Originally published on thenextsystem.org
This week we are talking about deepening democracy in our communities through participatory budgeting and participatory decision making more broadly. We’re joined by three great guests: Shari Davis of the Participatory Budgeting Project, Lorian Ngarambe of the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative, and Yale University Ph.D. student Alexander Kolokotronis.
Adam Simpson: Welcome to The Next System podcast.
I’m your host, Adam Simpson. Today we’re talking about participatory
budgeting and, more broadly, broadening the scope of democracy in our
communities and movements. We have a great group of guests lined up,
starting with Shari Davis, co-executive director of the Participatory
Budgeting Project. Shari, welcome to the program.
Shari Davis: Thank you so much.
Adam Simpson: We also have Alexander Kolokotronis, a
Ph.D. student at Yale University, and founder and board chair of the
Student Organization for Democratic Alternatives. Alex, thanks for
joining.
Alexander Kolokotronis: Thanks for having me.
Adam Simpson: And we also have Loriane Ngarambe, a
community engagement specialist with the United Way. Loriane, it’s great
to have you with us.
Loriane Ngarambe: So excited to be here.
Adam Simpson: Shari, can you start us off with just a
brief intro into participatory budgeting. What is it? How does it work?
What are some of the benefits and limitations?
Shari Davis: Sure. Participatory budgeting is
something that gets me really excited. I’m a person who worked in local
government in the City of Boston, Massachusetts for just about 15 years
overseeing youth services. While I had seen a lot of really interesting
and innovative approaches to community engagement, participatory
budgeting was an opportunity to explore that in a way that I hadn’t seen
before. My first introduction to this was in my role overseeing youth
initiatives. The mayor coming to me saying, “I really want young people
to play a leadership role, not just a figurehead role, in how I govern
and in how I make the City of Boston better.”
When a community, a school, an
institution adopts participatory budgeting, it really marks a change in
the way that they govern, and a change in a way that they have a
relationship with their constituency or broader community.
From that initial introduction, I learned that
participatory budgeting is relatively new in the United States, but,
globally, it’s been around for several decades. That said, the way that
we practice it in the US is also a bit
different. The first thing that happens, and my favorite part to ensure
transparency, is that community members come together to write the rules
that will govern a participatory budgeting process. Then we enter the
idea-collection phase, where we collect hundreds, if not thousands, of
ideas on how to spend a pot of money to make a community better. We’re
not talking about the entire public budget; we’re talking about
identifying a space, a line item in the budget, where we can make some
decisions together.
After we collect those ideas, we go into the next phase, maybe my
most favorite. This is proposal development. This is where community
members come together and form a couple of committees to review all of
the ideas that have come in based on need, feasibility, and impact. This
is an important piece around ensuring equity, not only for the projects
that come in but the projects that make it onto the ballot. They work
alongside agency or institutional staff to distill and vet those
projects so that we have final projects for the ballot. Nothing makes it
on a participatory budgeting ballot unless it can really happen if it
gets enough votes.
We enter the almost final phase then, the voting phase. Unlike
traditional local or national elections, the voting phase is usually a
bit longer. It can last a week. And the vote goes out to where people
are. That steering committee, and the folks that have been involved in
the process, really think about who is typically left out, and how do we
really center their engagement in this process, so that their voice is
heard. After the vote phase, the projects with the most votes are
implemented, truly enacted in the community, until that pot of funds
runs out. Then the process begins again the following year, after an
evaluation.
When a community, a school, an institution adopts participatory
budgeting, it really marks a change in the way that they govern and a
change in a way that they have a relationship with their constituency or
broader community. That’s the quick-and-dirty overview.
Adam Simpson: Wow, so much to dig into there. Thank
you for that, Shari. In particular, you mentioned that participatory
budgeting isn’t a new idea. I’ve actually read in some of your work,
Alex, that the tradition of participatory democracy having both
international indigenous roots. Can you say a bit more about this and
how you view participatory budgeting fitting into that historical
tradition?
Alexander Kolokotronis: Sure. Traditionally, I think
we connect these things to direct democracy, and we think of ancient
Athens. But I think a lot of recent work, in the last few decades, has
been connecting up this notion around participatory democracy to the
Iroquois Confederacy here in the United States. Most recently, in
explicit work on participatory democracy, Michael Menser really
foregrounds this in his beginning chapters of his book, We Decide.
But on through that, into history, we see a lot of other instances of
participatory democratic praxis on a wide scale. So, of course, there
are the traditions I’ve just mentioned, but then we see larger cases in
the 20th century, such as the Spanish Revolution in the 1930s. Then, of
course, the coining of the term, participatory democracy, in the ’60s by
Students for a Democratic Society in their Port Huron Statement, which
itself has a lot of international renown.
