Participatory Budgeting as ‘Citizens’ Town’? The Case of Berlin Lichtenberg, Germany

Abstract

Berlin was the first big city (with 3.46 million inhabitants in 2010) in Germany to implement a PB process. More importantly, Berlin was the first German city in which civil society activists, influenced by the Porto Alegre model and scandalised by a huge corruption case, placed participatory budgeting on the political agenda. As shown in Chapter 5, originally actors and organisations linked to new public management reforms introduced PB in Germany that had a quite technocratic shape. In Berlin, the NPM framework was also important because the process was integrated into the ‘agenda for rearrangement’, a citywide administrative reform programme aimed at increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of public spending.¹ Yet, it was combined with the quest for democratisation from civil society (and other) activists. Whereas PB was implemented in two Berlin districts, Lichtenberg and Marzahn, the former received a much higher media attention and coverage, mainly because the district mayor, in office between 2002 and 2011 and member of the Left party,² tried to make a political showpiece of it. Like Royal in Poitou-Charentes, she implemented a PB process in order to give shape to the adopted policy frame of the district, the citizens’ town, and to strengthen her own political profile.