Haute Lumière
Commerce · VI.06 · MMXXVI · daylight
WORKBOOK — THE STUDENT
Chapter VI.06 · Participatory Budgeting, Measured
For the personal student. A term of practice on one real authority, one real budget, and two numbers nobody has computed for it. You will end the term holding a finding that did not exist when you started.
WHY THIS WORKBOOK IS DIFFERENT
Most coursework on participatory democracy asks you to evaluate a case somebody else has already written up. This one asks you to produce a measurement.
The chapter's claim is that two numbers — the participatory share s and the execution rate x — decide whether a process is governance or consultation, and that almost no authority publishes either. That claim is testable by you, this term, with a public budget document and an afternoon of arithmetic. If it is true, you will finish with something genuinely new about a real place. If it is false for your authority, that is a better finding still, and you should be pleased to have found it.
Pick one authority in week one and stay with it. A city, a council, a region, a national programme. Somewhere you can visit or at least phone.
PART ONE — DISCOVERY
Weeks 1–4: find the money and the room
Exercise 1.1 — The two documents (3 hours)
Find and download two things: the authority's most recent adopted budget, and whatever it publishes about its participatory process. Note how long each took to find. That asymmetry is data.
Write half a page answering: what is the authority's total spending for the period, B? What did the participatory process allocate, P? If either number is not stated, write down exactly where you looked and stop — do not estimate it. A missing number and a small number are different facts, and a workbook that lets you replace one with the other has taught you the wrong habit.
Exercise 1.2 — The appreciative inventory (2 hours)
Before evaluating anything, list five things this process has plainly done well. Named projects. Streets, lights, equipment, programmes. Photograph two of them if you can get there.
This is not warm-up. Porto Alegre's participation went from fewer than a thousand people to 16,000 by 1998 and about 40,000 by 1999 — 3.1 per cent of a city of 1,300,000 — and it moved after the first works were actually built. People come back when something appears. Your inventory is the mechanism, not the decoration.
Exercise 1.3 — Read the ballot (2 hours)
Get an actual ballot or project list. What did people ask for, in order? In Brazil the order was reliable across hundreds of municipalities: basic sanitation, street paving, land regularisation, street lighting. Compare yours.
Write one paragraph on what the order tells you about who was in the room.
PART TWO — THE ARITHMETIC
Weeks 5–8: compute what nobody has computed
Exercise 2.1 — The participatory share (2 hours)
Compute s = P / B. Write it to four decimal places. Then write it as a fraction — one part in n — because that form is the one people remember.
Benchmarks to place yours against:
Porto Alegre, 1999 (nominal) 21 %
Scotland, councils, 2021-23 1.4 %
Paris, per year 1.04 %
New York City, cycle 8 0.0437 %New York's cycle 8 is one part in 2,286. Paris allocates €45.66 per resident per year; Portugal's national programme, 49 cents.
Exercise 2.2 — The denominator test (1 hour)
Now compute s three more times, using three different denominators: total spending, capital spending only, and discretionary spending only. New York's $39,000,000 is 0.0437 per cent of the fiscal 2019 adopted expense budget of $89,160,000,000 and 0.240 per cent of annualised capital spending of $16,275,000,000 — the same process, differing by a factor of five and a half depending on the choice.
Write one paragraph naming which denominator your authority uses in its own communications, and why.
Exercise 2.3 — The execution rate (4 hours)
Find out what proportion of allocated projects were actually completed, and what proportion of allocated money was actually spent. This will require a phone call. Make it.
Then compute the executed share, E = s · x. Porto Alegre's 2005 figures are your reference: R$338.1 million budgeted, R$109.4 million spent — 32.4 per cent — with completion at 43 per cent against 97 per cent under the previous administrations. Applied to a 21 per cent nominal share, the executed share was 6.8 per cent.
If nobody at your authority can tell you x, that is your finding. Write it up as one. It is worth more than a literature review.
