News From ParticipatoryBudgeting.org
[via the ParticipatoryBudgeting.org discussion list] Three important tidbits from the world of participatory budgeting (PB). First, there will be an international conference on participatory budgeting in Malaga, Spain, March 28-31. See the preliminary details at http://redfal.org/en/node/98.
Second, the discussion list announced one more online toolkit for learning how to do PB. Although the site is European, most of the materials are in English: www.kate-stuttgart.org/content/e827/index_ger.html.
Finally, Josh Lerner has written a paper about the recent (and growing) experience of communal councils in Venezuela. Similar to PB, the communal councils are local citizen-led political bodies that allow residents to decide how public funding is spent in their neighborhoods. Unlike PB, the councils are part of a new national system of participatory democracy, and they receive funding from the national government. You can see Josh’s article, called “Communal Councils in Venezuela: Can 200 families revolutionize democracy?” at www.linesofflight.net/work/communal_councils.pdf
[…] by NCDD: materials on how to do participatory budgeting, and an article by Josh Lerner, Communal Councils […]
[…] NCDD reports the release of The Handbook on Democratic Dialogue, the result of cooperation between many organisations. The handbook was designed to reflect current practice in the field of dialogue and to draw on concrete experiences of practitioners in various regions and of various actors involved in these processes. […]