As of 2015, over 1,500 instances of participatory budgeting (PB) have been implemented across the five continents.^[1] While the democratic spirit of PB remains the same throughout the world, institutional variations abound.^[2]

For example, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Peru have implemented participatory budgeting in all local governments,^[3][4] and a number of towns and cities in Portugal, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain have also initiated participatory budgeting processes.^[5] In Canada, participatory budgeting has been implemented with public housing, neighbourhood groups, and a public schools, in the cities of Toronto,^[6] Guelph, Hamilton,^[7] and West Vancouver. Since its emergence in Porto Alegre, participatory budgeting has spread to hundreds of Latin American cities, and dozens of cities in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America. In some cities, participatory budgeting has been applied for school, university, and public housing budgets. In France, the Region Poitou-Charentes is notable for launching participatory budgeting in its secondary schools.^[8] These international approaches differ significantly, and they are shaped as much by their local contexts as by the Porto Alegre model.^[9]

Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre occurs annually, starting with a series of neighborhood, regional, and citywide assemblies, where residents and elected budget delegates identify spending priorities and vote on which priorities to implement.^[10] Porto Alegre spends about 200 million dollars per year on construction and services, this money is subject to participatory budgeting. Annual spending on fixed expenses, such as debt service and pensions, is not subject to public participation. Around fifty thousand residents of Porto Alegre now take part in the participatory budgeting process (compared to 1.5 million city inhabitants), with the number of participants growing year on year since 1989. Participants are from diverse economic and political backgrounds.^[10]

The participatory budgeting cycle starts in January and assemblies across the city facilitate maximum participation and interaction. Each February there is instruction from city specialists in technical and system aspects of city budgeting. In March there are plenary assemblies in each of the city's 16 districts as well as assemblies dealing with such areas as transportation, health, education, sports, and economic development. These large meetings—with participation that can reach over 1,000—elect delegates to represent specific neighborhoods. The mayor and staff attend to respond to citizen concerns. In the following months, delegates meet weekly or biweekly in each district to review technical project criteria and district needs. City department staff may participate according to their area of expertise. At a second regional plenary, regional delegates prioritize the district's demands and elect 42 councillors representing all districts and thematic areas to serve on the Municipal Council of the Budget. The main function of the Municipal Council of the Budget is to reconcile the demands of each district with available resources, and to propose and approve an overall municipal budget. The resulting budget is binding, though the city council can suggest, but not require changes. Only the Mayor may veto the budget, or remand it back to the Municipal Council of the Budget (this has never happened).^[10]

The first recorded Participatory Budgeting process in the United States of America started in 2009^[20] in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois.^[21][22] Led by the ward's Alderman, Joe Moore, Chicago's 49th Ward is undertaking this process^[23] with the Alderman's "Menu Money." Menu Money is a yearly budgeted amount each of Chicago's 50 wards receives for use on capital expenses. This money in other wards is typically allocated at the complete discretion of a ward's Alderman. Since 2011 more examples have been occurring in the US, in New York City,^[24] and now citywide in Vallejo, California,^[25] and most recently in Greensboro, NC.^[26] In Boston, the first youth-led participatory budgeting process in the US allows teens to decide how to spend $1 million of the city's budget.^[27] Cleveland will decide whether to adopt participatory budgeting in 2023 that would allocate up to 2% or $14 million of the budget.^[28]

PB in the United Kingdom was initially introduced as part of the 'New Labour' Party's decentralization agenda that aimed to empower the local governments in the first decade of the 21st century.^[35] Hazel Blears, the Labour MP, "[...] played a key role in the inclusion of PB on the national policy agenda[...]," pushing for greater community participation and empowerment in the governmental structure.^[35]: 94 Within this new political ambiance, the British PB, inspired by Porto Alegre's example, gained traction for implementation, especially through the active engagement of local NGO's and community activists, namely the Community Pride Initiative.^[35]: 97

The first attempt at PB was initiated as a pilot in the city of Bradford in 2004, and its "procedural model consists of two main steps: the elaboration of project schemes by local community groups and a decision about these schemes by all involved groups during a public meeting."^[35]: 100 The Bradford process, while limited to small funding, helped PB spread to other cities such as Newcastle.^[35] In addition to the bottom-up activism in local communities, Blears's initiative for PB on the national level helped promote its implementation and diffusion more broadly, and by 2011, there were at least 150 recorded cases of PB, albeit being limited to small funding and designated personnel.^[35] The "UK style" of PB, as Anja Rocke puts it, "in form of small grant-spending processes with no secured financial basis and organized at the margins of the political system," failed to gain enough momentum to be established nationally as a formal decision-making procedure.^[35]: 162

The Scottish Government has made a commitment to participatory budgeting, saying "We support PB as a tool for community engagement and for developing participatory democracy in Scotland".^[36] In addition, the Scottish Government and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities have agreed that at least 1% of local government budgets will be subject to participatory budgeting by the end of 2021, potentially amounting to £100million.^[37]

The Scottish Government allocates funding for participatory budgeting through the Community Choices Fund, delivered in partnership between the Government, local authorities, communities and third sector organisations.

