The process of participatory budgeting is a form of promoting local democracy which
enables citizens to decide on the projects they consider the most urgent from an
investment point of view, and in the framework of which a portion of the municipal budget
is allocated to said projects. Three decades after its emergence in Porto Alegre at the end
of the 20th century, however, the long-term degradation of this process can be observed
(even, for example, in Porto Alegre), despite the positive impact of the process in practice.
Therefore, this thesis focused on foreign and Slovenian practices in order to determine the
factors that the success of the participatory budgeting process depends on. The core
objective of this thesis is to perform a literature review and a case study of participatory
budgeting in the Municipality of Komen in order to determine the key factors guaranteeing
a successful implementation of the participatory budgeting process, and the factors
inhibiting said process. The research has been carried out based on a successfully
implemented example of participatory budgeting in the Municipality of Komen in 2016, the
amendments indicated in 2020, and the review of participatory budgeting practices in
selected foreign cities.
The analysis provides a basis for the factors having a positive influence on the participatory
budget, e.g. the political will of the local authorities, and the factors negatively influencing
said process, e.g. the incompleteness of voted projects that are found to potentially
jeopardise the existence of the participatory budgeting process. The findings of this thesis
can be used to facilitate the introduction of the participatory budgeting process in
Slovenian municipalities that will opt to introduce said system in the future.
|
