Maja KLUN
Professor, PhD, Faculty of Public Administration, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia Tel.: 00386-1-5805.547
E-mail: maja.klun@fu.uni-lj.si Janez STARE (Corresponding author)
Professor, PhD, Faculty of Public Administration, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia Tel.: 00386-1-5805.585
E-mail: janez.stare@fu.uni-lj.si
* Acknowledgement: This work was supported by the Slovenian Research Agency (SRA) under projects (ID P5-0093, J5-1789 and J5-8238).
Abstract
The co-participation, co-creation and co-production of citizens has attracted a lot of interest in academ-ic and politacadem-ical fields in the last decade. Partacadem-icipatory budgeting is perceived as a direct democracy, whacadem-ich influences better engagement of citizens in public services and public decision-making. With participatory budgeting, local officials can promote transparency, which decreases corruption and improves the effective use of public resources. In the paper, we present the development of participatory budgeting at local level in Slovenia and some first evaluations. In 2019, almost 10% of all municipalities in Slovenia include participa-tory budgeting in their budgeting process. On average, the municipalities with a larger population and higher budget revenues introduced participatory budgeting. At the same time, irrelevant correlation was found with the higher transparency budget index.
Keywords: participatory budgeting, direct democracy, local government, Slovenia.
1. Introduction
Managing fiscal resources at local level is usually determined by several tasks and public services that should be provided at local level and determined by reg-ulation. Therefore, for local governments, a large part of their budget is used for fulfilling these obligations. Nevertheless, there is some space, especially in the field of investments or additional non-profit services, for using local public resources.
The co-participation, co-creation and co-production of citizens have attracted a lot of interest in academic and political fields in the last decade. Collaborative gover-nance improves trust in the public administration, and can become a way for better cooperation between policy, politicians, and citizens. One of the decision-making processes through which citizens can deliberate and negotiate over the distribution of public resources, is participatory budgeting. Participatory budgeting allows cit-izens to decide how a particular part of public resources will be spent. Such direct democracy influences better engagement of citizens in public services and public decision-making. With participatory budgeting, local officials can promote trans-parency, which decreases corruption and improves the effective use of public re-sources.
Traditional and bureaucratically oriented public administration has not paid much attention to encourage citizens to engage in decision-making. With the devel-opment and always-new models of public administration management, and above all new public management, the participation in the decision-making has become an increasingly important element. The Strategy on Innovation and Good Gover-nance at Local Level (Council of Europe, 2007) considers citizen participation to be one of the twelve principles of good governance. In the strategy, the participation is included in the first principle, which emphasizes that citizens are important in the decision-making related activities at local level, whereby manners of cooperation with the public should be clearly defined. Furthermore, the strategy indicates that all citizens should be able to participate in decision-making directly, or through intermediary bodies/associations, with particular reference to decision-making re-lated to the use of public funds.
Although participatory budgeting is not directly mentioned, it is clear from the indications that this principle also includes the approach to drawing up the budget at local level. Institutions and various researchers draw attention to citizens’ partic-ipation in the decision-making as an important element of public service efficiency, greater legitimacy of government, and citizen confidence (e.g. OECD, 2017; Pina et al., 2010; Piotrowski and Van Ryzin, 2007).
Participatory budgeting in Slovenia is a relatively new phenomenon, which started about five years ago at local level. The regulation on budget at central and local level does not include any premise for participatory budgeting. If we want to be precise, the constitution even declined the role of citizens in connection with the public budget. Despite the strict regulation, participatory budgeting is developing
slowly at local level, where more and more municipality councils involve citizens in their decisions about local budget spending.
In this paper, we present an overview of the participatory budgeting in Slovenian local government. We analyze the portion of budget spending determined by the participatory budgeting process, the way participatory budgeting is implemented, and how successful the engagement of citizens is. We try to test two assumptions:
1. The way and practices of participatory budgeting at local level in Slovenia are similar to cases and procedures in other countries.
2. The smaller municipalities and municipalities with a higher online transparen-cy budget index in Slovenia implement participatory budgeting in their budget preparation process.