Often, if I mention that some of the things I’m looking into with my own research include SDS,
Students for a Democratic Society, I’ll hear people from various parts
of the world say, “The Port Huron Statement and participatory
democracy.” But its practical roots really, really lie in different
areas of the world, including right here with the Iroquois Confederacy.
Adam Simpson: Now, there are a variety of ways that
participatory budgeting can be deployed. In Loriane in Monroe County,
New York, this was part of the antipoverty initiative that you were
involved in, which incorporated a participatory budgeting process. What
do you think was different about the outcomes, and the initiatives, of
that process, as opposed to the outcomes that would have been advanced
from a more top-down process, either from city leaders alone, or social
impact investors, nonprofits, et cetera? What do you think was different
about the fact that this process to alleviate poverty in the Rochester,
Monroe County area because of the participatory nature of it?
For so long, you’ve always had
content experts, people who understand poverty and the issues that
people are going through, because it’s the work that they do or it’s
what they studied. But context experts are those people who understand
poverty because it’s literally their lives.
Loriane Ngarambe: This is the thing I always use whenever I’m talking about communities, or other community engagement efforts over at RMAPI:
It’s always that the people closest to the problem are closest to the
solution. And for so long, any time people are talking about poverty,
and strategies, and solutions you always have this top-down approach. I
look at this through a context of content experts, and context experts.
And for so long, you’ve always had content experts, people who
understand poverty and the issues that people are going through, because
it’s the work that they do or, maybe, it’s what they studied. But
context experts are those people who understand poverty because it’s
literally their lives. They understand it through, and through, because
it’s not just a nine-to-five thing for them, right?
Adam Simpson: Right.
Loriane Ngarambe: When they go home, they still have
to deal with the poverty. At night, they deal with it when things are
good. When things are bad, they understand it at a deeper level. A PB
process really allowed an opportunity to see just what happens when you
give these context experts an opportunity to really tell you what makes
sense for them, right?
Adam Simpson: Right.
Loriane Ngarambe: The PB
process allowed for ideas to come up that could be sitting at tables for
decades and an idea like 24-hour daycare, that was one idea that came
out a couple of times when we’re doing idea collection. It’s just like,
“Wait, why isn’t that something that happens more often?” You have A, B,
and C-shift jobs, but when you think of daycare, it’s usually for
people who are working A-shift. But then there’s all these jobs that are
available, and people, especially single mothers, aren’t able to take
advantage of them, because they don’t have something like 24-hour
daycare, where they can be secure on where they’re leaving their child.
It’s things like that, that make the PB
process make sense because they’re able to bring ideas and propose
solutions that a content expert may not think about, because their
understanding to the problem is limited to their experience.
Loriane Ngarambe: So PB
just allowed us to really highlight what happens when you co-create
solutions with community, rather than come up with an idea, a creative
solution, and then present it to the community that has to live with the
consequences of whatever decisions are made. So PB
just allowed us to highlight that, and it’s really given us a lot of
momentum, and energy, and buy-in from the community, as well, too. Now,
you have people who then, as part of this process, that say, “We want
more. How can we be more involved? What are more opportunities where we
can really let our voices shine through?” And it’s just been an
incredible experience for us.
Adam Simpson: That’s something I want to ask about
directly. I think Shari mentioned a little bit what the process of
participatory budgeting looked like, but I’m interested, particularly,
in how you get people involved and engaged. I know that a lot of people,
they have work, they have, as you mentioned, childcare, they have so
many duties going on. Did you find it difficult to get people engaged?
What were the strategies you employed there? In your experience, were
people really eager to get involved?
Loriane Ngarambe: The main strategy that we used,
that was really important, was meeting people where they were at, and
not making this be an additional thing that they have to do. For
instance, in idea collection, just getting out there and getting people
more informed and engaged with what was going on. We would go to places
like our Department of Human Services, where people are going to be
sitting there for hours anyway to get their benefits or go to their
appointments. So, instead of making a meeting, later on in the evening,
where they have to find their way there, meet people where they’re at,
go to schools, go to libraries, go to rec centers, go to churches, meet
people where they’re at. Identify your key communities’ members, people
who already have those relationships, people who will be advocates for
what’s going on.
It’s a ripple effect, essentially, right? We’ve identified our 20 key people who really understand what PB
is and are really for it. So they start going onto their networks and
that’s, really, how the engagement bloomed, how the engagement grew.
Then you’d have people hitting up our Facebook page, people reaching out
to us because their cousin, who goes to their church, told them about
this thing that they’ve been taking a part of. That’s really how we were
able to get that engagement going. It wasn’t because of what me and my
colleague, Graham, are doing. It was more about the people who
understood this for what it was and were passionate about it, and so
they were looping in their neighbors, their friends, their family.
