Participatory Budgeting: Activities for Local Governments and Communities
Public investment decisions made — and verified — by the community
A participatory budgeting process that works is not a symbolic consultation or a vote without context. It is a process with distinct phases: designing who participates and how, building a genuine territorial diagnosis, deliberating proposals with time and methodology, prioritizing with transparent criteria, and documenting results so the community can actually track what was agreed.
This collection organizes the most effective activities for each stage, with special attention to formal civic participation processes in municipalities, planning secretariats, and local governments.
Who is this collection for?
- Civic participation coordinators in municipalities and local governments
- Planning secretariats with a participation mandate
- Technical teams supporting participatory budgeting processes
- Community organizations driving participation from the ground up
Process Design and Outreach
Before the first assembly, there are critical decisions to make: who is invited and through which channels? What decisions are genuinely open to participation and what is fixed by law or budget? How do you ensure that only the usual participants don't show up? A process poorly designed at this stage reproduces the participation inequalities it aims to correct. The activities in this phase help design the process with intention and communicate it in ways that reach the people who most need to be heard.
Technology of Participation (ToP)
ICA facilitation system with three core methods — ORID Focused Conversation, Consensus Workshop, and Action Planning — to move groups from reflection to committed action.
Participatory Budgeting
Democratic process where community members vote directly on how to spend part of the public budget — turning citizens into active co-designers of public investment.
Participatory Mapping
Community members collectively map their territory, resources, and needs. Essential for community diagnosis, local public policy, and territorial rights advocacy.
Public Consultation
Formal process for collecting public input on proposed decisions before they are finalized, with explicit links between what was heard and how it shaped the outcome.
Informative Capsules
Informative Capsules are brief and dynamic presentations that deliver key information to prepare participants for subsequent activities.
Art of Hosting
A facilitation framework for hosting meaningful conversations at scale. Integrates World Café, Open Space, and Circle practice to harvest collective wisdom from groups of 20 to 150.
Territorial Diagnosis
Prioritizing public investment without prior diagnosis reproduces the priorities of those who already have a voice. This phase builds the collective input that gives the process a shared foundation: what the real needs of the territory are, how they are distributed, which are urgent versus important, and what resources and capacities exist in the community. A well-done diagnosis makes the subsequent deliberation more informed and the prioritization more equitable.
Civic Dialogues
Structured conversations between citizens and institutions on specific policy issues, with explicit mechanisms for public input to influence concrete decisions.
Inquiry Workshop
Discover how the Inquiry Workshop fosters critical thinking and collective exploration by generating key questions that guide research, project design, and problem analysis.
Beneficiary Stories
The Beneficiary Stories dynamic collects and reflects on personal narratives to document the impact of projects and generate learning from the perspective of those who lived through them.
Participatory SWOT Analysis
Participatory SWOT Analysis is a collaborative tool used to identify and connect strengths, opportunities, weaknesses, and threats to design collective strategies.
Local Connections Map
The Local Connections Map is a participatory tool for identifying and analyzing existing networks within an environment, promoting collaboration and strengthening key relationships.
Data-driven decisions
Data-driven decisions is a collaborative activity designed to help teams classify key questions, explore research methods, and balance qualitative and quantitative insights to drive better decision-making.
Proposal Deliberation
Deliberation is the heart of participatory budgeting: the space where the community doesn't just vote on preferences but builds proposals, discusses them, improves them, and understands those proposed by others. Without real deliberation — with only direct voting — the process favors proposals from those with the largest networks or the best communication skills. The activities in this phase create conditions for different voices, with different levels of participation experience, to contribute with equal weight.
Citizens Assembly
Randomly selected citizens who deliberate on a complex policy question over weeks or months, producing evidence-based recommendations free from organized interests.
World Café
A structured conversational process where small groups rotate between tables and layer ideas collectively. Surfaces shared intelligence and consensus in groups of 20 to 100+ people.
Open space
Open space (Open Space Technology) is a group self-organization methodology in which participants themselves create the agenda, choose the sessions, and define the topics of work, radically liberating collective intelligence without a pre-established program.
Talking Circles
Ancestral practice where all participants have equal voice, turns are regulated by a talking object, and deep listening is cultivated. Widely used in communities, NGOs, and the third sector.
Fishbowl discussion
Fishbowl is a participatory dynamic where a small group dialogues in the center while others observe, promoting active listening, multiple perspectives and deep reflection on complex topics.
Expert Panel
Format combining structured presentations from specialists with active audience participation, creating dialogue between expert knowledge and citizen or professional perspectives.