The paper is structured as follows: after the introduction, a literature review about participatory budgeting is presented. The next chapter presents methodolo-gy of the research and research results. Conclusions and discussion conclude the paper.
2. Participatory budgeting
In the literary reference, participatory budgeting is presented as an innovative approach to empowering citizens as experts who are familiar with the operation of the community in which they live (e.g. Russon Gilman, 2016; Wampler, 2000;
Allegretti and Herzberg, 2004; Sintomer, Herzberg and Rocke, 2008). Most partici-patory budgeting definitions represent it as direct democracy in the adoption of the budget (Shah, 2007). Furthermore, Shah (2007) also highlights the importance, not only of co-decision in the budget process, but also the opportunity for citizens to become familiar with the activities of the local community, and to propose, debate and affect the allocation of public resources. Therefore, it is not merely an element of empowering citizens to participate in decision-making, but also a tool to educate, integrate and promote good, effective public administration.
Numerous authors (Shah, 2007; Russon Gilman, 2016; Wampler, 2000; Birskyte, 2013; Allegretti and Herzberg, 2004; Schneider and Baquero, 2006; Lerner, 2011) highlight the importance of participatory budgeting, as it also enables participa-tion in the decision-making for vulnerable groups in the society. In addiparticipa-tion to the aforementioned advantages, the majority also indicate a number of other positive effects of participatory budgeting; namely, better budget transparency, better pub-lic services, greater citizen satisfaction, greater confidence in the functioning of the authorities, etc.
The authors Birskyte (2013) and Švaljek, Rašić-Bakarić and Sumpor (2019) also draw attention to the obstacles that can arise in the participatory budgeting; name-ly, the risk that powerful interest groups introduce their ideas and desires, create
clientelism, and deepen injustice. Another obstacle is that elected decision-making representatives lose their legitimacy in the decision-making process. In some coun-tries, citizens’ participation related to the budget is also problematic in view of the adopted legislation (Vodušek and Biefnost, 2011), which prevents such participa-tion of citizens. Given that participatory budgeting is mostly implemented at local level, obstacles are often related to the ability of the local communities to complete the entire process. It involves the constraints arising from institutional capacity, or an inadequate attitude of decision-makers towards the idea. The process needs time, the implementation of certain procedures, and the involvement of decision-makers in evaluating the adopted initiatives. An important obstacle to participatory bud-geting is the citizens themselves, who are not willing to participate in the process because of insufficient knowledge of the process, and disengagement. Beckett and King (2002) also note that most citizens are more focused on achieving their own short-term goals than pursuing longer-term goals that are relevant to the commu-nity as a whole.
Sintomer, Herzberg and Rocke (2008) set out the conditions that must be ful-filled in order to be able to speak of participatory budgeting. It is important that it involves a repetitive process and not just a one-off attempt. The largest process promoter is the World Bank (2013), which sets out steps in the process that are consistent with the usual budget adoption process at local level. The only difference is that participatory budgeting starts before the first stage, i.e. the stage of drafting the budget. In the previous process, the citizens are to identify investments and projects that are in accordance with the needs of the local community; this is fol-lowed by a step, in which proposals are assessed in terms of feasibility, relevance, and meaningfulness, and incorporated into the draft budget through the established local budget adoption process, which is usually submitted to the certifying author-ity by the mayor.
2.1. Participatory budgeting in Europe
The participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989, in response to pov-erty alleviation (Schneider and Baquero, 2006), is indicated in most literary resourc-es involving participatory budgeting as the first example of participatory budget-ing. According to some estimates, the results of this first measure, which contin-ued in the following years, improved public infrastructure and its accessibility. The process is now well-defined, and the number of participating citizens who propose projects, is continuously increasing. In the decade that followed, the process first spread to most Latin American countries, and later, to other parts of the world. To-day, it is found on all continents.
