From Participatory Budgeting to “Collaborative Budgeting”

Seoul, South Korea

The Action

Seoul is continually revising its participatory budgeting (PB) program to give residents a stronger role in setting strategy, recognizing that participatory budgeting tends to be more consultative than collaborative. “When we say we institutionalize civic participation, more authority has to be given to citizens in terms of planning and budget,” Seoul Innovation Bureau Director Mr. Jun Hyo Kwan Jun said. “We are going to reinforce citizens’ power in budget planning.” Under a “traditional” participatory budgeting model, which Seoul adopted in 2012, citizens can propose ideas, serve on review committees and vote for their favorite projects. But the power to create strategy, establish priorities and develop and implement project proposals had remained with city officials and civil servants. So, a community of civic groups and experts, including a researcher at the city’s own Seoul Institute think tank, developed a new model for participatory budgeting, in which the public can take a more involved role in developing and shepherding spending proposals from idea to implementation. Features of the new model include establishing a more structured and collaborative proposal review process, so that amateur proposals can be developed into feasible projects; and supporting processes around cocreation of district level innovation plans including paid citizen advisors. This new model is being tested, adapted, and iterated in various districts alongside “traditional” participatory budgeting, and initial experiences suggest that it is best suited to civil society groups with the expertise and energy to tackle complex problems through government mechanisms. Seoul has also experimented with human resources and marketing around PB. For example, a year-round “Participatory Budgeting School” identifies and prepares hundreds of residents to serve on a resident committee, and some seats are reserved in order to ensure a representative diversity of viewpoints. Some students have substituted class time for participating in committee meetings, adding a youth perspective. Neighborhood outreach has also been added to the committee’s duties in order to boost proposal submission and voting.

Democracy Challenge

Involving residents in the work of government is a bedrock principle of democratic engagement. But the work of government is also technical, complex, and often tedious; engaging with it meaningfully requires training and time. Residents must be empowered to provide input and direction in ways that draw on and integrate with the work done by professional civil servants, to optimize the time and expertise of both sides. 

How It Works & How They Did It

The Seoul Metropolitan Government began implementing participatory budgeting in 2012, during Mayor Park Won-soon’s first administration, as one of many programs designed to devolve agency and decision-making authority downward to civil society and citizens. The model was relatively straightforward, built on the Porto Alegre model. But after a few years of operation, civil society groups and researchers began raising concerns about whether the program was truly giving citizens a more meaningful voice, and they brought forward ideas for how to improve it. So, the story unfolded in three acts: the early years, identifying the program’s shortcomings, and testing new structures and mechanisms:

Participatory Budgeting 1.0

• Process: 
  • Citizens make proposals, online or offline, for projects that they believe should be funded. Submission is open to all stakeholders, including nonpermanent residents (such as students) or commuters who work in Seoul but live elsewhere. 
  • Proposals are forwarded to the appropriate and responsible government officers, who evaluate their appropriateness and feasibility. 
  • Staff approved proposals go to a participatory budgeting committee, made up of 300 citizens, for additional review.
  • Citizens vote for their favorite projects.
• Training: Seoul launched a participatory budgeting “school” which operates year-round to train residents on the program and the structure of city government. Any citizen can take the course, and alumni are selected by lottery to join the participatory budgeting citizens’ committee for a one-year term. Members also receive additional training for subcommittee roles and responsibilities, for example project evaluation. They are volunteers, and they receive only a small stipend per meeting for transit and food costs.
• Budget: For the first few years of the program, KRW 35 billion ($27 million) was allocated at the metropolitan level, and KRW 15 billion ($11.6 million) at the district level.

Challenges Identified

Participatory budgeting is intended to give citizens real power over budgets, and Seoul’s civil society was particularly interested in citizens being involved throughout the entire process: from submitting proposals through evaluation, decision making and implementation. But evaluations of the first three years of Seoul’s PB program identified several shortcomings.

Residents who volunteer for PB tend to have ample leisure time and be knowledgeable about city government, so youth, low-income residents and other key groups are underrepresented. Under the original model, city staff evaluate the proposals submitted by citizens, to determine which are appropriate and feasible and can move forward for citizen review and voting. This takes a key decision-making step out of the hands of citizens. And after projects are voted on by citizens, city officials are responsible for monitoring implementation of the approved budget.

