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Democracy, governmentality and transparency: participatory budgeting in action
Public Management Review
Abstract
This paper examines initiatives in participatory budgeting (PB) in a city in the United Kingdom, a country which is a slow adopter of PB. While there are UK initiatives on PB, these are developmental. Nevertheless, this study underlines the potential of PB in an Anglo-Saxon context. The finance of local government and cities is notoriously opaque. PB has the potential to enhance both democratic accountability and effective city management through transparency. This study reveals a city which is profitably engaged with democratizing its budgetary activities and seeking to achieve greater transparency for its citizens and managers through the modernization of established practice.
... The implementation of transparency should be tailored to various circumstances (Lapsley & Rios, 2015). Internal transparency is an emerging concept in the literature, particularly in the field of public finance (Lapsley & Rios, 2015;Robbins & Lapsley, 2015;Brun-Martos & Lapsley, 2017). Internal transparency refers to the dissemination of operational information within an organization (Bowman & Bastedo, 2011;Lapsley & Rios, 2015;Robbins & Lapsley, 2015). ...
... Budget transparency, as defined by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), refers to the prompt and methodical complete disclosure of all pertinent budgetary facts (OECD, 2002). Nevertheless, the concept of "budget transparency" lacks a consistent definition, which highlights its intricate nature and the challenges in its assessment (Brun-Martos & Lapsley, 2017). The OECD sets three fundamental principles for budget transparency. ...
... The incidence of corruption in universities is persistently rising rather than declining. ICW reported that out of all the corruption cases, at least 65 people were behind the misconduct who were members of the academic community (Brun-Martos & Lapsley, 2017). This case demonstrates the lack of implementation and execution, as well as the absence of commitment from the management to uphold effective university governance. ...
The objective of this study is to analyse the impact of budget implementation and university governance on fraud prevention in Indonesia. Using the purposive sampling method, this study covered 50 private universities with 150 university officials as a sample. The findings demonstrate that effective university governance and budget execution have a substantial and favourable impact on fraud prevention. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge several limitations regarding the variables in this study, such as the small sample size and the absence of control over other variables that may influence university governance. The significance of this study stems from its examination of crucial areas, particularly the higher education service sector, which is well recognized for its substantial influence on the future of higher education.
... Academic works and political propositions have highlighted the importance of promoting civic engagement as a fundamental expression of direct democracy in local government. In academic literature, the discussion of this subject has expanded in recent years, both in theory (Cooper, 2005;Fung, 2015;Nabatchi, 2012;Rolfe, 2016) and in its application (Brun-Martos & Lapsley, 2017;Michels, 2012;Yang & Callahan, 2007), especially from the perspective of participatory governance (PG). ...
... Moreover, though the literature has highlighted some limits and difficulties of PG (Baiocchi & Ganuza, 2014;Ebdon & Franklin, 2006;Goldfrank, 2007) and offered reports of successful experiences with PG (Baiocchi, 2003;Brun-Martos & Lapsley, 2017;Shah, 2007), some of the relevant articles are outdated and can be enriched with new practices. ...
... First, such practices of PG create a strong link with direct democracy (Weeks, 2000), opening the possibility of overcoming bureaucracy (Cabannes, 2004) and aligning citizens' priorities with administrative choices in resource allocation (Im, Lee, Cho, & Campbell, 2014). Second, PG allows to enhance both democratic accountability and transparency in public finances (Brun-Martos & Lapsley, 2017). ...
Participatory governance is an administrative practice aimed at civic engagement and the promotion of direct democracy. The many applications of participatory governance make it a valuable practice in local government. Furthermore, participatory governance offers a possible answer to societal demands for greater civic engagement, as well as a possible solution to the generalised decline of trust in public institutions after the financial crisis. This article develops empirical research on diffusion and applications of participatory governance in Italian medium-large municipalities before the 2008-2009 financial crisis, after its outbreak, and today. Through mixed method research, the work seeks to understand the evolution of participatory initiatives in local government during a ten-year period. The results show that the financial crisis probably had an immediate negative impact on the diffusion of participatory governance, but also inspired changes in citizens' perceptions, as well as political responses to these perceptions though participatory processes.
... PB has spread globally in a rather short period of time. While the diffusion of PB is impressive, Brun-Martos andLapsley (2017, p. 1007) have highlighted that it has also caused complications due to PB "being implemented in very different ways, largely as a result of legal, social, political and historical traditions that exist in different countries." Thus, PB assumes different forms and aims depending on the context (Jung, 2022;Sintomer et al., 2008). ...
... Thus, PB assumes different forms and aims depending on the context (Jung, 2022;Sintomer et al., 2008). While PB is not a management tool itself, it can be defined as a mediating instrument between the two worlds of city management and citizens (Brun-Martos and Lapsley, 2017). Prior literature has recognized two goals of utilizing PB: to open the government and bring citizens closer as an evident part of administration and to strengthen democracy and trust with direct participation in decision-making (Pereira and Figueira, 2022). ...
... Prior literature has recognized two goals of utilizing PB: to open the government and bring citizens closer as an evident part of administration and to strengthen democracy and trust with direct participation in decision-making (Pereira and Figueira, 2022). In support of these missions, PB can enhance both democratic accountability and effective city management by promoting transparency (Brun-Martos and Lapsley, 2017). Moreover, it can be considered a form of sustainable governance relating to the issues of accountability and transparency that are typically principles of administrative practices. ...
