on the criteria sheets to show their preferences (see figure 

5.4). Paula counted the votes, to determine which criteria would have 

top priority for deciding land disputes. 

Juan thanked everyone for prioritizing the criteria, and invited them up 

to the table in the middle of the room. A giant map lay on the table, with 

each family’s house labeled. Their task was to suggest where passageways 

should go, using several long rectangular cutouts of colored transparency 

Paula asked if anyone had other criteria to add. Yasmín said that she 

wanted to stay near her brother’s family, so maybe they could add “family sheets. As Juan 

explained, each cutout represented a passageway, to scale 

with the map. He moved several cutouts around the map, to illustrate how 

they could be placed. 

After Juan’s demonstration, the neighbors began moving the pieces 

around, and new questions surfaced. Did the passageways have to be 

straight, like the cutouts? Yes, because otherwise they would be unsafe. 

Why were some cutouts wider than others? Because the width depended 

on how many families used the passageway to reach their house. As Mónica 

noticed, the cutouts were labeled with different sizes: 1.5 meters wide for 

access to one house, 1.8 meters for two houses, and so forth. 

After 20 minutes of playing with the cutouts, participants settled on 

locations for two passageways. With criteria and passageways decided, Juan 

called the meeting to a close around 11:00. 

The rule-making workshop, and others like it, helped generate and legitimate 

Rosario Hábitat’s rules—what residents could and could not do. To do 

this, it used several of the same game mechanics that designers use to establish 

game rules: participant-generated rules, multimodal presentation, narrative, 

just-in-time information, and modeling. 


First, Rosario Hábitat let participants develop and order their own rules for 

negotiating land conflicts. While most games start with fixed rules, some 

enable players to craft their own rules—through what Salen and Zimmerman 

call “transformative social play.”17 Sometimes players end up more 

interested in the rules they create than in the original rules.18 This seemed 

to be the case in Rosario Hábitat. As Mónica boasted, “We set the rules ourselves 

. . . so if we complain it’ll be stupid. And they have to be maintained 

because the agreement was collective and consensual.” Sergio added that he 

couldn’t go against the rules because “they’re decisions of my neighbors in 

the villa.” Small face-to-face meetings were essential for participatory rulemaking, 

since they allowed for more comfortable dialogue and flexibility 

than larger or online forums. 

Rosario Hábitat also imposes some fixed rules, however. Some are technical constraints 

for installing infrastructure, while others outline the 

rights of residents. The rule-making workshop did not assume that people 

instantly understood the rules, but rather that rules needed to be constantly 

communicated, explained, and reinforced. Like good games, the workshops 

accomplished this through multimodal presentation of information. 

As James Gee observed, games convey meaning and knowledge through 

images, words, sounds, and other modalities. Just as board games such 

as Monopoly communicate rules (such as collect $200 on passing Go) by presenting 

them in the instructions and writing them on the game board, the 

workshop facilitators communicated rules by distributing them as handouts, 

writing them on the wall, and reading them aloud. When asked how 

clear the rules were, one participant pointed to the wall and said, “They’re 

very clear, because they’re there.” 

In some cases, however, the reasoning behind rules is not obvious. Many 

games craft narratives to explain why players can or cannot take certain 

actions, and Rosario Hábitat took a similar approach. Facilitators tried to 

situate and explain fixed rules within a broader story of neighborhood 

change. In this story, community members would try to distribute land 

more equally and fairly, while disrupting the neighborhood as little as possible. 

This narrative helped frame the rules of 100 m2 per lot and maximum 

of 30 percent relocations, for example, as tools to advance common goals, 

rather than as arbitrary limits. One facilitator felt that this explanation 

helped people “accept because they understand,” rather than just accept 

Blindly. 

Finally, the workshop helped participants more deeply understand the 

rules through just-in-time information and modeling. Games avoid over- 


whelming players with information, instead presenting it only at the 

moment when it is actually useful. Similarly the workshop explained the 

rules about passageway size and shape at the moment when participants 

were actually arranging passageways on the map. By gradually adding more 

information, the workshop helped participants process the rules bit by bit. 

The colored passageway cutouts also served to model the rules. They provided 

physical models of the rules governing passageway size and shape— 

1.5 m width for one family, straight lines, and so forth. Having both, Juan 

first moved the pieces around on the map, and likewise modeled the kinds 

of trade-offs and calculations that would ultimately have to be made.” (Lerner, 2014, 

This process appears to have an almost alchemical power to it. By creating cooperative 

games, the author claims the process was able to smooth tension which had been roiled by other 

attempts at urban renewal. A deeper examination of the processes described reveals more of their 

limitations. 


The Rosario process attempts to create space for citizen-generated input within the rules 

defined by the political establishment. Therefore, it ignores the lessons of resources redistribution 


and land reform presented by Porto Alegre. Rather than redistributing resources, it is literally 

distributing a scarce resource of land, creating an incentive for those within the process to buy into 

based upon securing a favorable position for themselves and their family rather than broadening 

social quality for their community. By presenting a 30% relocation rate as an ironclad rule of the 

process, the process can be seen as attempting to manufacture consent for what is, in essence, a 

form of slum removal done at the behest of downtown business interests (the books notes the 

importance of slum removal to maintain Rosario’s thriving urban core). It is a clear example of 

the consumerification of democratic participation, as the participatory process is designed to meet 

discreet desires for family and friends to live close to one another, rather than to change the larger 

social and economic ecosystem in which they live. 

