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Transforming Lives, Communities and Systems? Co-production Through Participatory Budgeting

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The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes

Abstract

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic innovation where citizens participate directly in making collective decisions about how to spend public money. In the last 30 years, the process has been adopted in thousands of localities around the world, gaining steady support from governments, institutions and civil society. PB exemplifies how co-production can generate public value by enabling collaboration between professionals and citizens across communities of place, practice, identity and interest. PB processes are very diverse in scope, scale, ambition and impact, and while they embody various forms of co-production, this chapter focusses on co-commissioning because of its transformative potential to address health, social, economic and political inequalities. The chapter explores PB as co-production at the interface of public service reform, democratic innovation and social justice.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Chris Harkins, Evelyn O’Donnell, Coryn Barclay, Fiona Garven, David Reilly, Kathleen Glazik, Richard Brunner, Jez Hall, Ernesto Ganuza and Giovanni Allegretti for their insights and collaboration. I am indebted to the PB Scotland Network, the PB Working Group, and practitioners across the UK and globally—the feedback loop between research and practice is strong in the PB field, which bodes well for democratic innovation. Finally, my research was supported by What Works Scotland and I thank all researchers and practitioners involved, and our funders: the Scottish Government and the UK Economic and Social Research Council (Grant ES/M003922/1).

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  1. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland

    Oliver Escobar

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  1. Oliver Escobar
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  1. Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

    Elke Loeffler

  2. INLOGOV, School of Government, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Tony Bovaird

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Escobar, O. (2021). Transforming Lives, Communities and Systems? Co-production Through Participatory Budgeting. In: Loeffler, E., Bovaird, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_15

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