In 2011, Vodušek and Biefnost (2011) drew up a report on the use of the par-ticipatory budgeting of the members of the Council of Europe. Nine (Belgium,
Bulgaria, Denmark, Georgia, Greece, Finland, Malta, Poland, Slovenia and Ukraine) of the 27 countries that participated in the analysis, defined in their legislation that the public should be involved in the drawing up or adoption of the budget. Most of these countries use websites to get the information on the draft budget; the text is rarely sent to interested groups (e.g. in Austria). Some countries enable comments on the published draft budget on a web portal, or organize meetings for the interest-ed public. Although the proposal is in a public debate, none of the above-indicatinterest-ed countries has laid down in the legislation that proposals should be taken into con-sideration. The analysis therefore clearly shows that it is more about informing the public about the draft budget, and not so much about co-deciding on the drawing up of the budget. According to the analysis, we can conclude that the participatory budgeting, as used in Brazil, fails to exist. Nevertheless, we should take a closer look at the experience of individual local communities, which are still in the minority in most European countries; however, there are participatory budgeting practices at local level in all parts of Europe (Allegretti and Herzberg, 2004).
European examples of participatory budgeting indicate that they are mostly en-couraged in a different way, as they are mostly politically motivated, or part of the modernization of the public governance at local level. Europe also encounters some resistance to direct democracy in the budget adoption, because of concerns that the elected authorities will lose legitimacy, and consequently, interest groups or non-profit organizations with a long tradition of cooperative involvement fail to play an active role in the attempts to introduce participatory budgeting. Further-more, the examples which are implemented in Europe, indicate that so far, they have not been effective in empowering the most vulnerable groups in society, as individual examples have succeeded in activating young people, but not disabled persons, migrants, etc. (Allegretti and Herzberg, 2004).
2.2. Development of participatory budgeting in Slovenia
In 2017, Slovenia reached 69 out of 100 points in terms of an overall budget transparency assessment within the Open Budget Transparency survey (Interna-tional Budget Partnership, 2017). The worst-rated part of its transparency is the assessment of public participation in budget adoption, where it only obtained 11 points, and is therefore among the worst rated in the region. The assessment jus-tification clearly shows that public participation is best assessed in terms of the legislation and supervisory bodies; however, Slovenia has failed to obtain points in relation to the implementation of public participation. The assessment is given for the state budget; however, this also applies to local budgets.
In the local public finance area, the legislation stipulates that the municipality must submit a draft budget for public debate before its adoption by the municipal council. There are 212 municipalities in Slovenia, of which 11 are urban
munici-palities. Municipalities in Slovenia differ according to several criteria, as there are multiple ratios in terms of the number of inhabitants or the area. The same could be argued for budget revenues and expenditures, as municipalities deviate from the average by more than 20%. This demonstrates great diversity of Slovenian munici-palities, not only in connection with indicators, but also in the manner of manage-ment and cooperation with citizens. A major problem is the legal obligations that represent i.e. a fixed part of municipal budget spending, the part of the budget that the municipality is to provide for the performance of its tasks. The municipalities may only spend the remaining part according to their own needs. This mostly in-volves investment spending.
As already mentioned, the legislation provides for a public debate on the munic-ipal draft budget, and most municmunic-ipalities in Slovenia respect this provision. Almost 90% of municipalities publish a draft budget for public debate on their websites (Klun, Benčina and Umek, 2019). A relatively large percentage of municipalities inform their citizens about the proposed expenditure from the budget in the coming years. The legislation does not stipulate that municipal councilors should take into account public proposals and comments when adopting the budget. It is therefore more about the principle of transparency than public participation in budget adop-tion. Nonetheless, some municipalities have committed themselves to the introduc-tion of participatory budgeting.
The first attempt in this respect was carried out in 2015, by the municipality of Maribor (the second largest municipality in Slovenia); however, the results were poor, as the municipality encountered considerable unresponsiveness from citi-zens. Consequently, the idea was put aside until this year, when the municipality will once again try to implement participatory budgeting for 2020, but this time, only in one of the district communities. Participatory budgeting at local level was successfully implemented for the first time in Ajdovščina and Komen, which started the process in 2016 (for fiscal years 2018 and 2019). The municipality of Ajdovščina invited citizens to participate with a lot of promotion, clear instructions, and a transparent process. The process was carried out in such a way that citizens, or a group of citizens, drew up an initiative on the prescribed form, which could not exceed a certain amount of funds. The total amount of the budget earmarked for participatory budgeting was also determined. Several workshops were held in local communities during the promotion of the participatory budgeting, where the pro-cesses and rules of the submission of the initiative were presented to the citizens. A special committee, which evaluated the received proposals according to known and predefined criteria, was set up. The selected proposals were then put to the vote.
