Enfoque
The main objective of this research is to analyze the Participatory Budget as an educational experience based on the ideas of inclusion and empowerment. To this end, a revelatory case study has been selected in the town of the Great Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (Ripollet, Catalonia); developing a methodological design in which X in-depth interviews to political representatives, civil servants and community members have been triangulated. After applying a cross-case analysis, the findings reveal how the Participatory Budget is structured from 2016 to 2023 through eight phases in which the City Council’s technical staff worked on the design and implementation of community projects in the public and charter educational centers; specifically with the secondary education students and with the teachers and members of these four educational centers. The Participatory Budget as an educational experience and innovative pedagogical process contributed to: (i) deepen the participation of students in the community through inclusive practices (Sintomer et al., 2011; Röcke, 2014: 1-113), connecting the community and the young people. The aim was to (ii) recover the idea of social justice, taking into consideration how through the Participatory Budget social problems and needs are explored in a collective and deliverative way, with practical and real implications. And, thus, activating the idea of empowerment through the educational processes: in the sense of developning the required abilites and skills needed when it comes to deciding which are the social problems, how could they be defined and how could they be solved through community projects in the broader political and social arena.
Samuel López-Carril
Comentó el 27/06/2024 a las 04:37:11
Dear Miriam:
Thank you very much for sharing your work. I have two questions to raise with you:
1. What specific factors contributed to the success of the Participatory Budget as an inclusive and empowering educational experience in the educational centers of Ripollet?
2. What were the main challenges faced by the City Council's technical staff and educational centers in involving students in the Participatory Budget, and how were these challenges overcome?
Thank you very much in advance for your answers.
Best regards,
Samuel.
Miriam Ureta García
Comentó el 27/06/2024 a las 18:42:35
Dear Samuel
Thank you for your interest in the research
1. When it comes to a qualitative approach in research, we usually speak about dimensions and not about factors, which is a notion normally related to quantitative approaches (statistical generalization). As the actual work is more of a qualitative nature, I will refer to two main dimensions: (i) inclusion and (ii) empowerment. Your question is so pertinent and relevant: "How have you theoretically operazionalized both main dimensions regarding inclusion and empowerment?".
On the one hand, inclusion is defined in this study as This ID evaluation principle is based on the fact that these mechanisms must focus on who participates and how they participate. Where the fight against exclusion is based on (i) involving participants to make participatory processes as inclusive as possible through concrete designs and measures that especially take into account politically marginalized groups beyond the “usual suspects”. While the idea of inclusion also emphasizes (ii) the actions that are developed to ensure that all participants understand the issue under consideration and the points of view of other citizens.
On the other hand, the dimension on empowerment is operationalized as the influence and control within the decision-making process, including the power to set the agenda and rules of procedure. That is, how an agenda is configured to allow participants to explore problems in their own terms. The notion of empowerment has the idea of social justice as a horizon (redistribution, recognition and representation) by expanding the way in which participatory processes approach fundamental differences in the distribution of powers and advocating for how power can be expanded/distributed/distributed/transferred.
This requires the bottom-up emergence of organized political demands and the permeability of institutionalized spaces when it comes to being able to transfer decision-making power to participants and/or broader influence in the political process – including cooperation. organization of the ID- apparatus (Röcke, 2014: 39, see also Hjern, 1978; Barrett and Fudge, 1981; Hull and Hjern; 1983; Subirats et al., 2008: 189). Popular control and empowerment introduce possibilities of politicization (Bobbio, 1985; Manin, 1997; Talpin, 2011; Röcke, 2014: 170) in the degree of control and the mode of participation of citizens, in their relationship with local government and in the sustainability of the process (Cabannes, 2004: 27); where most of the experiences traversed by popular control and empowerment are found somewhere between “movement” and “institution” (Cabannes, 2004: 28-29).
2. Firstly, and in relation to the Participatory Budgeting, it is limited to the investment section (300,000 euros), and the idea is to influence other areas of the budget in a substantive way. As Ganuza and Fernández recall (2012: 337), “the problem is the importance that the administrations themselves grant to the Participatory Budgeting. In most countries it occupies a peripheral place with respect to the centers of power and decision-making, which diffuses its impact and reduces the experience to a minor practice within the municipalities”. So in this case, the Participatory Budgeting should go beyond the investment section.
Secondly, and as a note for future improvement, a need for prior pedagogical work in the community is identified in order to understand how a municipal budget works. That is: there is a need to politicize the Participatory Budget as a prior step to the design and implementation of participatory processes linked to the public budget, which would favor the educational experience oriented towards pedagogical innovation.
Thirdly, the eighth phase of the Participatory Budgeting related to the community vote on the youth proposals is not thought out with the same depth and care; since it is limited to voting on the projects through in-person and virtual ballot boxes. Therefore, an imbalance occurs: excessive attention to the pedagogical and participatory process in local schools, but lack of inclusion of concrete measures during the last phase in which it is decided through voting which projects are actually proposed for the town.
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