Deeper analysis reveals many of Lerner’s vaunted gameplay “tricks of the trade” can be 

subject to critique. His analysis on the value of “just in time” information, a gameplay technique 

designed to give players relevant information when they need it to complete a task and not before 

to avoid information overload, makes sense when the goal is to slay a computerized dragon. But 

in the context of a literal life and death decision on the future of a community, it comes across as 

paternalistic and troubling. It is essentially a glorification of the staff being the gatekeepers of 

knowledge. Despite arguing that the rules were “up for discussion,” it appears some information 

was set in stone and not up for debate. The participants didn’t know it unless it bumped up against 

an issue which required “just in time” information to be revealed. 

A deeper analysis of the Theater of the Oppressed activity reveals similar concerns, 

specifically on the replicability of this process. The process of the Theater of the Oppressed has 

no direct link to resources or urban planning. The author therefore assumes an inherent value in 

the political messages coming from artistic performance and that the authorities present are 

sufficiently trained to interpret how these performances should translate into political solutions. 

The author himself acknowledged as much, writing: 

“Plaza Dreams was not having much impact. More than three years after 

winning funding, only one of the 14 plazas had been constructed, and that 

one only partly. According to Ana, the rest were suffering from “budget 

problems.” “The problem is with the adults. They don’t designate funds 

for the City of the Children, don’t put it on the agenda. There’s still a lack 

of education among the municipal staff. When it comes time to finalize 

something, they say that it’s a mess and nothing can be done.” The City of 

the Children made Rosario look good, but for Ana, the administration was 

not really supporting the program. 

Others placed the blame elsewhere. “It’s how the City of the Children 

positions itself,” suggested another member of the Intergovernmental 

Commission. While the program was officially housed in the Department 

of Children, it was physically and ideologically isolated. Staff worked in a 

refurbished train station far from the department headquarters. Most of 


them were trained as artists or psychologists. Other departmental staff complained 

that the council coordinators insisted too firmly on implementing 

children’s “authentic” ideas, without adult contamination. As a result the 

program often came into conflict with the planners, technicians, and other 

adults who had the power and expertise to turn ideas into reality. 

These conflicts were part of a deeper problem with Plaza Dreams (and 

with the City of the Children program): the coordinators insisted on separating 

children’s play from adult work. During the workshop games, facilitators 

did not share any information about the plaza, nor did they ask the 

children to tackle the real decisions that planners would have to make. 

Afterward, planners designed the spaces mainly on their own, without 

Playing. 

This separation between play and work distracted children’s attention 

and trivialized meaningful planning decisions. The workshops focused 

attention entirely on play and games, concealing the children’s ultimate 

lack of power over design decisions. To design public spaces, planners 

need to address tricky issues such as accessibility, environmental impacts, 

and safety. In the workshop these serious topics were reduced to abstract 

splashes of paint and ambiguous snippets of poetry.” (Lerner, 2014, 110-111). 

This practical concern over whether the play sessions accomplish their missions should not obscure 

deeper concerns as to the dangers inherent in how this play was politically used and carried out. 

The town of Rosario, like Porto Alegre, is a town with a disproportionately large white population 

compared to the rest of the country. This fact is particularly relevant for Argentina given its history 

of forced migration of Black citizens in the 19th century and “Blanqueamiento,” or intentionally 

encouraging (white) european immigration in the 20th century. Many scholars have questioned the 

emancipatory power of performance for Black people given the history of racialized stereotypes 

projected onto Black bodies. They present the possibility that these forms of “theatrical” 

performance can create a form of fetishization of Black bodies which might deter Black citizens 

from participating or lead the process to become infused with racial bias (Yancy, 2006). 

To Lerner’s credit, he does pepper his text with acknowledgments of the limitations of 

these gaming design-infused PB processes. But even in his acknowledgments of the limitations of 

the process, he reveals his personal inability to grasp the political limitations of the process 

analysed by Baicchi and Ganuza. In analysing a session of Rosario Hábitat which did not work, 

Lerner blames the problem not on the fundamental limitations of the process, but on a failure to 

apply game design principles properly, such as demonstrating the process and using affect and 

direction to create the heralded “magic circle” effect, where people can suspend reality and buy 

into the process. Similarly, Lerner explains that people bought into the process more when they 

saw things being built and understood that there would be significant government investment in 

their community. However, he does not see this as the sort of transactional, consumer-based theory 


of participatory governance Baicchi and Ganuza caution us about but instead chalks the victory up 

to these facilitators better executing his vaunted game design principals to smooth out potential 

conflict. 

That the very impetus for the installation of this process was violent resistance in the streets 

by people in other parts of the city, one wonders if the “smoothing of conflict” is even desirable, 

given the reality of dislocation and potential gentrification this process would entail. In a Latin 

American country where US-backed CIA dictators created a historical legacy of violence, Lerner 

says nothing about these structural conditions and simply notes how happy the people going 

through the process seem, which raises the question as to whether PB can serve as a sort of opioid, 

dulling the impact of neoliberal structural violence by creating the illusion of control in those who 

participate in the process. 