The voted proposals were included in the draft budget, and in the adopted budget (Municipality of Ajdovščina, 2019).
Similarly, the process was carried out in the Komen municipality. The assess-ment of the participatory budgeting in the above-indicated municipalities showed
that, in this respect, 31 projects in the total amount of EUR 360,000, were carried out in the Ajdovščina municipality, and 22 projects in the Komen municipality in the amount of EUR 120,000. The Ajdovščina municipality continued its practice in 2018 for the next two budget years, during which a special youth section was introduced.
The participatory budgeting in the municipality of Kranjska gora was first imple-mented only for a specific target group, i.e. young people. Only young people could participate in the vote and initiative. They were activated through various youth organizations in the municipality (Danes je tvoj dan, undated).
3. Research on participatory budgeting at local level in Slovenia
Through this research, we intended to verify how many municipalities in Slovenia have already introduced participatory budgeting, to determine the process of the participatory budgeting introduction, and see if any characteristics of the municipality affect the introduction. We collected the data by visiting the websites of all the municipalities in Slovenia, and through the Google search engine by typ-ing in the keywords ‘participatory budgettyp-ing of the municipality’. We decided to use the search engine, because websites of certain municipalities are not transpar-ent, lack specific budget-related subpages, or the invitation to submit initiatives in connection with participatory budgeting are part of the current news that changes on a weekly basis.
The data obtained enabled us to make a list of municipalities which are intro-ducing, or have already introduced, participatory budgeting, and review ways of participatory budget process implementation. We also used data on the estimated budget transparency index for 2018 (Klun, Benčina and Umek, 2019), data on pop-ulation (Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia, 2019), and data on budget revenues for 2018 (Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Slovenia, 2019) for all municipalities.
After reviewing the websites, we can conclude that by 2019 a larger number of municipalities have started the participatory budgeting introduction process in Slovenia. In 2019, a total number of 21 municipalities, i.e. 9.9% of all municipalities in Slovenia, introduced the participatory budgeting process. On average, munici-palities allocated between 0.2% and 4% of the budgetary resources for the partic-ipatory part of the budget. Most of these municipalities had no, or low, budget deficit in the previous year. It should be noted however that a large proportion of the budgetary resources in Slovenia, both at national and local level, is determined based on the execution of statutory duties. According to some estimates, this share ranges between 90 and 95% of budgetary resources; therefore, the possibility for participation relates only to a relatively small proportion of resources.
The fact that this has been a highly topical subject in the last year is further sup-ported by the website announcement of one of the municipalities, that it would
in-troduce participatory budgeting in the next budget year. The City of Ljubljana (the capital) argues on its website that participatory budgeting has been implemented for a long time, as all citizens have the opportunity to submit initiatives – not nec-essarily related to the budget alone – through their web portal, at any time. As indi-cated above, the initiatives are then reviewed and considered by the representatives of the district communities; moreover, many initiatives are realized. Regardless of this, the portal for the submission of initiatives was not considered participatory budgeting, because it is not linked to the budget adoption process; furthermore, the processes for evaluating proposals and their role in the budgetary expenditure is not clear. In the analysis of the websites, we have determined that many initiatives for the introduction of participatory budgeting have been made by representatives in the municipal council, which is evident from the minutes of meetings of this body in several municipalities. There are only a few citizens’ initiatives for the in-troduction of participatory budgeting on the Web.
After reviewing the processes for the implementation of the participatory bud-geting published by municipalities, we can observe some common features of
After reviewing the processes for the implementation of the participatory bud-geting published by municipalities, we can observe some common features of