That’s really how the engagement happened.
Then just meeting people where they’re at, mitigating barriers. If we
knew that childcare was an issue, then we made sure we had childcare
available at a meeting that we had. We made sure we had food. We had
giveaways, if people needed it, just to incentivize people to be able to
get there, so it’s worth their time, essentially. I don’t want you to
have to leave your kids to come participate and be engaged; bring them
with you. We’ll have things for them to do, as well, too. Just meeting
people where they’re at and being cognizant of the barriers they need to
be facing and how you can help mitigate that. That was really important
for us.
Adam Simpson: Wow. That sounds like a really amazing
process. Shari, could you say a little bit about this and your
experience? What do you see as the most successful strategies for
getting the community engaged in these participatory processes?
Shari Davis: Well, one thing I want to just
underscore is this principle that was mentioned before, and that’s
around content and context expertise. I often say, “If I were to build a
building, I would get an expert.” I would go get an architect because I
don’t want the building to fall down. So, if I’m going to build a
healthy community, I need experts to do that. I need people that live,
walk, breath, and exist in that space on a regular basis. When we’re
infusing their ideas, impact, and, really, voice, we’re able to build
communities that are responsive to generations to come. I think that’s a
really important piece here.
In terms of what we’ve seen work, and how this really works is, is
centering those folks—who now we’re turning to as experts, and have
always been experts and leaders in their own right. But if we’re going
to center their engagement, we have to design the process with them, and
not for them, and that’s why this steering committee component is so
important. If we want single parents, or parents period, to participate,
then we have to really think through childcare, times that we’re
meeting. If we want young people to be in the room, then we probably
can’t meet at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday. These considerations and the design
process are essential. And that’s not me, Shari, or other members of PBP,
that make those decisions. It’s the important folks that are on the
ground, the folks that work in government, but especially those that are
of the community that we’re trying to engage in a participatory
budgeting process, really need to be at the helm of that design.
That’s what we’ve seen work in Oakland, where there’s no minimum
voting age, anyone of any age, as long as they can interact with the
materials, can participate. That’s what we’ve seen work in the City of
Boston, where young people reported being more likely to engage in their
community or being more likely to vote in a local or national election,
as a result of participation. That’s what we saw in Phoenix, Arizona,
where the entire school district engaged in a participatory budgeting
process. And, last year, nearly a thousand of those young people that
engaged in the PB process also registered to vote in local and national elections.
That’s what we’ve seen be a big piece of success is making sure that
community, and those that are representative of their community, are
really involved in the design process early, and in a way that they can
make some decisions.
Loriane Ngarambe: Just to add to that, real quick.
Here, in Rochester, we have a community advisory council. This is made
up of community members who have decided to take on that extra time to
really be involved with what’s going on, and provide input and guidance
to the solutions and programs, and conversation, that are being had
around what’s going to be happening with our communities. They played a
really important role in the education part of introducing PB
to the community. We brought it to them. We explained what it was to
them, and they helped with the creation of our steering committee, and
getting the word out there. Just to back up that statement, that was a
huge, huge component of this, as well, too for us.
Shari Davis: I think you were touching on something
that’s super important, and I know Alex can attest to this too. Often
times we see councils and engagement strategies, and the councils may
work, sometimes they’re a bit defunct, so participatory budgeting can be
a way to really build robust advisory council level support. And, to
your point, really allow them to infuse the beginning stages of planning
that lead to the steering committee creation. And, in the City of
Boston, we saw that with the Mayor’s Youth Council. They became huge
ambassadors and key to the success of participatory budgeting, and
really ran this process, and continue to now. I know that’s true, in
terms of what Alex has seen, on the university scale, as well.
Things like participatory
budgeting on a very, very simple level allow people to connect with one
another and identify different things in their neighborhood that they
didn’t even have any awareness of.
Alexander Kolokotronis: Yeah, to add to
that. At the university scale what we’ve seen is—and you’ll find this
again; this is another product of the ’60s—so many schools have a series
of advisory committees in every aspect of the school structure, in
terms of making school policy, or making recommendations for school
policy. What we found, when we were doing our participatory budgeting
process at Queens College, was that there were all these committees for
different things, related to finance, related to buildings and grounds,
related to all these things. As we looked through the lists, nearly all
the students’ seats were vacant. It really astonished us, because it was
clear that in a school with 20,000 students, there was an opportunity
there and that no one, nearly no one, was taking up this opportunity to
push things forward.
At the same time, we were recognizing that these are advisory
structures and, after all, we, ourselves, are pushing for a process
where we actually had decision-making power and weren’t simply being
shuffled off into advisory seats that we were afraid might not affect
change. But the result in having a participatory budgeting process is
that people felt anchored, and felt able to try out, maybe, also sitting
on some of these advisory seats, and, maybe, also having that feedback
into the participatory budgeting process itself at Queens College.