PB in America- The Chicago Example 

While there are recent examples of PB in America, many are very recent and have news 

articles written about them and therefore, do not make for the best in-depth scholarly analysis. The 

PB process in Chicago, however, is one of the longest-running and presents a vantage point from 

which to see the unique challenge of using PB in an American urban environment. 

The Chicago process has been described as “attempting to create a bottom up process from 

the top down” (Baicchi and Ganuza, 2017). In an attempt to respond to criticism about the lack of 

focus on district-specific policy, the former alderman for the 49th ward of the city, Joe Moore, 

decided to allocate his discretionary “menu money” fund of approximately 1.3 million dollars per 

the results of the PB process. Far from the radical redistributive politics of Porto Alegre or the 

liberation theater of Rosario, the process which ensued was far more technocratic, reflecting: 

“In the 49th Ward, Moore used PB to allocate his discretionary “menu money,” a 

$1.3 million fund given annually to aldermen for infrastructure projects. The fund is a 

trivial matter in Chicago city politics; constituents are largely unaware of it and allocation 

decisions face little public scrutiny. Thus when Moore proposed participatory budgeting 

for the 49th Ward, not only was the process of deliberation foreign to residents; the 

community was unfamiliar with the budget itself. From the start Moore recognized that he 

faced an inherent contradiction in trying to build a bottom-up process from the top down. 

Early on he convened a steering committee of local activists to put a “Rogers Park stamp” 

on the process. With help from the Participatory Budgeting Project the committee made 

initial decisions regarding the design of the process (writing and approving a rule book), 

met regularly to plan its next steps, and facilitated the first community meetings. 

Throughout, the steering committee thought of itself as the backbone and directive body of 

PB in the ward. 

In early November 2009 the PB organizers held nine neighborhood assemblies 

throughout the ward—eight in different neighborhood areas and one wardwide assembly 


for Spanish-speaking residents. After the steering committee sent out invitations and e- 

mails to presumably all thirty thousand households in the ward, residents turned out in 

small but substantial numbers; about forty community members attended each initial 

meeting. The assemblies were divided into two main parts. First, the alderman and the 

steering committee introduced the concept of participatory budgeting and the details of the 

menu money budget. The facilitators explained that the project aimed to transfer power to 

the people in the spirit of a more “democratic democracy.” They also provided information 

about some of the constraints and common uses of menu money. In the second part of the 

meeting, participants were divided into discussion groups to deliberate about 

infrastructure needs and priorities. 

Participants proposed a range of ideas such as a community swimming pool, 

pothole filling, murals, and bike lanes. Steering committee members facilitated these 

groups, operating as if they knew more about the menu money budget than the other 

participants. They believed this meeting structure would ensure that the initial stages of 

the process ran smoothly. At the end of these initial assemblies the facilitators invited 

residents to stay involved in the process by becoming community representatives. 

These “Community Reps” as they came to be known were responsible for 

developing concrete spending proposals for the final wardwide vote. About sixty residents 

volunteered to become community reps. Each rep chose to serve on one of six budgeting 

committees: transportation, traffic safety, public safety, parks and environment, streets, 

and art and other projects. Committees met separately and could exercise considerable 

discretion in determining the process, outcomes, and criteria for project selection. There 

was no minimum or maximum limit to the number of projects that could be slated; members 

could work in subcommittees or together as one group; and whether decisions would be 

based on community needs or on representatives’ interests was open for debate. Ultimately 

the six committees proposed a total of thirty-six projects ranging from street resurfacing 

to bike lanes to community gardens. 

The PB facilitators then placed the proposals, including project descriptions and 

estimated price tags, on a ballot. They invited all ward residents age sixteen and over to 

vote for up to eight projects —a rule the steering committee developed before the process 

began. Community reps and the steering committee organized a massive “get out the vote” 

effort involving yard signs, community banners, and displays of project posters. Many 

community representatives campaigned for their committee’s projects. Over the course of 

a single voting-day event and a week of early voting, over 1,600 people cast their ballots 

in a ward of approximately 30,000 eligible voters. The projects that won the most votes 

were funded from the $1.3 million of the alderman’s discretionary budget.” (ibid). 

In the Chicago process, we see much of what was warned about in the previous processes 

in Brazil and Argentina and the results which the watering down of the Porto Alegre model 

presented. In Brazil, care was taken (perhaps too much care) to prevent established civil society 


interests from controlling the PB process whereas in Chicago, established homeowners 

associations and community groups played a key role in the process. The transportation committee 

was especially filled with local political wheelers and dealers. This led to one of the more 

contentious fights in the PB process, with a proposal to expand bike lanes being rejected by city 

technocrats who claimed the proposed design was not feasible. This caused a schism within the 

transportation committee between younger, more activist types who saw the bike lanes as an 

essential part of an eco-friendly social movement and thus, off the table for compromise and older 

community activist types more acquainted with negotiating with Chicago’s political machine 

