Participatory Budgeting: Who Actually Decides the Money
The first time I ran a household budget meeting with a partner, I did the whole thing myself, showed her the finished spreadsheet, and could not figure out why she barely spoke to me the rest of the weekend. Turns out “presented the budget” and “made the budget together” are two different things, and I had done exactly one of them.
Participatory budgeting is what happens when the people affected by a decision get a real vote on the money behind it, not a slide deck afterward. It started as a city-hall idea. Neighbors deciding which streets get repaved, which parks get benches, which programs get funded. Once you see the shape of it, you notice how much of your own money life would go better if you did the same thing at your own kitchen table.
Here is what participatory budgeting actually is, where you can watch it running in a US city right now, what the research finds when it gets measured, and the version you can borrow for a joint account, a family fund, or a shared pot at work.
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What participatory budgeting actually is
Short version: it is a public-vote process where a chunk of a government budget gets set aside, community members propose projects they want funded, and the community itself votes on which ones win. The winning projects get built. Roads, playgrounds, streetlights, community fridges. Real projects, real money, real decisions made by people who do not work in the mayor’s office.
It matters because most government budget building happens behind closed doors, in rooms full of people who write budgets for a living. Participatory budgeting takes a small slice, moves it into the open, and hands the decision to the residents who have to live with the outcome. In New York City’s version, that slice is $22 million spread across 22 council districts. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is $1 million a year. Small percentages of huge budgets. Big change in who feels heard.
The full process usually runs in five stages. First, the city decides how much money is on the table and where it can be spent. Second, residents brainstorm ideas at neighborhood meetings and online. Third, volunteer committees turn the raw ideas into real proposals with rough costs. Fourth, everyone in the district or city gets to vote (in New York, that includes anyone eleven and older, regardless of citizenship or voter registration). Fifth, the winning projects get funded, built, and reported back on.
None of that is complicated. The reason people write books about it is that the shift from “we told you what we did” to “you told us what to do” changes the relationship between residents and their government.
Where it started, and why
Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1989. The Workers’ Party had just won the mayoralty of a city in a country freshly out of military dictatorship. Their theory was blunt. If the point of democracy is that people run their own affairs, then people should get to help run the money. So they carved off a piece of the municipal budget and invited neighborhoods to fight it out, in public.
The results were unglamorous and important. Between 1988 and 1997, the share of Porto Alegre households connected to sewer and water rose from 75% to 98%. School capacity roughly quadrupled. The neighborhoods that had been written off (poor, Black, farther from the city center) were the ones who showed up in force and voted to fix their own infrastructure. When you let the people who live somewhere decide where the pipes go, the pipes end up in the places that need them.
That model spread. According to the nonprofit Participatory Budgeting Project, more than 11,500 municipal versions exist worldwide now, up from around 1,500 a decade ago. Some are small (a school parent group voting on the enrichment budget). Some are huge (Paris allocated roughly 75 million euros to it in 2023). The mechanics change city to city. The idea, put the choice in the hands of the people who live with the choice, does not.
Where you will see it in the US right now
The best-known American version is New York City’s The People’s Money. In its most recent cycle, more than 134,000 New Yorkers voted on how to spend a citywide pot, with over 122,000 casting a paper ballot in person and roughly 12,000 voting online. That is on top of the older, district-level program the New York City Council has been running since 2011, now in its 15th year, which routes $22 million into 22 council districts for the fiscal-year 2027 budget. Anyone eleven or older who lives in a participating district can vote, regardless of citizenship status.
Boston runs a program called Ideas in Action. Cambridge and Somerville each have their own. Chicago’s 49th ward was the first US neighborhood to try it back in 2009, and while the local version has had its rough patches (the alderman’s office has been criticized for keeping the rules tight), the fact that it happened at all reset expectations for what a ward-level budget could look like. Seattle has run a version aimed at youth. Vallejo, California, tried it as a way to rebuild trust after a bankruptcy. Every city runs the process a little differently, which is a feature, not a bug: the process has to fit the place.
