The territorial impacts of participatory budgeting in middle cities

Abstract

Participatory budgeting, an urban management instrument with its theoretical basis connected to the precepts of participative and deliberative democracy, focusing in popular debate about public budget was created in Brazil and had, through the last 30 years a massive global expansion, meanwhile having a crisis on its country of origin. Because of that, the instrument is applied in diversified spatial realities, from central to peripheral countries and its urban networks, in metropolises, medium and small sized cities. Considering this context, the current research project is structured with the objective of understanding how geographical conditions of medium sized cities can influence the quality of these participatory processes. The core concept comes from the theoretical debate about institutional conditions for participation, focusing specially in a territorial approach, applying the Geographical Science framework, composing the idea of "territorial impact". In methodological terms, quantitative and qualitative data are going to be collected to the whole universe of PBs applied in Brazilian medium sized cities (both occurring or stopped), then analyzed with statistical methods in tables and spatialized in Geographic Information Systems tools. These procedures will give basis for the samples that are going to be analyzed with quali-quantitative methods, allowing comparisons with the application of participatory budgeting in cities of other dimensions, such small ones and metropolises from Brazil, and also other countries. The empirical data, together with the discussions to be made about comparisons with the findings from other researchers will serve to confirm or cancel the hypothesis that the geographical conditions of Brazilian medium sized cities tend to generate PBs that have higher qualitative impact on its territorial relations. (AU)