(ibid). There was a similar fight over the cost estimate for a dog park, with the city’s technocrats 

estimating the cost much higher than the citizens and demanding that the park mirror the design 

of parks designed for humans, even if it was designed for dogs (ibid). The other lesson of Porto 

Alegre, not allowing technical expertise to overwhelm democratic community will, was also not 

learned. That the pot of money used was small and obscure also fit with the analysis that the 

redistribution portion of the Porto Alegre example was not met. The Chicago PB mirrored Porto 

Alegre and Rosario in one unflattering way; it similarly had issues reflecting the diversity of the 

community, as Baicchi and Ganuza note: 

“Chicago’s process in contrast has been less inclusive, tending to privilege the 

participation of homeowners and college-educated whites.31 A 2013 survey of participants 

in neighborhood assemblies and among community representatives found that Latino 

participants were severely underrepresented, while African American participants were 

still underrepresented.32 Moreover social justice organizations have been largely absent 

in the overall Chicago process. In one ward researchers report that groups ‘representing 

the interests of low-income renters’ have been largely absent from the process. Though 

they ‘were invited to join,’ they ‘were not made to feel welcome’ and tried to “disassociate 

themselves” from participatory budgeting.”33 The same researchers note that ‘despite the 

large presence of community groups in Chicago, only a fraction of them were enrolled in 

the PB process’…”(Baicchi and Ganuza, 2017). 

While it is tempting to see Chicago's PB process as a failure, it might be more accurate to see it as 

successful in meeting the goal of PB as they had been defined and thus, revealing the limitations 

of the technocratic, “citizen as consumer” style definitions of PB that have applied. In meetings 

for the Chicago PB, folks visiting the steering committee wondered out loud whether this was a 

group of “professionals who were afraid of working class people” and whether this was a “group 

of the alderman’s supporters”. Dismissing these criticisms of the process as ad hominem personal 

attacks or misinformed ignore the stated goal of PB which is to generate increased political 

consensus through antagonistic deliberation between citizens to encourage the community to work 

in deeper collaboration with the state. Working class folks antagonistic to the middle class political 

order and social justice radicals antagonistic to the centrist political machine are thus always 

already framed as outside the process and threats to the “magic circle,” as they may interject calls 

for administrative change and resource redistribution which exceed the space the PB process can 

accommodate. It is interesting that although John Lerner is the co-founder of the nonprofit brought 

in to help design the Chicago process, he does not mention the process in his book, leading on to 


only project what his commentary on the Chicago process would be; likely that they should have 

played more and better games to align people’s self-interests more efficiently. This ignores the 

fact that all of the source of conflict in the Chicago process between the activists and the 

establishment community representatives on the PB transportation committee, and between the 

political administration and the PB committee, is from different people doing exactly what Lerner 

and other PB advocates ask them to do: operate in their own self-interests. When these selfinterests 

competed beyond the “magic circle” of gameplay Lerner promotes, there was not an 

infrastructure of community organizing or political base building present to push back, as these 

sorts of potentially confrontational efforts are the exact sort of effects PB is designed to trade off 

with, which the example in Rosario shows. Baicchi and Ganuza reflect on this notion of competing 

ideas of “good citizenship” and what that entails playing out in the battle between the PB 

transportation committee and the administration technocrats, writing: 

“The committee proposed the path because participants wanted 

more recreational space for biking and walking. The proponents of the project were selfinterested 

in the sense that their goal was to improve their own pursuits. To them this 

seemed like a legitimate motivation: they were residents of the ward and as such felt 

justified in making a demand they believed would advance their personal interests. 

According to recollections by participants, the alderman’s office did not agree. The staff 

recognized that the representatives were entitled to make demands as citizens in the 

process, but they held that legitimate demands were grounded in concerns for the larger 

community. Many residents, especially condominium owners whose land abutted the 

property, would oppose the path. Thus, as one participant remembered, the concern was 

raised that the committee “needed to think in terms of the whole neighborhood.” They were 

told by the alderman’s office that “we should have taken this opposition into consideration, 

and the fact that we did not was taken as disregard” for the community’s wider set of 

interests. The bike path proponents’ self-interested motivations conflicted with an 

unspoken assumption of good citizenship. It was not enough to want a project that would 

satisfy your own interests, however reasonable they may seem. Rather participants should 

want the project to benefit the entire community, and propose it in terms that reflected this 

interest.” (ibid). 

Without a broad framing of social justice and broad community benefit, the advocates on the 

transportation committee were (correctly) seen as self-interested and thus, were seen as not having 

a leg to stand on when met with NIMBY (not in my back yard) opposition arguing the flip side, 

that they had a material, personal and quality of life interest in not having the bike lanes. Were 

they not citizens? Didn’t their participation matter? Without any mechanisms to adjudicate these 

kinds of conflicts, Chicago’s PB would continue to be seen as an insular process where 

“professional citizens” get to “play” at being city planner and manifest projects which meet their 

personal consumer desires, far from the radical emancipatory democratic revolution Lerner 

promises. 