Collective Prioritization
When there are more proposals than available budget — which is always — the process needs prioritization mechanisms that are transparent, understandable to the whole community, and resistant to capture by better-organized or better-resourced sectors. The activities in this phase produce verifiable results: everyone can see what was voted and why, and no one can question the legitimacy of the process because the criteria were explicit from the start.
Affinity diagram
The Affinity Diagram is a visual and participatory tool that organizes ideas into categories to facilitate group analysis and informed decision-making.
Dot Voting
Dot Voting is a participatory technique that combines analysis and prioritization to identify the most relevant proposals within a collective process, promoting collaboration and group consensus.
Deliberative Poll
Combines a scientific survey with facilitated deliberation to measure how public opinion shifts when citizens engage with balanced information and genuine peer dialogue.
Nominal Group Technique (NGT)
Participatory technique combining silent idea generation and anonymous voting to produce ranked priority lists free from hierarchical influence and social pressure.
Impact and feasibility scale
The Impact and feasibility scale is a participatory tool for evaluating proposals based on their potential benefit and ease of implementation, promoting strategic and consensus-driven decisions.
Heat Map Voting
Heat Map Voting is a visual and collaborative technique for prioritizing key aspects within a set of ideas by distributing multiple votes across specific elements.
Documentation and Systematization
The participatory budgeting process produces a public agreement: what will be done, with what resources, on what timeline, and who is responsible. Without rigorous documentation, that agreement lives only in collective memory and fades over time. The activities in this phase build the formal record of the process — what was said, what was decided, and how it was decided — so that both the community and authorities have a verifiable reference when it comes time to implement and account for results.
Gallery of results
The Gallery of results is a visual and participatory exhibition that allows achievements and lessons to be shared in a creative and reflective way.
Stories of change
Stories of change are a participatory tool for capturing and analyzing real experiences that showcase significant transformations and deep learning.
Chronological Review
The Chronological Review is a participatory activity that analyzes progress by comparing it to the planned timeline, promoting adjustments and reflections to ensure the project's success.
Narrative workshop
Engage in a Narrative workshop to share stories, foster empathy, and build collective solutions. Ideal for team building, reflection, and creative problem-solving.
Timeline
Create a collaborative timeline activity to visually analyze key events, foster reflection, and generate insights. Ideal for planning, evaluation, and team building.
Talking stick
The talking stick is a dialogue facilitation practice rooted in Indigenous traditions of North America that grants the right to speak only to the person holding the object, ensuring that every voice in the circle is heard with respect and without interruption.
Accountability and Follow-through
The legitimacy of a participatory budget is proven after the decision, not during it. If the community has no mechanisms to verify that what was prioritized was implemented, and if authorities have no formal spaces to report on progress, the process remains a consultation exercise without consequences. The activities in this phase create those mechanisms: follow-up sessions, accessible reporting formats, and public spaces where the community can hold authorities to what was committed.
Confidence Vote
Confidence Vote is a fast participatory dynamic that lets groups gauge consensus, commitment levels, or uncertainty on a proposal by voting with hand signals or visual cues.
Risk mapping
Risk mapping is a visual and participatory tool for identifying and analyzing threats and vulnerabilities in a specific area or context, fostering collective strategies for prevention and response.
Informative Capsules
Informative Capsules are brief and dynamic presentations that deliver key information to prepare participants for subsequent activities.
Keys to a participatory budget that produces real change
1. Process design is a political decision
Deciding who participates, in which sessions, with what prior information, and under what decision rules is not a technical matter — it is a decision that determines who has power in the process. A design that doesn't actively address participation barriers (schedules, language, channels, institutional trust) will reproduce the representation biases that participatory budgeting aims to correct.
2. Diagnosis before proposals
When the community arrives to deliberate proposals without first having built a shared diagnosis, the most elaborately presented proposals tend to win — not the most necessary ones. Prior territorial diagnosis levels the field: it makes the needs of sectors with less participation experience as visible as those of organized groups.
3. Deliberating is not the same as voting
A participatory budget that only votes on proposals without prior deliberation tends to reproduce the agenda of those with the largest networks. Deliberation — spaces where proposals are discussed, questions are asked, and trade-offs are understood — changes the outcome because it changes the information people use to decide. It's not slower: it's more legitimate.
4. Prioritization criteria must be public from the start
When prioritization criteria are defined after proposals are on the table, there is always suspicion that the criteria were adjusted to favor a specific proposal. Criteria must be defined and communicated before proposals are presented, so the entire community can evaluate with the same standard.
5. Accountability is part of the process, not an afterthought
Participatory budgeting processes that don't include follow-up and accountability mechanisms in their design create a credibility problem in the next cycle: the community remembers what was promised and not delivered. Formal accountability sessions — with dates, accessible formats, and public spaces — are what transforms a consultation exercise into a verifiable social contract.