What if you could decide how to spend a part of your local government's budget.
What kind of initiatives would you propose? What kind of projects would you like to implement in
your neighborhood? Today we're in Edinburgh to take a closer look at how participatory
budgeting works in Scotland, we're talking with experts and politicians about this process.
So I think 2017 is a good starting point;
participatory budgeting is actually the foundations laying within the community
empowerment Scotland act of 2015. In 2017 councils agreed and they committed that they
would allocate at least one percent of their total budgets using participatory budgeting.
In Scotland a few years ago the national government and then the organization
that represents local government across Scotland agreed that at least, and I want to
stress that word, at least one percent of local authority budgets will be allocated through PB.
So it's a starting point rather than a ceiling, although, you know, depending on who you talk to,
some people will assume that that's the the max rather than the minimum.
It's a continual progression, I think is the best way to understand the one percent target
and councils will be approaching it differently and also it may change year to year as well
depending on the broader financial and political context as well.
But in terms of the amount of money and the challenges that people want to see PB addressing,
like inequalities, like social economic development, the development of community
economies, climate action, all kinds of things., it's going to require more money of course.
The COVID-19 pandemic deeply affected participatory budgeting processes
everywhere and Scotland was no exception: distance requirements increased the use of digital tools
and the economic crisis shifted citizen priorities when it comes to allocating
resources at the very local level. The pandemic had a clear impact in
forcing us to to become more creative and more, you know, engaged online.
The pandemic was a great leveler; none of us were used to working online in that way
so we were all learning how to use these online platforms together so whether you were a member
of staff or a service user, nobody had any more advantage we were all learning together and that
was a fantastic part of that process. There are a group about 20 of us from very different
backgrounds, all kind of worked together, did training together on zoom, got to know each other.
Most people now have had to develop a sense of digital citizenship
and there are some risks and there are some short comments and pitfalls that come with that and
there's more work that needs to be done on digital equalities, but I think it's fair to say that more
people appreciate the value of online spaces as well as the limitations and that's going to allow
us to combine those things more creatively. Even where participatory budgeting is more
developed, it still largely depends on the will of political actors to share power with
the community and to support citizens carrying out this process with the right tools and resources.
I think PB is important everywhere and not just in Leith, but we don't get enough money to resource
the project. We get money to give to people who have applied but there's hardly any money
to resource, so when we got posters this year, we were running an infrastructure project for
the trams, through Leith, and the tram team made special posters that went all on the Tram works,
and they paid for that. So we managed to get them to cover some of our promotional costs,
but you know we have to find pennies and skip money out of budgets for that,
so I would like to see as well as a one percent budget a proper budget for resourcing
and I would like to see the council staff that work really really hard on this,
because of their commitment to PB in that project, be much better resourced as well.
For some political leaders, not for all, but for many political leaders
they sometimes think about power as a zero-sum game. If i share power, I lose power.
But we can also think about power in a more productive generative way and what I mean by
that is that sometimes by sharing power you generate power that you didn't have
and this is what PB does: PB mobilizes all kinds of communities of place, practice, identity and
interest in order to tackle a range of issues, to develop initiatives to put forward programs,
services, and all kinds of ideas; in doing so is generating power that wasn't there before,
is generating legitimacy and capacity that weren't there before.
I don't think political leaders like sharing either power or money to be honest,
particularly with the community; the needs they wanted to community are often quite divergent
from needs and wants of political leaders, so it's quite a difficult sale; you will
get agreement theoretically, but in practice it can be quite difficult to get them to agree, to
letting go of that control to other people. That's all from Scotland for now. Keep following
our coverage on participatory democracy on our website.