When Lerner was invited to Baltimore, he demonstrated his PB processes. Members of the 

community felt his processes were not reflective of what would be best for the community, and 

launched a political campaign to get the Baltimore City Children and Youth fund to reflect a 

participatory process which would genuinely empower the community. There was a meeting held 

in 2016 by a local nonprofit, Strong City, which invited the Boston-based PB process to Baltimore 

to pilot some of their processes and inform people in the community of what they have done. Upon 

seeing some of the aforementioned “gamified” PB process championed by Lerner and 

conversation with those familiar with the PB Projects who touted “successes” stories in Boston, 

concern began to brew among some that these were efforts to get the Boston process adopted in 

Baltimore. Also, there was concern that these processes would not reflect what many community 

experts felt would be the best use of these funds. 

First, there was conversation about making a smaller portion of the 12 million dollars 

available via some sort of PB process, with the remaining amount being managed by a traditional 

grant making institution (such as the Family League or Strong City Baltimore). This idea raised 

concerns that an incident similar to what happened in Porto Alegre would occur, being that the PB 

process would be the mandatory process for all community folk, closing off the majority of these 

funds that were locked into the traditional grant-making process for larger, more established 

nonprofits. Second, after hearing of the processes in Boston, which used gamified processes to 

isolate community concerns and create the contours of an RFP which was then vetted and put up 

for an internet vote, concerns were raised that while the process on face seemed fair and 

democratic, the larger, more established nonprofit would be able to launch better digital PR 

campaigns to get votes for their projects, essentially tilting the scale toward middle-class 

knowledge economy professionals (who, in Baltimore, are disproportionately white) and against 

working class grassroots activists who do work in the most needy communities in Baltimore 

(which are mostly Black). Due to the objections by civil society organizations, a task force was 

established to determine the next steps. 

Baltimore City Children and Youth Fund 

In 2015, youth in Baltimore protested the death of a young Black man, Freddie Gray, by 

burning cars and throwing rocks at police. In 2016, via the efforts of then-City Council President 

Jack Young, citizens passed a public ordinance at the ballot box which allocated 3% of the city’s 

collective property tax dollars (approximately 12 million dollars per year) to the Baltimore City 

Children and Youth Fund, a non-lapsing government fund which would provide support for 

organizations working with children and youth. 

As soon as the city established this fund, the fight over who would hold the funds and how 

the funds would be dispersed began. The task force finished its work in 2017, offering 

recommendations that the youth fund focus on supporting community groups doing work in the 

most needy communities, specifically those who typically do not have access to large public or 

philanthropic investments. The task force was co-chaired by Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle CEO 


Adam Jackson and John Brothers of the T. Rowe Price foundation, and also featured a diverse 

cross section of youth, elders, nonprofit professionals, and representatives from the government 

who were installed as non-voting, ex officio members. This task force created recommendations 

that the youth fund should focus on capacity building for grassroots institutions, an area seen as 

essential but often underinvested in by philanthropic institutions. The task force also stated that a 

local Black foundation, Associated Black Charities (ABC), should hold the fund and administer 

the creation of a grant review team made up of a representative cross section of Baltimorians whose 

task would be to evaluate grant proposals, rank them and decide where the money was allocated. 

ABC was selected because they were the only institution in the region with expertise in and an 

explicit focus on racial equity. Larger pots of money were reserved explicitly for organizations 

which submitted cooperative proposals, creating incentives for cooperation rather than incentives 

for competition among organizations. Finally, the task force stated that institutions should not have 

to be 501c3 nonprofit organizations to receive funds, and recognized that formal nonprofit 

incorporation is a barrier to entry for many community-based youth service providers. The 

ordinance which established the youth fund was a codification of the task force recommendations. 

The fund began its work in 2018. ABC subcontracted to a Black consulting firm, Frontline 

Solutions, which included Black consultants with experience working in Baltimore (Annie E. 

Casey Foundation) and handled much of the technical assistance. First, informational meetings 

were held throughout the city, preparing potential grantees on how to write their proposals and 

explaining the evaluation criteria for this grant, which would be different than traditional grants. 

It would include an explicit racial equity lens and focus on capacity building for typically 

underfunded grassroots institutions. After the RFP went out, a call for individuals to serve on the 

grant review team also went out, offering a competitive hourly salary for serving as a citizen grant 

reviewer. The reviewers were selected with an emphasis on geographic and racial equity, which 

made the review team reflective of the demographic of the city. Other priorities included nonprofit 

experience, social justice advocacy experience, and personal experience, such as providing or 

receiving youth services. After reviewing 400 proposals, totaling over 70 million dollars in 

requested funds, the grant reviewers ranked proposals based upon the selected criteria. After 

combining the rankings, the portfolio of institutions was examined by the youth fund and it 

announced 65 organizations for funding (Associated Black Charities, 2018). 

Jackson Model - People’s Assembly 

While falling more into the space of “participatory planning,” the model from Jackson, 

Mississippi must be included, as it served in part as inspiration for the Baltimore model. 

Jackson, Mississippi may appear as an unlikely model for progressive government in 

America, yet its current progressive political leadership is a reflection of decades of grassroots 

organizing. In 2013, decades after coming to Mississippi from Detroit as a member of the Republic 

of New Africa, progresive lawyer Chokwe Lumumba was elected mayor of Jackson. The victory 

was a victory not just for him, but also for the powerful civil society forces which brought him to 

the mayor’s seat, specifically the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and Cooperation Jackson. 


