This paper studies participatory budgeting and its use in the municipality of Logatec. Participatory budgeting is a little studied and rarely adopted method, where a wide community participates in the use of predefined funds for the realisation of different initiatives. Participatory budgeting allows individuals to participate more actively in their local environment and to make changes to it.
The first part of the paper presents theoretical premises and describes the notion of participatory budgeting, its development through history and its use. A descriptive research method was adopted. Theoretical starting points are then used in the empirical part of the paper, using a survey as a research method, which was sent out to residents of Logatec.
Based on the survey, we determined that residents of the municipality of Logatec are mostly not aware of the possibility to cooperate in the use of funds. Moreover, only 27 of 212 municipalities in Slovenia have adopted the participatory budgeting method. Since it is not widely used, its advantages are unknown to potential users.
The paper offers a new insight into the field of public administration as well as political sciences, law and sociology. We examined a new democratic process, which has the potential to improve the state of democracy in the Republic of Slovenia and consequently raise the standard of living of inhabitants residing in individual municipalities. The process incorporates the essence of diplomacy: everybody decides on everything. Trends indicate that participatory budgeting will be a more and more frequently adopted method in municipal budgeting, which is why we need to understand it.
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