Introduction

Abstract

‘For us, real participatory democracy is a democracy which reaches a real division of power […]; otherwise you deal with the consultation of citizens, you listen to them, you are close to them … all things which are necessary. But for real participation there needs to be a moment of decision taking, or at least of impacting decisions’.¹ This quote comes from the former advisor of Ségolène Royal, president of the Poitou-Charentes region in France, who masterminded the implementation of a participatory budgeting (PB) process in regional high schools. In this case, participatory democracy constituted the leading frame of reference for the implementation of a new participatory process that involves ordinary, non-elected people into the allocation of public money. PB was first invented in Porto Alegre, Brazil,² at the end of the 1980s, and belongs today to the ‘canon’ of democratic innovations, next to cases like the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly (Lang, 2007) or community policing in Chicago (Fung and Wright, 2003c). It was in correspondence with this new participatory institution that the ideal of a ‘participatory democracy’ was formulated (Genro, 1998, 2001; de Souza, 1998). The global diffusion of PB favoured the re-emergence of this lead slogan from the 1960s in a powerful and new form during the 2000s (Wainwright, 2009: 22). It has become one of the main references of leftist and alter-globalisation movements all over the world.