After Chokwe’s death in 2014, his son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, was elected in 2017 and tasked 

with the mandate to continue his father’s legacy of engaging in governing from the perspective of 

enhancing Black community self-determination. 

As opposed to the Porto Alegre model, which sought to use a “participatory” process to 

disempower civil society groups in the political process, Jackson’s “People’s Assembly” is run by 

a civil society group and seeks to be cultivated by civil society groups in the name of empowering 

individuals, specifically the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, which uses the assembly to purvey 

its message on radical Black self-determination to the government (Bragg, 2017). Similarly, while 

tied to the government currently in power, the assembly’s attempt to resist being cast as a tool to 

“manufacture consent” for the contemporary government and instead serving grassroots desires 

was to be interfaced with those in power in a deep, structural way. In interviews with government 

officials and People’s Assembly participants, the structure was shown to be a container for a less 

instrumentalized vision of participatory governance, where deep conversation and mutual 

education can take place: 

“Akil Bakari, the co-chair of the mayor's transition team, maintains that despite Omari's 

detailed speech peeling through every element of the mayor's plan, there has to be a clear 

understanding and distinction that the people's assembly is not married to Lumumba in 

particular, and would continue even if he was not in office. 

"(The people's assembly) is totally independent and autonomous of the City of Jackson," 

Bakari told the Jackson Free Press a couple days after the assembly. "It's going to exist in 

function regardless of who's in the mayor's office. 

"Obviously, we like to have a good relationship with whoever is there, and we just happen 

to have a relationship with the one that's there now, but the whole intent and purposes of 

it is to create and build people power independent of any political party or whoever is in 

the mayor's office." 

Bakari is also part of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a "radical" self-determination 

movement that the mayor's father, former Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, started. Its hallmark 

principles include a demand for reparations for slavery in the U.S. and the creation of an 

independent black nation in the Deep South. 

The MXGM believes in people's assemblies as a democratic tool. 

"The Assemblies are organized as expressions of participatory or direct democracy," the 

MXGM website reads, "wherein there is guided facilitation and agenda setting provided 

by the committees that compose the People's Task Force, but no preordained hierarchy." 

Bakari said this first assembly was more introductory for people who are unfamiliar with 

this process. "What we really want to do is educate people around what participatory 

governance looks like, democracy, budgeting," Bakari said. "Upcoming assemblies will be 


around those concepts and ideas." He also clarified that the mayor was invited, although 

he did not attend because he was at what Lumumba describes as a "mayor's school" 

conference at Harvard University. 

In his office, Mayor Lumumba spoke to the Jackson Free Press about the assembly, which 

started under his father's city-council tenure with an intent he says is centered around an 

idea that he and his sister, Rukia Lumumba, repeat often: "Three minutes on a microphone 

does not make community participation." In city council meetings, citizens who wish to 

voice their concerns on an agenda item during the public-hearing session are limited to 

three minutes' speaking time.” (Bragg, 2017) 

For the first time, in July 2019, the city of Jackson partnered with the Jackson-based 

People’s Advocacy Institute to engage in PB activity through the People’s Assembly. While not 

much has been written around the specifics of the activity, members of LBS made the trip to 

Jackson to experience the activity firsthand. While the activity did involve a game, the game 

seemed to be designed in a manner quite different than the gamification described by Lerner. 

Rather than gamifying a decision on how to spend a small part of the city’s budget, citizens were 

presented with the entire civic budget, with full details on insurance, interest, and obligations and 

were given money to express how they would want the discretionary funds allocated. This would 

seem to violate several of Lerner’s principals, including the “magic circle,” where players are 

taught to abstract their decisions from the real world, as well as Lerner’s injunction to not overload 

participants with too much information up front. While Lerner feared this would overwhelm 

“players,” showing the real world trade-offs on budgetary spending for an entire civil budget 

seemed to galvanize the players to engage in the game thoughtfully and creatively. Rather than 

creating elaborate advocacy campaigns for relatively small allocations, as was the case in Chicago, 

the game was designed to produce data which would go directly into the city’s budgetary decision 

for the entire budget. Players were given “just in time” information, as those who were overseeing 

the game were on hand to explain when players’ decisions may have violated budgeting laws. 

While Lerner may have viewed this as poorly designed gameplay, showing citizens what tradeoffs 

were possible and which were not may have been an essential pedagogical tool which 

answered citizens’ critical questions on why money simply can not be shifted around on a massive 

civic scale. 

By refusing to use a “magic circle” theory of disembodiment, the game located the citizens 

of Jackson in a specific time and place and gave them control over the budgetary decisions which 

would affect their entire city. This gave citizens material stakes in the process of playing the game 

which seemed qualitatively different than the experience individuals felt when discussing small 

pots of money tied to specific allocations. The motivation for playing becomes different, as there 

is no possibility of getting personal “pet projects” funded. Instead, you are providing information 

to be aggregated by the city and included in budgetary decisions. The entire process shows the 

value of attentive and well-trained technical assistance staff and being able to guide people through 

this complex game. It also shows the value of the reservoir of public support the regime in Jackson, 

Mississippi has built up over decades of grassroots organizing and electoral political campaigns. 