The City of Helsinki started its citizen budget process in 2018. The first round was conducted in 2019. The OmaStadi-process ("MyOwnHelsinki") consists of four stages: First, citizen make proposals in the areas of ecology, culture, outdoors, nature, build environment and community. In the second stage, the city administration adapts the proposals to the city's standards and equips them with a budget. Third, citizens allocate the available budget according to their personal preferences in a vote. Finally, the city implements the most highly ranked proposals in consultation with the original initiators as far as the budget suffices.

In 2021, a citizen budget of €8.8 Mio. is allocated through the OmaStadi-process. This equals about 0.2 percent of the city's budget (€5000 Mio. in 2021). 1.8 Mio Euro are spend on measures concerning the whole city, €7 Mio. are distributed on the district level. Citizens can vote on both levels. Every Helsinki citizen aged at least 12 years can participate. Voting takes place through a personalised internet access. People with difficulties using the internet can turn to help points, e.g. at local libraries. OmaStadi/MyOwnHelsinki citizen budget 2021

The City of Turku spends €1 Mio. on its citizen's budget for 2020. About 3.000 citizens participated and voted for 52 projects out of 239 proposals.^[43][44] The City of Tampere started its first participatory budget in 2020. A sum of €0.45 Mio. is focussed on supporting children's and youth's urban environment.^[45] The City of Lahti devotes a budget of €200.000 for the year 2022.^[46] The City of Vantaa spends a budget of €50.000 for the year 2021. The budget focuses on city districts.^[47] The City of Oulu spends a budget of €50.000 Euro for the year 2021.^[48]

Participatory budgeting projects in Spain accelerated in the early 2000s, typically as a result of left-wing party advocacy.^[49] Left-wing municipal governments established participatory budgeting exercises in "Sevilla, Albacete, San Sebastián, Getafe, Leganés, Sabadell, Leganés, Segovia, Torrellano, Elche, Algeciras [and] Novelda."^[50] Other municipalities that have implemented participatory budgeting at some point include "Puente Genil, Cabezas de San Juan and Rubi."^[51] As one of the first participatory budgeting experiments in Europe, participatory budgeting in Córdoba was influenced by other participatory exercises and originated from resistance to the Franco dictatorship in the 1970s and the experience in Porto Alegre, Brazil.^[52]

Although participatory budgeting experiments across Spain seemed to provide deliberate spaces for participation of citizens, Ganuza and Francés (2014) suggest that these experiments decreased in number through 2010 because municipal governments did not change their decision-making processes to accommodate greater citizen involvement.^[53] For example, the experiment in Córdoba was pushed by the municipal government and associations and only impacted up to 5% of the municipal budget.^[54] Pineda Nebot (2009) elaborates that local governments across Spain struggle to coordinate between citizens who recommend specific spending priorities and the bureaucracy that implements the budget.^[55]

In more recent times, participatory budgeting has resurged and expanded to some major cities, including Barcelona and Madrid. After left-wing parties won the Madrid municipal elections in 2015, a participatory budgeting experiment began, but the practice has faced problems with clear communication, transparency, and utilization of latest technology.^[50] For example, Pineda Nebot and Pires (2017) believe that many of the experiments in Spain do not provide sufficient information about previous budgets or space for citizens to design the rules of debate to have better deliberations, though they suggest that adopting technological innovations could improve the process.^[56] In the other hand, Ganuza and Francés (2014) and Sintomer et al. (2008) believe that some Spanish experiments of participatory budgeting are successful at creating deliberative spaces compared to in other parts of Europe since Spanish citizens tend to have a greater role in deciding the municipal budget.^[53][49] Looking at municipalities in the province of Barcelona, Parés (2011) agrees with previous research that find that participatory budgeting in Spanish municipalities with smaller populations have been more successful.^[57][58]

In 2005, the national government revised its Local Finance Act to promote citizen participation in the local government budgeting process in response to a few of the local governments that initially took a bottom-up approach in experimenting with forms of PB.^[63] Since then, the Ministry of Security and Public Administration invested in the nationwide promotion of PB system diffusion, and under Myung Bak Lee's Administration in 2011, the newly revised Local Finance Act required all local governments to adopt PB.^[63]