Exercise 2.4 — The cost per participant (3 hours)
Ask what the process costs to run: staff, outreach, platform, printing, venues, evaluation. If the authority cannot say, build a model and label every line as an assumption, the way the chapter does:
PB unit, 4.0 FTE at EUR 62,000 loaded EUR 248,000 ASSUMED
outreach partners and community grants EUR 130,000 ASSUMED
platform, translation, accessibility EUR 50,000 ASSUMED
venues, printing, ballots, counting EUR 40,000 ASSUMED
verification and evaluation EUR 32,000 ASSUMED
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cycle cost EUR 500,000Against 118,308 participants that is €4.23 each and 1.25 per cent of a €40,000,000 pot — 80 euros of public money placed under public decision per euro of process cost. Compare with the published comparator: the Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat cost €5,900,000 for 150 seats, €39,333 per participant, 9,307 times as much per head.
Write a paragraph on what each buys.
PART THREE — DREAM AND DESIGN
Weeks 9–12: measure the tiers, and price the repair
Exercise 3.1 — Count both populations (4 hours)
Find out who voted and who wrote the proposals. Two populations, two profiles.
Your benchmark is New York's third cycle: 39 per cent of participatory voters below $35,000 household income against 21 per cent of 2013 local-election voters; 11 per cent Asian against 4; 24 per cent Hispanic or Latino/a against 14; 66 per cent women against 56. The door was wider than the election — and the proposal tier was dominated by already-organised groups.
Porto Alegre is the same shape: assemblies drawn disproportionately from the poor, thematic forums drawing professionals and the middle class, and the 92 elected budget councillors — one per 14,130 residents — ranking above the city average on education and income.
Exercise 3.2 — Price the repair (2 hours)
Using the published unit costs, cost a stratified, paid proposal tier for your authority:
recruitment, 60 seats at EUR 1,883 EUR 112,980
stipend, 60 x 8 days at EUR 86.04 EUR 41,299
care and travel fund EUR 12,000
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the repair EUR 166,279
as a share of a EUR 40,000,000 pot 0.42 %
as an increase on the cycle cost 33.3 %
new cost per participant EUR 5.63Then adjust every line to your authority's real scale and currency, and state your assumptions where you changed one.
Exercise 3.3 — The acceptance argument (1 hour)
German-speaking Belgium pays €155 a day and reports 10 per cent invitation acceptance against the 2 to 5 per cent typical of unpaid processes. Write half a page arguing the other side — that payment changes who comes in ways that are not obviously better — and then say which case you find stronger and why. You must do both halves.
PART FOUR — DESTINY AND DELIGHT
Weeks 13–15: write it so it lasts, and go and look
Exercise 4.1 — The one-page finding (3 hours)
One page. The authority, s, x, E, the cost per participant, the two population profiles, and one sentence saying what you could not find out. That last line is the most valuable one on the page and it goes in bold.
Send it to the officer who gave you the numbers. Not to your tutor first — to the officer. A finding that never reaches the person who could act on it is an exercise.
Exercise 4.2 — Go and stand next to something (1 hour)
Find one thing your authority built because residents voted for it. Go and stand next to it. Write one paragraph, by hand, about what it is like to be there.
This is not sentiment. The chapter's claim about why these processes survive is that people walk past the results — and you cannot assess that claim from a budget document.
Exercise 4.3 — The transport question (2 hours)
Write 600 words on whether the Brazilian health evidence applies to your authority. Use the intensity ratio: Porto Alegre at 17 to 21 per cent against your own s. New York's is 1/480th of Porto Alegre's. Compute yours and say plainly what your evidence can and cannot carry.
THE TERM PROJECT
One piece of work, carried the whole way
Produce a measured profile of one real participatory process, 3,000 to 4,000 words, containing:
s, computed against all three denominators, with the arithmetic shown.xandE, or a clear statement of what could not be obtained and from whom.- The cost per participant, with every assumed input labelled.
- The two population profiles — ballot and tier — with the comparator.
- A priced repair, costed at the published unit rates.
- An appreciative inventory of five things the process has plainly done well, with two photographs.