Under the original model, project ideas from nonexperts are at a disadvantage, because of the staff screening phase. Staff are not at liberty to amend the proposal unilaterally, so they typically approve or reject it as submitted. This compounds the underrepresentation challenge referenced above and makes participatory budgeting less likely to direct funds toward less advantaged people and communities. Citizens had the opportunity to propose and fund projects at the district level, through the district office. But researchers concluded that in some cases, citizens were being influenced or pressured to submit and approve proposals based on the district government’s own priorities. Researchers also concluded that structurally, the amount of money allocated to participatory budgeting was too small (about 2 percent of the budget,) and spending decisions were overly predetermined because of the top-down nature of the budget process. 

Participatory Budgeting 2.0

In 2015–2016, a revised participatory budgeting model was developed. Based partly on recommendations from Seoul Institute researchers and civic activists, it aims to better advance the city’s collaborative and decentralized governance strategy. “We needed a more structured process, so that the citizen groups in villages can make their voices heard in policymaking,” Seoul Innovation Bureau Division Director Cho Kyung-Man said. This new model was piloted in 2016 and then expanded in 2017. Seoul now has participatory budgeting running on several tracks, administered across three different Bureaus, with separate budgets depending on whether the projects are at the city-wide, district or neighborhood level and whether the 1.0 or 2.0 model is used. The following innovations have been introduced:

(1) More representative citizens’ committee. Thanks to a large number of volunteers—by mid-2018, about 2,000 residents had completed the participatory budgeting school—Seoul has been able to reserve seats to ensure that the review committee has an appropriate balance of genders, age groups, regions of the city, and so forth. The metro government also introduced mobile PB schools to reach organizations working with youth, women, and people with disabilities.

(2) Collaborative proposal development and evaluation. The resident committee now has a deliberative function of evaluating and developing projects, and it also monitors the city budget. A key goal of the 2.0 model is that citizens should be able to submit an idea in any stage of development, to lower the barriers to entry. The resident committee will then work with the author and with technical experts to evaluate the idea and develop it, as needed, into a feasible proposal for budget allocation. It takes three rounds of review over three to four months for an idea to be ready for a public vote. “Previously, we just maintained the project as it was rejected or approved,” said Mr. Choi In Uk, Deputy Director of the Civil Cooperation Team in the Finance and Planning Bureau’s Participatory Budgeting Division. “Running the system made us realize this is not the right approach. We cannot ask the citizens to provide a complete proposal. Now we are trying to improve the evaluation process. Citizens can propose very simple ideas, and we can improve the idea.” Evaluation criteria include the effectiveness of the project, and its fairness and equality in terms of location and impact for different social groups.

(3) District-level Social Innovation Model. To ensure that resident voices were being represented in the district-level participatory budget, the metropolitan government will support a structured innovation model in which district residents gather to identify top issues and an agenda, and then cocreate a local social innovation plan with the district government. Citizens with relevant experience and expertise can be employed by the district office as a local participatory budgeting support advisor, a position that has been filled in nearly half of the districts.

(4) Active marketing. The city has recognized a need for active outreach to encourage project submissions. “While they are accepted year-round, most of the proposals are received during our month-long proposal campaign launch,” Choi said. “As a reference, we have maintained 3,000–4,0000 citizen proposals since 2015. Considering the size of Seoul, this is an impressive number."

(5) Voter outreach. Offline voting was added for 2018, to complement the online Voting system. Committee members set up booths at district offices, during an extended four-week voting period, to publicize the program and invite people to cast votes. Choi said city staff have been surprised by committee members’ dedication to the program. “Every time we make a difficult request to them, they accept our request, and they take pride in what they are doing,” Choi said. One citizen volunteer, who was participating in the get-out-the-vote effort at a local district office, echoed this. “I realized that we are shaping city government ourselves, and I have pride in that,” she said. 

How’s It Going?

In 2018, KRW 65 billion has been budgeted for the 2.0 model and in 2019, KRW 70 billion is expected. The budget execution rate of participating budget projects is very high. Particularly in the case of municipal projects, the total amount allocated is annually, and the execution rate is more than 90 percent.

The district-level innovation model has given the program a sort of “laboratories of democracy” function, as different districts engage with and implement participatory budgeting in their own way. The program has been successful at surfacing niche issues or needs from particular populations. For example, one submission proposed installing remote-control devices that would assist residents with disabilities in securing their homes. The committee decided to increase the requested budget so that such a device could be rolled out across Seoul, not just in the requester’s complex. Another proposal involved a truck that would provide mobile showering facilities for the homeless. The author requested personal support to launch the project, but the committee decided to support the initiative at a broader scale as a new social service. 