The effect has been, over the last few years, that students have
consistently found certain committees are really great to work within
and are able to push things that sometimes may spill out of the PB
process. For example, we have, at Queens College, a lot of technology
projects have been pushed, rather simply having those projects having
funds allocated through PB itself, they’ll be
brought into the technology feed committee and will be pushed that way.
We’ve seen, in that case, a lot of spillover effects in terms of the
preexisting advisory structures and how PB not
only provides people with the confidence to step up into positions in
those councils or committees but also brings in the information and all
the different perspectives that are accumulated through PB into those advisory structures themselves, affecting change in a lot of different ways.
And that’s what we’ve seen, where projects have been, ultimately, taken up and have been funded well beyond the PB process itself at Queens College.
Adam Simpson: I’m really interested in what your
views are, all of you really, on participatory processes at different
layers beyond different governments, including universities, as you
mentioned, Alex, or neighborhoods, and workplaces, et cetera. But maybe,
in an effort to begin gesturing toward that, I think one of the really
resonating things to me about participatory budgeting is that the
community—and this is what I’ve heard from Shari and Loriane—is being
treated explicitly as the actor rather than something that’s acted upon.
Alex, I wanted to ask, in your research, have you seen what effect this
level of gesturing toward direct democracy has on broader social
participation and building a sense of community and community wellbeing?
Alexander Kolokotronis: Absolutely. I think,
actually, this indirectly gets back into one of the earlier questions
you asked, in terms of traditions that this all derives from or is
related to. A big push in the first half of the 20th century, and is
now, of course, creeping back in and is something that is often
addressed by The Next System Project is a push towards workers’ control,
towards cooperatives, and towards, really, trying to reshape the
workplace from something that is seemingly separate, or it feels
separate, from us to something that actually can constitute a community
in its own right.
Things like participatory budgeting, I think, do the same thing for
neighborhoods, and for any institution that’s using participatory, or
has a participatory, budgeting process where people might feel quite
apart and distinct from their neighborhood. That’s something you’ll
experience, for example, in New York City, where I’m from, where people
often get caught up in their daily commute, caught up in a lot of the
different transformations of New York City, where, maybe, a lot of
locally owned businesses have now terminated. A lot of the community and
civic life has slowly been drained. And, of course, New York City has
been a big battleground for things like this, when we think of, for
example, Jane Jacobs in the ’60s and ’70s, and the fights around
neighborhoods and maintaining a neighborhood vitality.
Things like participatory budgeting on a very, very simple level
allow people to connect with one another and identify different things
in their neighborhood that they didn’t even have any awareness of. This
is something I’ve seen time and again. But, in terms of my own research,
I really look at participatory democracy within public schools. There
are a few reasons for that. One, actually, connects to what Shari and
Loriane were talking about. I view the adult-child relationship as the
first iteration of the expert-layperson relationship. For me, when I
think about these issues in terms of expertise, when it comes to
architecture, when it comes to medicine, or when it comes to physical
infrastructure, and we talk about the very particular distinctions
between expertise in all those realms, I try to get at that thinking
about, “Well, how is this expert-layperson relationship constructed from
the very beginning and, particularly, within schools?”
Alexander Kolokotronis: I think one thing that we
see in schools is that kids, and children, and teachers themselves,
often experience the school as theirs, like “This is my school,” or “At
my school, we’re doing this.” But, at the same time in their daily life,
their daily experiences, they don’t necessarily feel the school is
really theirs. Something like participatory democratic processes,
including PB, really allow for people to not
just take ownership of the school, and take ownership in the sense that
what is theirs is actually really theirs, but that they are an agent, as
you push forward, within that setting and can constitute themselves as a
collective agent in the process.
I’ve seen that in my own research in the way in which students and
teachers at more traditionally and, dare I say, authoritarian-structured
schools have a far different sense of, and range of emotions, when it
comes to their setting, than those, even if there are problems and
difficulties at participatory democratic schools and trying to build a
community around that, as well. I mean, that might be a long-winded way
of getting at that, but I think we see that daily in the daily
distinctions between different types of schools and how well
incorporated people are, in terms of acting within them.
Shari Davis: Alex, you bring up something that’s so important to me and, as you were talking, I was just thinking about one thing. That
is, a lot of what we talk about when it comes to democracy—and we
haven’t talked about it or defined the problem—there is no secret that a
lot of folks are not happy, or feel that government is not designed for
the benefit of all. There’s been reasonable
research on this, and I think that one part of the long-game strategy to
addressing this bigger problem is to change government, and to change
who’s in government, so that government looks like the people that we
see in communities, so that they’re familiar with the issues, and so
that there is more of a conversation, and there’s not this big divide
between those individuals.
