Participatory Budgeting

Participatory budgeting is a democratic civic-engagement process that allows community members to decide how to spend portions of an annual public budget. The first participatory-budgeting process took place in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 1989 as a strategy for helping the community root out corruption and address economic inequality. In the decades since, participatory budgeting has been used in thousands of communities and institutions around the world, and it has involved hundreds of thousands of community members in determining how public funds are spent in municipalities, governmental agencies, universities, districts, schools, and other public institutions and programs.