The PB system has also generated ideas which are then incorporated into larger programs or the general budget; for example, the Sharing City Center was originally established through a PB proposal.

Considerations

Officials and observers who have been deeply engaged with the program noted several ongoing challenges, some which are common to participatory budgeting programs generally and some which are specific to Seoul:

(1) Bureaucratic engagement. One interviewee noted that different business units of the Metropolitan Government have very different attitudes toward participatory budgeting, depending on the nature of their work. For example, the parks department tends to be extremely favorable toward participatory decision making, since improving parks is a popular initiative and relatively easy to execute. By contrast, departments dealing with social welfare benefits or policy for women and families take a more cautious approach toward citizen engagement. The possibility of failure is a key factor, where the burden would fall on the shoulders of city staff.

(2) Project biases. Citizen-led budgeting tends to favor certain kinds of projects—namely, small investments in physical infrastructure. Some city officials attributed this to citizens’ conservatism— for example hesitant to approve big-ticket items, volunteer decision makers will distribute funding across many smaller projects. But it has led to what some see as an overemphasis on facilities at the expense of services.

(3) Benefits for the organized. The participatory budgeting 2.0 model is tailor-made for organized civil society, which has the expertise, energy, and capacity to identify and address social issues. According to one interviewee, civil society activists have been thinking about their chosen issue for a long time, and now they finally have an opportunity to implement initiatives using city funds. So, there is pent-up demand not only to make proposals, but to plan and implement projects together with city government. This was the impetus for the more structured 2.0 participatory budgeting model. But as a result, the new model may actually be more daunting for ordinary citizens to engage with— for example where in the 1.0 model they can essentially propose an idea and walk away, in version 2.0 there is a process to follow the proposal through its development and implementation.

(4) Encouraging diverse participation. While the program has introduced features to encourage participation from a more diverse set of citizens, stakeholders acknowledge that it is an ongoing challenge. The goal is to structure and institutionalize collaboration models that allow citizens to meet, discuss and develop proposals—something that Seoul is running multiple experiments on.

Point of Contact

Mr. Choi In Uk

Deputy Director

SMG Planning and Administration Office / Finance & Planning Bureau / Participatory Budget Division / Civil Cooperation Team

[email protected]

Mr. Cho Kyung-Man

Governance Advisor

SMG Seoul Innovation Bureau / Civil Governance Division

[email protected]

Who Else Is Trying This?

• Turin, Italy: In 2014, Turin implemented a new “deliberative budgeting” model focused on public spaces in collaboration with the Policy Laboratory at the University of Turin. In the pilot district, a steering committee of district councilors was set up to supervise the process. Proposals were solicited via open door meetings as well as online. A deliberative commission of 16 citizens worked alongside the council to develop a “basket of projects,” of which three were selected for a popular vote by the district’s population (the 90,000 residents selected a green spaces project). The Policy Laboratory collaborated with city technicians and civil servants during implementation, and a second participatory phase let the public decide on specific locations and designs. Read more
• New York City, US: New York City has the largest and fastest growing participatory budgeting process in the United States. Thousands of residents participate in over 200 neighborhood assemblies over the eight-month budgeting cycle. There are multiple avenues for getting involved in decision making, including the Participatory Budgeting NYC Steering Committee, local district committees, working groups, or as a “budget delegate” working on specific project ideas related to parks, public safety, transportation, among others. These budget delegates collaborate with the local council to develop ideas from citizens into more concrete proposals that will be put to a ballot. Youth engagement is an important aspect of PBNYC—residents aged 11 and older can serve as budget delegates and vote on proposals, so long as they live in the participating council district. PBNYC also partners with the Participatory Budgeting Youth Fellowship to provide training, support, and experience to high school students. Read more 
• Makueni County, Kenya: In the 2016–2017 budgetary cycle, 32 percent of the county’s budget was dedicated to participatory processes and each of the county’s 3,455 villages elected an 11-member development committee. The budgeting process involves public participation and deliberation at every administrative level, and it is managed through a Project Management Committee (PMC) made up of elected community members who receive training on oversight functions. PMC members are involved in resource allocation, document design, project implementation, resident feedback, as well as day-to-day monitoring of the project. The PMC provides the final approval for payment to the contractor when they are satisfied the project has been completed to specification. Read more

This action was originally developed for Big Bold Cities, an initiative of Living Cities and the National Democratic Institute (NDI); republished here with the permission of Living Cities.