How do we prepare folks for roles? Not everyone necessarily wants to
be, or is interested in being, an elected official. There are so many
roles in government that serve community and I ask myself this question:
What does lifelong civic engagement look like? What does onboarding
look like? I was a young person who started working in government as a
teenager and had nearly a 15-year career in local government, and that
was unique. How do we not make that a unique story and make that an
opportunity that folks can really attain, and lean into, and explore,
especially as a young person? I think, to Alex’s point, introducing that
in a school context is so important, and then can become foundational.
And organizationally, at the Participatory Budget Project, that’s why
we’re not only focusing our efforts on the county level, and citywide
level, and regional, and larger scale PB, but we’re also really focusing on school, and school-district level PB,
because it’s so important to empower our young leaders that are not
future leaders but are leaders today, and need tools and support.
[Participatory budgeting] is a
way to crack that door open, and now we just have to figure out how to
keep that door open, because you have people who, when their eyes are
open, want to be more involved.
Loriane Ngarambe: For us, we also had our
Mayor’s Youth Advisory group that was heavily involved in this whole
entire process. And the energy that they brought, and just the
innovation that they brought to this process, it wouldn’t have been what
it was without them. To just piggy-back off of when you’re trying to
say, “How can we get communities that are more centrally engaged?”
You’re right, it is foundational. It needs to start early on.
I know when we would go out into the community and tell people about what this PB
process is, you have community members who almost feel siloed from the
democratic process that’s going on. You have these people in position of
power making decisions, but, to them, it’s like, “I got to figure
things out for me. I don’t have time to worry about what they’re doing
or how they’re doing it.” Because, in their minds, decisions that are
being made are not being made with them in mind because, if that was the
case, then these decisionmakers would be way more informed about what
really matters for people living in poverty. They’d be more aware of
what is it that community members are doing that works, that we can
build from, what is it that community members are missing that we’re
missing on our end, as well.
This process, a lot of it, was just relationship building and
education, as well, too, really informing community members of the power
that their voices have. The power that they have, as a collective, when
they really stand up and say, “Hey, enough is enough,” or “This is what
we need. This is what should be happening.” In RMAPI
community engagement, it’s a huge cornerstone, a huge part of the work
that we’re doing, because we understand poverty is not going to be
reduced, eradicated, or any other word, if community is not a part of
what’s going on.
Again, I keep saying this, PB is a way to
crack that door open, and now we just have to figure out how to keep
that door open, because you have people who, when their eyes are open,
want to be more involved; they want to know, “How can I, in my sphere of
influence, do something that can make a difference? How can I be more
involved? How can I be part of this greater democratic process? What
does that look like? There just needs to be more education and
strategies around making sure people get the information that they need.
So, whatever they decide to do with that, at least, they have that
information.
Adam Simpson: I want to turn from how we’re thinking
about community engagement and broadening this scope of democracy, and
think about how racial equity fits into that. Shari, I know I’ve seen
you highlight, and you, as well, Loriane, in the Rochester-Monroe
Anti-Poverty Initiative, a participatory budgeting process as a pathway
to creating racial equity, and bring that, really, out of frame and into
focus. Shari, could I start with you? Can you tell me about the impacts
you’ve seen and how participatory budgeting, and participatory
processes, in general, can really begin building pathways toward racial
equity?
Shari Davis: Absolutely. Since 2009, the first instance of participatory budgeting in the US,
we’ve seen over 400,000 people be empowered to decide how to invest
over $300 million on community projects in over 30 cities across the
United States and Canada. The participatory budgeting projects have
played a lead role in most of these processes in US
and Canada at some point. For us, ensuring equity, and racial equity,
in particular, is a little bit different in every space. No two PB processes are the same, but, honestly, I can’t find two communities that are the same.
With that said, layering in the important elements of racial equity,
it really goes back to design. That means, who is designing the process?
What are the considerations that they’re making? And how are we
ensuring that this process is really centered around people? People that
are, you could say, often left out, but these end up being the folks
that are easiest to ignore. With that said, I think a lot of our
strategy around racial equity is having honest, open, and transparent
conversations, and allowing folks to be on the same side of the table. A
key element to that is excellent facilitation and training folks to be
able to hold space, so that they can have some group agreements, and
really be able to dig into some things.
I’m really interested to hear how this rolled out in Rochester, in practice, and I can give a few other examples.
Loriane Ngarambe: I know, when we were designing the
process, there was a lot of time and emphasis around making sure that
this made sense for our community. What does that look like? We wanted
to be very intentional about reaching to, but also reaching past, the
usual suspects, as I like to refer to them. Anytime there’s anything new
that comes into Rochester, those engaged community members are always
there. But we wanted to make sure that we were making an effort to reach
behind them, to the people who are not engaged for whatever reason.