Ordinarily, when a city announces a “community engagement” plan, it means someone is about to run a survey and then do whatever they were going to do anyway. Participatory budgeting is different because the outcome is not advisory. The winners get built. The money is already allocated. When people show up to vote, they are voting on real, spendable dollars, not on the marketing sheen of dollars.
What the research actually shows
Full disclosure before this section. I am not a policy researcher and this is not a policy blog. I care about it because the underlying shape (give the money decision to the people affected) is useful in a life, not just in a city. But it is fair to ask whether the civic version really works.
The peer-reviewed answer is a shrug with a lean toward yes. A 2024 cross-national analysis found that participatory budgeting is associated with meaningfully lower municipal debt risk, which is a fancy way of saying governments seem to overspend less when the public is watching the ledger. Studies also find higher civic trust, higher tax-payment compliance, and better project-level satisfaction in cities that run credible programs. On the deeper “does it change actual health and wellbeing” question, the picture is thinner. Porto Alegre’s water-and-sewer numbers are real, but replicating them cleanly in North American cities is hard, because North American programs tend to be small slices of much larger budgets.
The consistent knock is representation. In some cities, PB voters skew older, whiter, and more engaged than the neighborhood at large, which is the opposite of the point. The good programs work hard on outreach (mobile polling stations, multilingual materials, ballots in libraries, youth-specific tracks). The mediocre programs run one meeting in the basement of a rec center on a Tuesday night and then wonder where the working parents went.
The other real critique is that people vote for the local project they can see over the citywide project they cannot. Your block gets a new playground. The wastewater plant three neighborhoods over does not. That is not really a flaw of the process, it is a flaw of anything that lets people vote. The fix is to bound what participatory budgeting is allowed to decide, so the truly technical stuff (water treatment, bond issuance) stays with the professionals.
Bring the same idea home
Here is the useful part. The point of participatory budgeting is not that citizens should vote on public dollars. The point is that a decision goes better, and holds better, when the people affected by it help make it. That principle scales all the way down to a kitchen table, a family, and a small work team.
The point isn’t that people vote on public money. It’s that decisions go better, and hold longer, when the people affected help make them.
With a partner
Try it on the joint account. Most household budget fights are not really about the numbers. They are about one person feeling like the money conversation happened to them instead of with them. Once a month, sit down together with the discretionary line, whatever is left after fixed bills and savings goals. Put three or four categories on the table (a weekend trip fund, a home project, restaurants, gifts). Each of you says what you would spend it on and why. Then decide together where it goes. Not evenly. Not fairly in some abstract sense. Together.
With the family
Try it on the family vacation fund. If there are kids, they get a small say, not a controlling say. You will be shocked how much cheerful acceptance you get for a “we are not staying at that hotel” answer, if the kids also got to vote for the trampoline park and won. Buy-in is the whole game. If you want more of it, hand out more of the vote.
At work
Try it on a shared team pot. Any manager with a small discretionary line (holiday party, offsite, small perks, learning budget) is running a tiny municipality. Post the number, let people pitch, let the team vote, honor the result. Your team will trust you more than the manager down the hall who spent the same money on a lanyard nobody asked for.
None of this is a formal method. If you want a proper framework first, the 50/30/20 rule is a solid starting point for the numbers. Participatory budgeting is a shape you lay over any of them: swap “one person decides and everyone else goes along” for “everyone with skin in the game gets a real say in the number.”
📌 Save this one for the next money conversation you were dreading.
If your budget talks at home feel more like homework than teamwork, this is the shift. You do not need to run a formal vote or take minutes. You need the person you share money with to be in the room while the decisions get made, and to have a real say in the outcome. That is the whole idea, translated from a city hall into your kitchen.
The rest is picking a monthly hour on the calendar and letting the number reflect what both of you actually want. Which is what a budget was supposed to be doing anyway.
What is one shared money decision you wish had been more of a conversation? Drop a comment. Good chance I made the same mistake first.
Who wrote this
Robby Naka writes The Millennial Budget, a no-shame take on money for people who want a great life now and later. He’s not a financial advisor, just a guy a little obsessed with spending on purpose and figuring out his own kind of rich. More about Robby. This article is general education, not financial or tax advice for your situation.
