Municipal Participatory Budgeting
The Municipal Participatory Budgeting, implemented in 2007, derivates from Law 176-70, which mandates that 40% of the total municipal budget must be spent via participatory budgeting and that all municipalities must allow for citizen participation in their budgeting, ensuring the citizen?s right to democratic participation and deliberation on the matter. According to the budgeting law, the municipal budget must be divided at 25% personal costs, 31% social services, 40% infrastructure and education, and citizens must adhere to those amounts. However, citizens do have the right to deliberate on the spending plan in various forms that are dependent on the municipal design. In some municipalities this involves open-debates, public fora or e-participation through text messages or the internet. The process always follows the proceedings of 3 months for preparation (July-September), 3 months for public consultation (September-December), and 3 months for implementation (January-January). The first municipal participatory budgeting process was tried in 1999 in Villa González and developed rapidly from there. While only four municipalities participated in 2003-04, in 2009-10 two hundred and thirty four municipalities participated and this number is still growing. So far, the total sum of money dispersed through participative deliberation is more than 3 billion Dominican Pesos. Up to 15% of all eligible citizens have participated in the participatory budgeting process.
Institutional design
Formalization: is the innovation embedded in the constitution or legislation, in an administrative act, or not formalized at all?
Frequency: how often does the innovation take place: only once, sporadically, or is it permanent or regular?
Mode of Selection of Participants: is the innovation open to all participants, access is restricted to some kind of condition, or both methods apply?
Type of participants: those who participate are individual citizens, civil society organizations, private stakeholders or a combination of those?
Decisiveness: does the innovation takes binding, non-binding or no decision at all?
Co-governance: is there involvement of the government in the process or not?
- Formalization
- embedded in the constitution/legislation
- Frequency
- regular
- Mode of selection of participants
- open
- Type of participants
- citizens civil society
- Decisiveness
- democratic innovation yields a binding decision
- Co-Governance
- yes
Means
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Ends
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