When our steering committee first came together, there were a lot of
honest, sometimes uncomfortable, conversations that needed to be had to
say, “All right, so why is it that anytime something new comes to
Rochester, the people who are going to benefit from it the most, are
always the last to hear about it.” And when they hear about it, it’s
usually when decisions are already made. There’s a plan already being
rolled out, and they didn’t know anything about it, but what can we do,
this time, that’s different?
Having those intentional conversations was really important. They did
so much work in creating the guidebook and making sure that they were
taking into consideration things that normally wouldn’t be taken into
consideration. So having single mothers at the table, having young
people at the table, was really important as well. Then having
predominantly context experts and then having people, who I call the
hybrids, context experts who also are content experts, so they can live
in both of those worlds. They’re almost like culture brokers, so they
know how to navigate both of those worlds, and being able to think
practically like, “Okay, this is something that’s going to make sense,”
or “This is something that’s not going to make sense,” and just
encouraging those conversations. As staff persons who are helping
facilitate this process, we wanted to make sure this was as
community-led as possible.
We wanted to do everything on our end to mitigate barriers, to
mitigate influencing what these guidelines or rules that they laid out
look like, and just really making sure this was community-led, and
community-owned. I think it made a huge difference for this process to
be what it was.
Shari Davis: Loriane, I have a question for you.
First, let me just commend you, because I think often folks get nervous
when we talk about opening up transparent processes that center race
and, really, that center tension. I think that there’s a way that
tension can be healthy and tension can be toxic. But I’m curious if you
can talk a little bit about your experience in moving this through
government and getting to a “yes” and dealing with some of the strong
hesitation around being so transparent. I think folks are often afraid
that it’s going to be counterproductive and not productive. You’re
telling a different story. I know a different story. How do we get
there?
Loriane Ngarambe: Yeah. At RMAPI, we were lucky enough to be able to roll out this pilot PB
process without having to do it through government. Our process wasn’t
through a city government. We secured the funding, and we helped roll
out the process. So, as a result, we didn’t necessarily have to deal
with the red tape of government and the bureaucracy that lies
everywhere. We were able to really make the process whatever is the
community members who were helping design it be what it was. Then, also,
at RMAPI we have our three guiding principles
of addressing structural racism, being trauma informed, and community
building. This is something that we infuse in everything that we’re
doing.
Any project, any solution, any process, conversation that’s being
had, these guiding principles are meant to be utilized as lenses in
which we’re doing all of this, so that we’re not just sitting around
sugarcoating what the real problem is. We’re trying to deal with the
root causes of why we’re here, and what we’re going to do, and what’s
going to make the most sense. Having these tense conversations goes with
the territory of doing RMAPI work. So having
the right people in the room, and being able to sit in those moments,
was interesting, because it was almost the community members themselves
guiding that process. When you were in moments of tension, moments of
people not sure of how to receive what was being said, just sitting in
that moment and facilitating: Where are people’s heads at? How do we
move past? What about this do you not understand? Just allowing the
space to really get through that, I think, is and was really important.
Shari Davis: Adam, the reason why I very much tagged Loriane in on this is because I mentioned no two PB
processes are the same. But a big piece in addressing racial equity is
grassroots leadership, and that usually looks like a strong
community-based partner that is very much involved in this, because they
have the connections, they’ve done a lot of this work, and they have a
really good sense of the landscape. Oftentimes we’re talking about
bringing these folks together, making these connections, getting them on
the same side of the table. I can’t think of one PB
process where this wasn’t the case, where there weren’t really strong
relationships with community-based organizations that were centered on
things like racial equity, housing inequality, gentrification, and
really inviting those folks to be at the forefront who are doing some of
this deep engagement.
Shari Davis: We need those community ambassadors,
whether it is a youth council, an advisory board, or, really, those
groups that have the deep relationships in communities with those folks
that are often hard to reach, is a key element to centering this process
and really using a lens of equity, racial equity, gender equity, and
these other pieces. We have to be clear on the goals at the beginning of
the process, otherwise they will not show up in the design.
Adam Simpson: Before moving on, I wanted to follow-up, Shari, on something you mentioned earlier about the first PB
project in the United States, or in North America, maybe, you said,
beginning in 2009, now, over 400,000 participants across the country. I
get a sense that PB is spreading, and I wanted
to ask, why do you think that is? Why do you think? Maybe, it’s
something to do with this particular moment or maybe it’s something that
the idea is just compelling to a lot of people. But why do you think PB is growing in this popularity, in this particular moment?