Best Principals 

An analysis of the Baltimore City Children and Youth Fund reflects many of the lessons 

previously outlined in this chapter, lessons one could consider “best practices,” though given the 

necessity of accounting for geographic and community specificity may make the term “best 

principals” more appropriate. 

l Resource Redistribution- While property tax dollars are typically seen as going towards 

schools, Baltimore’s budget shifts money largely toward policing and depends on the state 

of Maryland for education dollars. As such, the youth fund can be seen as a redistribution 

of resources from policing to youth services. 

l Bottom Up Political Agitation- Ballot initiatives are often approved by Baltimore voters 

by default. Nevertheless, by having the initiative go to the ballot box, it created a public 

mandate for the changes the youth fund instituted. 

l Community Outreach - Democratic Impulses Over Technocratic Focus- By not only having 

outreach meetings but ones with a focus on having credible folks in the community 

translate community democratic impulses into demands which could withstand 

technocratic scrutiny, the youth fund helped create a degree of trust in community. 

l Coupling the process with Robust Administrative Reform- By having the ordinance be a 

continuation of the task force recommendation, the youth fund has written into law certain 

requirements on how these funds shall be allocated, which inoculate the fund from being 

siphoned off for other governmental needs. By placing the money first into ABC and then 

mandating the creation of a new governmental intermediary, the goal is to prevent other 

governmental entities from holding the funds, and thus being tempted to spend down some 

of the funds on other priorities. 

l Protecting the Process from Capture of Civil Society Organizations- By demanding the 

fund stay out of the purview of the Family League and Strong City, the fund centered the 

grant review team as the key decision maker on grants. By ensuring robust conflict on 

interest protections on the grant review team and ensuring the institution selecting the grant 

review team, ABC and the Frontline Solutions consultants they hired, both have explicit 

experience with using racial equity as an institutional lens and help guide the grant review 

team selection to prevent too many established “community association” types from 

dominating the grant selection team, a dynamic which was not present with the Chicago 

selection committee. 

l An Explicit Focus on Racial Equity- The demographics of Porto Alegre and Rosario may 

have been connected to the (relative) success of their PB processes. However, their inability 

to use a race-conscious lens limits the applicability of their processes outside of their 


specific locations. Baltimore, a majority Black city with an established rescue disparity 

between Black and white service providers, demands an upfront racially conscious 

approach to PB. One need only look at the guiding principles of the Baltimore City 

Children and Youth Fund to see how the BCYF is directly addressing questions of racial 

equity: 

“1) Racial Equity: The entire grant review process must be built on racial equity. We 

should clearly identify and directly address how society’s power structures show up in the 

operation of the Proposal Review Panel, including how assumptions about race may figure 

into the decision-making process. Specifically, white people should not dominate or drive 

the conversation. Additionally, the evaluation of different programs should include a basic 

understanding and appreciation of the cultural resources and assets within each 

community. 

2) Intergenerational Leadership: In the West we often greet each other by saying, “How 

are you doing?” The Maasai people of East Africa greet each other by asking, “How are 

the children?” This greeting represents the idea that the well-being of the children defines 

the well-being of the community. The purpose of the Fund is to help the whole city of 

Baltimore to embrace and live out the worldview embodied in this Maasai greeting. 

Specifically, the well-being of our children is everyone’s responsibility. The Proposal 

Review Panel must include youth leaders along with adults. Having different generations 

work together will reflect how our entire community must work together to improve the 

quality of life for our young people. 

3) Community Ownership: The purpose of the Fund is to provide the communities typically 

seen as merely recipients of services with equal, authentic decision-making power to 

disperse the Fund’s resources. This means that the members of the Proposal Review Panel 

should reflect the totality of our community. Specifically, the Proposal Review Panel must 

include a variety of people who are highly committed to the communities they serve. 

4) Collective Decision-Making: “Gatekeeping,” when one person has too much power in 

a decision-making process, marginalizes the people and communities who are most hurt 

by structural racism. Gatekeepers can use their power to circumvent community 

accountability and limit access to power and resources. Therefore, the Proposal Review 

Panel must structure its decision-making process to be collective, not individual. 

Specifically, the Proposal Review Panel will work together truly as a group to make 

decisions. (Baltimore City Children and Youth Fund, 2018) 

l A Focus on Institutional Capacity Building (i.e. Sustainability Beyond the Funding Period) 

- BCYF attempts to leave the intuitions they fund stronger than they left them. 

Understanding the nature of these processes means the grantees can not depend on 

perpetual infusion of large amounts of public dollars. By creating funding for capacity 

building, BCYF attempts to help institutions acquire a diversity of funding streams and 


develop a plan for institutional sustainability. 

