The topic of the diploma thesis is participatory budgeting, a new-age process of managing and allocating municipal budget money, where citizens have the opportunity to co-decision, i.e. to propose and vote for projects that take up a certain share of budget funds.
The purpose of the thesis is to examine the process of implementation of participatory budgeting in selected Slovenian municipalities and to compare the process with an example of good practice from abroad. The first part of the diploma thesis takes up the field of participatory budgeting from the definition, history, legal basis to the description and comparison of the process in the Slovenian municipalities of Hrpelje - Kozina and Postojna with the municipality of Cascais in Portugal. A descriptive research method was used. In the second part, we obtained demographic data using the method of research survey. We found that the citizens of Slovenian municipalities are more passive in all phases of participatory budgeting, largely due to relatively low funds allocated for projects and poor advertising.
The thesis, mainly due to the empirical work, provides feedback from citizens involved in the process of participatory budgeting, which is slowly developing and upgrading. Feedback is the only way to improve the process, and we found that both in Slovenia and abroad there is a lack of research that includes opinion of participants, therefore our research has an important contribution to the social environment, especially to municipal officials, who can use the findings to improve the process of participatory budgeting.
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