The Role of Civil Society in Participatory Budgeting in New York and Mexico City

From the early days of participatory budgeting (PB) in Porto Alegre to the more recent global diffusion of PB, controversies over the role that pre-existing civil society organizations (CSOs) should play in the process have been constant. While advocates of PB agree that deepening or strengthening democracy is the ultimate goal, significant disagreement exists among practitioners, activists, and scholars about how and even whether CSOs should be incorporated. At one extreme, some governments have implemented PB processes that are completely individually based, ignoring CSOs altogether and making PB a personal experience of that of a voter in a booth (or, more frequently, a voter on their laptop or cellphone). At the other extreme, some PB processes have only allowed legally registered CSOs to participate, eliminating any role for non-affiliated citizens. In most cases, a mix of individual and CSO participation prevails, recognizing that democratic innovation requires moving beyond traditional political actors. Furthermore, most scholars agree that for PB to deepen democracy by providing new avenues for residents to contribute meaningfully to public decision making, both city officials and CSOs need to actively promote citizen participation. Key questions remain, however, about which PB processes allow CSOs to simultaneously: (1) function as counterweights to the political will of the implementing government rather than as clients or extensions of it and (2) represent and organize the broad and diverse interests of city residents without allowing one or a few sets of interests to dominate. When PB fails in either or both aspects, expectations for deepening democracy are unlikely to be met. Instead, citizen disillusionment with democracy may persist or worsen. This paper examines the role of CSOs in two of the largest participatory budgeting processes in the world: New York City and Mexico City. In both cases, PB started slowly, with only a few city districts adopting it, but later evolved to become city-wide processes involving tens of thousands of participants and tens of millions of dollars. The role of CSOs in PB varies in the two cities and has changed over time as well. In the most recent processes, CSOs in New York’s PB have played vital roles as "community partners" implementing programs voted on by residents, while Mexico City’s CSOs appear less prominent in PB, allowed to present proposals but not serving as privileged actors within the process. This paper’s goal is to understand how these differences came to be and what effects they have on the quality of PB and its capacity to deepen democracy. We examine the following questions: What were the responses of CSOs to PB in each city? How have CSOs participated in PB? How has their involvement affected the levels of participation more broadly? What kind of relationships have developed between CSOs and city officials through PB and how do city residents view these relationships? Do the CSOs function as counterweights or as clients to those in power? Do they reflect diverse citizen interests or do they reinforce initial inequalities?