- One page of what you could not verify.
The mark is not on the conclusion. It is on whether a stranger could check every number you printed, and on whether you refused to estimate anything you could not obtain.
SELF-ASSESSMENT
Answer honestly. Nobody sees this.
- Did I replace any missing number with a plausible one? (If yes, go back.)
- Can a stranger reproduce every figure in my project from what I printed?
- Did I state the denominator every single time I stated a share?
- Did I make the appreciative inventory real, or did I hurry it?
- Did I make the phone call, or did I decide the website was enough?
- Did I write down, in one place, everything I could not find out?
- Would the officer who gave me the numbers recognise their process in what I wrote?
CARRYING IT FORWARD
You now hold a measurement of a real institution that did not exist before you made it, and a habit that transfers to everything else in this volume: state the share, state the denominator, and never let a missing number become a small one.
The next chapter in this volume asks who holds a commons when nobody owns it. You will find the same two questions underneath it — what fraction, and did it actually move.
FIVE TRAPS, AND HOW TO WALK PAST THEM
Every one of these has been made by a published researcher, and each one is cheap to avoid once it has a name.
The flattering denominator. A share is meaningless until you say what it is a share of. New York's $39,000,000 is 0.0437 per cent of total spending and 0.240 per cent of annualised capital spending — the same process, five and a half times apart. Whenever you print a percentage, print the denominator in the same sentence.
The fallback number. If a query fails, a missing figure and a zero are not the same fact. Write not obtained, asked on this date, from this office and move on. You will be tempted to fill the gap because a complete table looks better. A complete table built on one invented cell is worth less than an incomplete honest one.
Turnout as evidence of control. Forty thousand people is a fact about a room. Porto Alegre's assemblies met, voted and were counted through the years when execution fell to 32.4 per cent — every participation statistic stayed healthy while the money stopped moving.
The dose error. The Brazilian health findings were measured at 17 to 21 per cent intensity. If your process is at a four-hundredth of that, the finding is about a different treatment. Make the argument your own evidence supports.
Counting the door and calling it the room. Report both populations — everyone who voted, and the much smaller group who wrote what was voted on — or you have described the wrong one. This is the single most common omission in the whole literature and you can correct it in an afternoon.
THE HISTORY YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO TELL IN THREE MINUTES
Learn this well enough to say out loud without notes, because you will be asked.
1989. A city of 1,300,000 inverts its budget process. Fewer than a thousand people come in the first two years. Then works appear: drainage, paving, a sewer line.
1992 to 1999. Participation reaches about 40,000. The share of the total municipal budget allocated this way goes from 17 per cent to 21 per cent. Sewer and water connections rise from 75 per cent of households to 98 per cent — 92 per cent of the remaining gap closed — and the health and education share of the budget goes from 13 per cent to nearly 40 per cent.
1990 to 2004. The rest of Brazil runs the experiment by accident, because adoption is a reversible mayoral choice. A panel of 3,651 areas and 47,707 observations, with 228 adopters, finds 2 to 3 percentage points of budget moved into health and sanitation and 1 to 2 fewer infant deaths per 1,000 — against a national rate of 48 per 1,000 in 1990 — and finds the effect independent of the governing party.
2004 onward. The mayoralty changes. The assemblies continue. Completion falls from 97 per cent to 43 per cent, and to 26 per cent in the sectors residents ranked first. The process is suspended outright in 2017, by which time the suspension only formalises what the execution rate had already done.
Now. Between 11,690 and 11,825 processes across 71 countries, most of them allocating well under one per cent of a budget.
Tell it in that order. The last two paragraphs are the ones nobody else tells, and they are why you were listened to.
APPRECIATIVE QUESTIONS FOR YOUR SEMINAR
- When has a group you belong to made a genuinely good collective decision about money, and what made it possible?
- What is the largest sum you have ever had a real say over, and how did you know the say was real?
- Which public thing near here would you want a room of neighbours to decide next, and what would you personally put on the ballot?