Shari Davis: Well, I think, to be honest and
completely transparent, we’ve seen some slower growth of participatory
budgeting in the United States compared to what we’ve seen in some other
places. I think there are a few things to think about here. In Paris,
France, for example, they do a PB process with
over 100 million euros, a school-based process, a district-based
process, and a city-wide process. The mayor has committed 5 percent of
the budget to be decided on by folks that live in the City of Paris. So
it can be that big. We’ve seen countrywide PB in Portugal. We’ve seen really big large scale PB
processes in other places across the world. And, I think, we’re
starting to see some real growth of participatory budgeting in the US
since 2009. And, as I mentioned, the practice of participatory
budgeting is different in every process, but it’s also a bit different
in the United States, and it should be, because the context in the US is a bit different.
I do think that we are seeing a continued growth, and there is a
moment here for us to think about what participatory democracy looks
like overall, and really, for us, to think about what civic engagement
looks like beyond just voting, and what building pathways to lifelong
civic engagement are. And, I think, participatory budgeting is not the
silver bullet or the only solution, but is one of some innovative
solution that should definitely be considered in addressing this. And I
think we’re in a moment where we’re seeing an uptick, and a real desire
for things like PB.
Adam Simpson: Absolutely. I just want to follow-up
on that. As a tool for building community power, and a sense of
community cohesion, I’m hoping to hear from folks about how far they
think these processes can go beyond budgeting, really, to local issues
like zoning or economic development plans. The recent fiasco with Amazon
HQ II in New York City comes to mind immediately. But being conscious that one of the criticisms I’ve heard about PB
is sometimes that of the decisions that are put on the table by various
local governments, et cetera, the amounts of money involved are
relatively small, or the decisions involved are not as consequential as
they could be.
Maybe we could start with Alex. Do you think that participatory
budgeting, or participatory processes more generally, could be applied
to bigger economic decisions whether we’re talking about the state
level, or the regional level, or even the federal level, or is there
really, truly a scale dilemma and this is much more appropriate for
municipal processes? I’m just wanting to get a sense of the scale and
what are the limitations or the potentialities.
Alexander Kolokotronis: This is a question I thought about for years. Recently, I started to think about the criticism of PB, and what that criticism says in the more underlying way. I think what the criticism of PB
does is that it actually says something about the way we understand
money. The way we understand money is really this very orthodox
neoclassical economics-based outlook of seeing money as something really
separate from us. If you take an Econ 101 class, the way it starts, and
the thing that animates it all the way through, is the supply and
demand curve, and that’s that.
Somewhere the consumer and the producer are supposed to meet at this
optimal space. The whole point there is the service or good being
exchanged. Money is external to that. Money is not seen as really a part
of that. Money is just this separate thing that, at best, maybe helps
facilitate that private meeting or exchange. This is the private money
story, where we really start our barter. Now, and I think in recent
years, what’s really taken off, especially with modern monetary theory,
is another story that is more historically based, that it’s not that we
were born as these isolated individuals who come to market and then
separate; we’re really born into a community, and when we think of
things that way, we understand provisioning far differently.
Let’s say I’m looking for a shoe and someone else is looking for a
bottle of water. Instead of understanding it as, “Well, we so happen to
have this double coincidence of loss, so I’ll give you want I need, and
you’ll give me what I need.” It’s rather more like, “You have this, I
owe you one.” Then that person, who I’m exchanging with, owes someone
else one. Then we come to the question of, well, what is one? One of
what? This is something covered really well in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
We see that this story is not really barter comes first, then money,
and then credit. It’s really credit comes first and then money.
The reason why I’m taking this story and bringing it here is that
when you think of it this way, money is really a part of, and really
emblematic of, the community that we’re building. And money is not
really the super-private isolated thing. Actually, money is public. And
if we think of it that way, things like participatory budgeting are not
simply this add-on thing. Think about participatory processes, like
participatory budgeting, as actually really necessary to community
control. They’re not simply a tool for someone to maybe pat themselves
and look better. And they’re certainly not necessarily this thing that
some on the left will criticize as things that are just about crumbs and
don’t really get at bigger things.
In fact, I think a really big power of participatory budgeting is it
gets at the very question of how we experience money. In our day-to-day
lives, we experience money as something completely alien to us, whether
it’s our boss who pays us, whether it’s a government that
bureaucratically allocates funds, or whether it’s money in terms of the
sense in which we don’t have it. What I think you experience with PB
is actually really unique and almost a rupture in how we relate to each
other through money. We start to see money as not this necessarily
disgusting alien thing that’s above us and controls us, or that we lack
control in relation to. I mean, you can think of when someone might feel
quite ashamed of spending money. I mean, all these dynamics. All of
these are reversed or upended, when we do something like PB, where people start to relate to each other through, “Well, how are we going to allocate funds?”
Participatory budgeting is an absolutely necessary component to any version of community control at any scale.