Before the 2011 decree, approximately 45% of local governments had already been utilizing the PB system, and it took 3 years for the remaining municipalities to fulfill the mandate.^[63] The PB System of Seoul Metropolitan Government served as the benchmark for other local governments' adoption of PB in those years.^[63] Seoul, city with the world's 4th highest GDP, runs a PB committee of 300 people representing 25 districts. The committee is then split into 11 different budgetary fields such as parks and recreation, culture, environment, etc. In its first year, Seoul citizens voted and finalized on 223 projects worth 50.3 billion KRW, and most recently in 2017, the PB system finalized 766 projects amounting to 59.3 billion KRW (approximately US$55 million).^[64]

A comprehensive study of Korea's PB in 2016 suggests that PB in Korea has allocated most of public budget to the following three areas: land/local development, transportation, and culture and tourism. Transparency in budget documents and information sharing has increased since 2011, and the approval rates by local PB committees averaged to approximately 70%. On the other hand, the study also points out that the lack of citizen capacity, inadequate resources for smaller municipalities, and limited representativeness of vested interests as some of the most unresolved challenges in Korea's PB implementation.^[63]

India's experience with PB has been limited despite its 74th Constitutional Amendment, which proposes to the state and local governments the formation of ward committees composed of local citizens to direct ward-level budgets.^[65] Such initiative was not implemented, and thus there were only few cities that experimented with PB, namely Bangalore, Mysore, Pune, as well as the village Hiware Bazar.^[65]

Bangalore was the first to implement PB in India in 2001 with the help of a local NGO. Similarly, Pune was able to adopt PB in 2006 with the help of several local NGOs. Pune's PB system was met with a large response from its local citizens, and multiple online and offline workshops were carried out to foster the implementation^[65] As a result, Pune has experienced both increased citizen participation and budget allocation, which are directed primarily towards roads, electricity, slum-improvement, and water shortage.^[65] Influenced by Pune's PB, Pimpri-Chinchwad, the fifth-most populated city of Maharashtra, also began to adopt the framework in 2013.^[65]

Hiware Bazar, a village in Maharashtra, may have served as the most successful example of PB in India. On June 25, 2015, Delhi Deputy chief Minister Manish Sisodia presented the Swaraj Budget.^[66] The Aam Admi Party Swaraj Budget was prepared based on voting from the people of different constituencies. In each constituency three meetings were held; each meeting was attended by 200–300 residents, and a list of key issues was prepared, which was then voted on to decide the top priorities.^[67][68][69] As a result, the village, once bereft of water, education, and basic needs for life, is now self-sufficient with a high per capita income.^[70]

For South Africa, the mechanisms for citizen participation is written in its constitution. Each municipality has its budgetary committee formed with representatives from its 'wards' that deal directly with its budgeting.^[71] The World Bank Group's research lists Mangaung and Ekurhuleni municipalities as representative cases to demonstrate the typical PB process in South Africa.^[71] First, the process for the council is fixed by the mayor, who sets up certain deadlines for the council to deliberate within.^{[71]: 207–208} Then, the municipality is divided geographically into 'wards', and the public budget is drawn with any desired submission from the community through their ward representatives.^[71] The tentatively accumulated budget plan is then publicized so that any citizens or "stakeholders" can make their final inputs, and the final version is submitted to the national and provincial governments for approval.^[71]

On a nationwide level, the South African municipalities, as a result of PB, have witnessed the public budget "shift from infrastructure development to local economic development, a higher priority for citizens."^[71]: 213 Currently, PB is being carried out in 284 municipalities, each varying slightly in its process.^[71] The rate of transparency for the municipal governments has increased because the sub-organization ward committees are able to maintain consistently ongoing communication with the citizens.^[71] Regardless, the challenges in South African local governance still prevail as a result of the lack of resources and limited capacities assigned to PB. Furthermore, language barriers and cultural differences also provide immediate obstacles for holistic communications between various wards and social groups within the municipalities.^[71]: 24

The Better Neighbourhoods participatory budgeting project of the wider citizen sourcing Better Reykjavik project of the City of Reykjavik was established in 2011. Nearly 2 million Euros (300 million ISK) has been allocated each year with over citizen proposed 100 projects funded most years. The project is mostly driven by digital participation with secure electronic voting.^[72][73]

Tel Aviv conducts a participatory budgeting process since 1999. The city is divided into 58 neighborhoods. Each year, participatory budgeting is done in 12-20 neighborhoods. In each neighborhood, interested residents participate in planning workshops, in which projects for renovating the neighborhoods are suggested. The list of projects is put to a general vote among the residents. The single project with the highest number of votes is funded and carried out in the following year. If some budget remains, it is used to fund parts of the project with the second-highest number of votes.^[74]

• List of participatory budgeting votes