1 Lessons from Latin American Experience in Participatory Budgeting

(PB), or orçamento participativo in the original Portuguese, has evolved dramatically. What was once an obscure process of popular participation championed by a few parties on the left in South America as a step towards reinventing socialism has become a “best practice ” in the mainstream international development community’s toolkit for reducing poverty and practicing good governance. Depending on how strictly one defines PB, it has expanded from about a dozen cities mostly in Brazil to somewhere between 250 and 2,500 locales throughout Latin America alone. The smaller figure would include those cities where PB began as a local government initiative, while the larger figure would include all the municipal governments recently required by national laws to consult civil society organizations on budget priorities, such as Bolivia’s 327 municipalities, Nicaragua’s 153 municipalities, and Peru’s 1,821 districts, 194 provinces, and 25 regions. Whether this diffusion of PB is seen as cause for celebration or cause for alarm should depend on both how PB is interpreted and how it is being implemented in its new environs. Interpretations of PB, especially as practiced in Porto Alegre, the Brazilian city that named and publicized it, abound. Yet studies of how PB is practiced, especiall