While the BCYF did many things well, some places where the BCYF had issues were also places 

where other PB projects were limited, showing a need to understand these dynamics for future 

“best principals.” 

l Preparing for Resistance from Political Bureaucracy use to Unilateral Control - The 

Chicago example proves that, even if those using PB are middle-class white professionals, 

the sheer fact that individuals are challenging the bureaucratic status quo will create 

resistance. BCFY has also been subject to bureaucratic misunderstanding, necessitating 

increased communication and relationship management between the youth fund and 

government bureaucracy. 

l Balancing the need for gaining popular credibility and buy in with preventing PB capture 

by “Professional Citizens” and established civil society - Porto Alegre essentially doubled 

down isolating civil society institutions from the established PB process, leading the PB to 

being a tool to potentially undermine the organized left. The BCYF was led by a political 

push from the bottom up, and was designed to not allow those forces to dominate the 

process and to create a genuine space for uplifting grassroots services providers. 

Continuing to balance political support for PB while allowing PB to be seen as a genuine 

reflection of grassroots work and not a selection by a political active few is a balance all 

PB processes must walk. 

Baicchi and Ganuza conclude their book with a list of questions, what they call “counterfactual 

standards” by which we can judge and evaluate PB proposals. They conclude that there are lists of 

administrative and deliberative standards for which PB should strive. They ultimately conclude 

that toolkits and manuals focus too much on the communicative and interpersonal elements of PB 

which are compatible with and useful for the neoliberalism project (i.e. Lerner), but the ultimate 

goal is to establish a sense of community sovereignty which resists the enclosure of communities 

in the false scarcity of market logic and racial capitalism : 

“Moving this critical framework to participatory budgeting and democratic innovations 

gives us several counterfactual standards against which we can judge specific experiences 

and their procedures: 

1. What is the intensity of the participation? Who actually participates? Do features of 

participatory spaces prevent these processes 

from being open to all? 

2. How inclusive is the deliberation? In addition to being present at assemblies, do all 

citizens “deliberate”? Are there systematic biases 

about who speaks and who decides? Is the technical language made accessible to all? 


3. How democratic is the deliberation? What is the quality of decisions emanating from 

the participatory process? Do participants feel free to openly debate or discuss the rules 

governing discussions?20 

The scholarship on participatory budgeting in Brazil and other countries has addressed 

the communicative dimension quite carefully, and research efforts continue to focus on 

“participant surveys.” But self-rule does not subsist only in communication. The second 

facet of participatory budgeting is the coupling of PB assemblies with administrative 

structures. We refer to this as the sovereignty dimension... 

1. The primacy of the participatory forums. If the participatory forums are not the exclusive 

point of contact between government and citizen, how important of a point of contact are 

they? Are there other ways of accessing government resources, and how important are 

those? 

2. The scope and importance of administrative issues that are subjected to participation. 

How much of the local budget is subjected to 

participation, and how important is that budget to social justice efforts? 

3. The degree of actual participatory power over the budget. Are there institutionalized, 

direct, and transparent links between participation and government action? What if any 

administrative reforms are undertaken to prepare the state apparatus to receive 

participatory inputs? What discretion do elected officials, technical staff, and bureaucrats 

have over the decisions once they are made? 

4. Participation’s self-regulating, or constitutional aspect. To what extent are participants 

able to determine the rules of participation; to debate and determine social justice criteria 

that will order the process; to determine the reach of participatory influence over 

government affairs? 

If we were to take our sets of questions about communication and sovereignty to today’s 

“how-to” manuals and to currently circulating blueprints for participatory budgeting, the 

result would be to show that processes seldom include anything but the communicative 

dimension. 

Toolkits and blueprints generally only include the first dimension, having little to say about 

the second, which is understood to depend entirely on local implementation. The real 

democratic reforms and connectors between communication and state actions are 

frequently “black-boxed.” This does not mean, however, that the sovereignty dimension is 

necessarily missing in every experiment, but only that it is largely contingent on the will of 

local representatives. Toolkits for global implementation often emphasize the yearly cycle 

of meetings, rules for open and transparent assemblies, and how to carry 


out voting procedures on proposals. They say little about how reforms enable those 

proposals’ compatibility with administrative logics. These toolkits fail to describe 

mechanisms that would allow participants to define the terms of participation or how to 

make those the primary interfaces. 

Indeed, looking then at the many global cases of PB, we find a commonality around 

the set of meetings to discuss investments, but these are embedded within diverse national 

and political contexts that dictate the overall priority and purpose of the participatory 

budget. Normally the focus is on citizen apathy rather than social justice or political 

transformation. Thus local projects are rarely successful at implementing sovereignty 

reforms. As we have already expressed, we worry that PB becomes a participatory 

experience that leaves citizens thinking collectively about trivial issues from the standpoint 

of the administration of power, as has so often been the case with traditional participatory 

devices.26 And as some recent research has shown, this is happening in all kinds of 

participatory experiences.27 From this context the deep skepticism of citizens about their 

ability to influence policy making is justified, because the prevailing division of powers 

between public authorities and citizens is far from being challenged.28” (Baicchi and 

Ganuza, 2017). 

Baicchi and Ganuza write a balanced text which attempts to value what the form of PB can 

be, but has fidelity to the power relations which create the contours of what PB actually becomes 

when deployed. That Baicchi and Ganuza end with a discussion on sovereignty is interesting, as 

the discussion of sovereignty among Afrikan people is extremely robust and has led to constant 

conversation and political organizing around the ultimate plan to support Black community selfdetermination: 

reparations. 


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