Participatory Budgeting and the Redistribution of Political Representation. A Comparison of India and China

Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a democratic innovation that has been spreading globally since the 1990s, from Latin America to Europe and now Asia. In this paper we propose to conduct a comparative analysis of two experiments with PB in India (Delhi) and China (Chengdu). In Chengdu, which is Sichuan province’s capital city, PB was first launched by the provincial government in 2008 in some villages in the context of post-earthquake reconstruction and was gradually expanded to the whole population of 16 million inhabitants. Representatives elected every three years take part in village or neighbourhood-level deliberative assemblies (yishihui) every month to discuss budget issues and meet bureaucrats to solve local disputes. In Delhi, a city-state of 17 million inhabitants, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) that came to power in 2013 and again in 2015 has conducted a pilot experiment of PB through the organization of some 400 neighbourhood assemblies (mohalla sabha) meant to prioritize local development works. Though short lived, this experiment is central to the AAP’s evolving participatory governance. In spite of these contrasted political contexts and local practices, our fieldwork (observations and semi-conductive interviews) allows us to highlight important and significant similarities between these two cases (a top-down process developed in the context of anti-corruption campaigns to channel citizen grievances and improve governance and legitimacy), as well as differences that were not necessarily expected (especially the gradual expansion and refining of the experiment in Chengdu). On the basis of this comparison, we argue, firstly that PB is a procedure that disrupts existing patterns of representation (electoral or not) insofar as it reveals such patterns even as it redistributes political representation. And secondly, PB appears as a procedure where representative claims and counter-claims are made, but in a way that is quite different from the usual sites of political discourse.