What is Participatory Budgeting?
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which community members decide how to spend part of a public budget.
Participatory budgeting started in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989, as an anti-poverty measure that helped reduce child mortality by nearly 20%. Since then, PB has spread to over 7,000 cities around the world and has been used to decide budgets from states, counties, cities, housing authorities, schools and other institutions.