The paper is presenting the success story of applying a participatory governance tool to a highly regularized and bureaucratized local public administration in Eastern Europe – the first successful participatory budgeting process in Romania.
The Law of Public Administration and the Law of Public Finances do not mention anything about this type of citizen engagement in public decision making. This and the fact that 2014 was an important electoral year in Romania, made even more difficult for a local public administration (the City Hall of Cluj-Napoca) to implement a participatory budgeting process.
The PB process conducted in Cluj-Napoca can be regarded as atypical especially because there was no established sum of money pre-allocated from the budget and the PB process was based on the consensus building approach of participatory processes, rather than the deliberative one.