I think PB is an absolutely
necessary component to any version of community control at any scale. As
Shari was referring to, there are some national initiatives, such as in
Portugal, with national PB process there, and there have been statewide PB
processes, such as in Ontario, Canada, or in Rio de Consul, Brazil. So
there have been some initiatives to try and get at this, and it’s really
about, I think, getting at the mechanics. But PB
is, I think, connecting very much with modern monetary theory, and I
don’t think it’s absolutely coincidental that we’re seeing these things
dovetail, in terms of their rise in the current political moment, that
we’re fundamentally re-understanding what money means, or can mean, to
us, and that it neither has to be this thing that is a fetish, as
Marxists, might frame it, as the only way money can exist, nor does it
have to be a thing where it’s something that we just have to, as a
result of being a fetish, feel ashamed of even touching. Rather, it’s
something we have to embrace and redesign to have an experience of
something far more shared and something that will facilitate the
provisioning of community-building, of individual fulfillment, such as
you see in the project development phase, where people are individually
really cultivating their own projects. These are all things that PB points the way to and, I think, it’s something we have to add more to.
Adam Simpson: We’re getting really close to time, so
probably this is my final question. Given what Alex just said, I want
to ask you, Loriane, the outcomes of the antipoverty initiative that you
were involved in, in the Rochester, Monroe area. The outcomes touched
housing, they touch food scarcity, so many different things. And the way
Alex was talking about, they do have to do with money, but also these
are also very much policy issues. I wanted to know, specifically, what’s
your thinking on this? What are the limits of participatory budgeting
from just your recent experience of participatory processes? Do you
think that it’s possible to engage in the way that you’ve been engaging,
in the Rochester community, to make these broader decisions about the
local area, and the different bigger economic decisions more broadly?
Loriane Ngarambe: Right. At the Rochester-Monroe
Anti-Poverty Initiative, our goal here is to bring system change. So,
there’s a lot of information gathering that is required. There’s a lot
of understanding of what is a problem; what’s been done that wasn’t
working, that’s working; What are some new strategies; what are some new
solutions. I think, more than anything, what the PB
process does, as I keep saying, is brings community into this
conversation and, now, we have to figure out a way to keep community as
part of these conversations and part of this solution-creation. But
then, also, it sheds light on what the real problems are. It sheds light
on not just the problems, but what some of the assets are within our
communities that are so often overlooked. Because, when you’re talking
about poverty, you come at it from such a deficit point of view and
often overlook just how people are making ends meet, how people are
living day-to-day with the dire circumstances that they’re living in.
When you’re talking about systems-level change, when you’re talking
about policy-level change, all those conversations require evidence, and
PB, for us at least, I would say has been a
great tool, a great process to bring to light what evidence exists.
Because it’s really hard to look at over 2,600 people who voted on the
projects that won, because these are things that they feel are important
and should be highlighted, and should be regarded as conversation
builders around how to really support individuals living in poverty. I
think it just provides the evidence to be able to change policies and
change systems in a way that, if this was just a closed-door process,
when just policy makers stand on policy gains, it wouldn’t be as
effective, and it wouldn’t be able to get to the core of what it is that
people really actually need to live self-sufficient, full, and complete
lives.
Adam Simpson: I know I said that was probably my
final question, but I’m going to kick this to Shari, if you don’t mind. I
just wanted to get your perspective, just a closing comment given what
was just said by Alex and Loriane, on your view of participatory
budgeting in the context of system change.
Shari Davis: I think Alex and Loriane raised some
really wonderful points. One of them that’s sticking with me is, when
we’re talking about participatory budgeting, we’re not talking about
blowing up or highlighting only problems. We’re talking about thinking
through solutions. That includes really doubling down on the assets that
exist in place, building them out, understanding what to duplicate and
invest in. Participatory budgeting is about understanding community
spending priorities, government spending priorities, and having an
opportunity to reconcile them. This is about an opportunity to lift up
the lid, invite folks in, and do things better. Ultimately, we’re
talking about building more sustainable, effective, and responsible
communities. This truly is an opportunity for us to maximize the finite
resources that we have to serve folks the best way that we can. This is
one strategy of many to do exactly that.
In terms of broader systems change, participatory budgeting, when
adopted, marks a real change in the way that folks do business, a real
change in the way that government operates. For me, and for many folks,
this is a beginning of a larger participatory democratic wave that, I
hope, really is fueled and ignited, so that we can see things like
participatory budgeting really take hold and become the way that we do
business.
Adam Simpson: I can’t thank you all enough for
joining me today to talk about participatory budgeting, and all of your
work around it. Just a final thank you to Shari Davis, Alexander
Kolokotronis, and Loriane Ngarambe. Thank you all for joining me today
on the podcast. It’s been a pleasure.
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