Purpose
Sustainability is a pressing challenge of governance and public financial management. One key element of sustainable governance is the role of citizens. Participatory budgeting (PB) is a participatory tool with which citizens can influence public administration. PB is a democratic process that grants people real power over real money and it has spread around the world. This special issue explores the role of PB in the context of sustainable governance. In this editorial, the authors aim to approach PB as a form of sustainable governance.
Design/methodology/approach
In this editorial, the authors collaborate in the analysis of how PB is implicated in the public management of complex social, economic and ecological issues. The authors identify key dimensions of internal and external sustainability based on prior research. The authors approach these dimensions as an internal–external nexus of sustainable governance in which organizational and financial sustainability are the internal dimensions and socio-political and environmental sustainability are the external dimensions.
Findings
Even though PB can be seen as one tool for citizen participation, it has the potential to foster sustainability in multiple ways. PB, as a form of sustainable governance, requires a financially and administratively sustainable organizational process that results in the institutionalization of PB. It also includes thorough consideration of socio-political and environmental sustainability impacts of PB.
Originality/value
Academics are actively studying PB from various perspectives. However, most of this work has approached PB from the viewpoints of design and results of PB, and less is known about its institutional settings. PB has not yet been adequately studied in the context of sustainability, and there is a need to scrutinize PB as a form of sustainable governance.
... Other studies explore PB as a tool to enhance: legitimate political decisions (Ganuza et al., 2014); transparency in decision making (Brun-Martos & Lapsley, 2017); and encourage elected officials, civil servants, and citizens to work closely together (Sintomer et al., 2012). Political support and trust are considered key elements to support public managers' flexibility in analyzing PB proposals (Liao & Schachter, 2018;Zhang & Liao, 2011). ...
... Transparency across the process can enhance its effectiveness (Brun-Martos & Lapsley, 2017), as can education and open-mindedness (Zhang & Yang, 2009), and training activities (Liao & Zhang, 2012). Moreover, relationships between managers and politicians can affect both the design of the PB process and subsequent changes in participatory mechanisms (Uddin et al., 2019). ...
Participatory budgeting (PB) aims to enhance citizens' participation in local government. While there is a significant body of literature on PB, few studies investigate the role of internal actors in its management. This study aims to understand public managers' perceptions of the whole PB process. Using the Q‐methodology on a sample of Italian local governments experienced in PB, we analyze the perspectives of public managers, revealing four approaches to PB, which we classify as skeptics, enthusiasts; guarantors; and believers. We find that managers have different approaches to how PB works and its potential effects, based on their role in managing the process. We also find that their attitude may influence citizens' participation in and perception of PB. Further research should consider the nexus between managers' perceptions and citizens' involvement in PB.
... Scholars have extensively examined PB experiences in many settings including Latin America (Bland, 2017;C el erier and Botey, 2015), North America (Pinnington et al., 2009;Zang and Liao, 2011;Zang and Yang, 2009), Asia (Grillos, 2017;Jayasinghe et al., 2020;Kuruppu et al., 2016;Nurmandi et al., 2015;Uddin et al., 2019), Europe (Aleksandrov et al., 2018;Brun-Martos and Lapsley, 2017;Rocke, 2014) and to a lesser extent Africa (Shall, 2007;Sheely, 2015). Although the experience reported in these studies expectedly vary, they share similarities in approach (Bartocci et al., 2022), for example the involvement of multiple actors from elected officials and functionaries to civil society and community representatives with the aim to improve participatory approaches and sustainable governance necessary to deliver outcomes relevant to grassroot needs (Bland, 2017;Grillos, 2017;Justice and D€ ulger, 2009;Pinnington et al., 2009). ...
... Although the experience reported in these studies expectedly vary, they share similarities in approach (Bartocci et al., 2022), for example the involvement of multiple actors from elected officials and functionaries to civil society and community representatives with the aim to improve participatory approaches and sustainable governance necessary to deliver outcomes relevant to grassroot needs (Bland, 2017;Grillos, 2017;Justice and D€ ulger, 2009;Pinnington et al., 2009). In the process, pluralistic democratic values and skills of major stakeholders such as elected officials, bureaucrats and citizens are enhanced (Brun-Martos and Lapsley, 2017;Rocke, 2014). These are, as reported by Lassou et al. (2021a), essential factors for sustaining PB practices and improvements in living conditions of locals that it enables once external support withdraws. ...
Purpose
This research aims to examine the introduction of participatory budgeting (PB) in local governments in two Francophone countries, namely, Benin and Niger, and how local contextual factors influence its practices.
Design/methodology/approach
The research employs a multiple case study design with a comparative approach to analyze the introduction and practices of participatory budgeting across selected municipalities in Benin and Niger. Hopper (2017) and Lassou et al .’s (2018) notion of “pragmatism” within neopatrimonialism is mobilized to analyze the data from sources including interviews and documents. The analysis is conducted at both the country and local government levels.
Findings
Participatory budgeting took roots in a number of municipalities. Its introduction and adoption has promoted participatory governance especially from traditionally marginalized segments of society (e.g. women); albeit to varying degrees, in the face of the prevailing national neopatrimonial context. Furthermore, despite donor's push for a standardized model of PB implementation, actual practices took varying shapes, a consequence of differing local conditions and circumstances.
Research limitations/implications
In terms of limitation, it was not possible to access a number of research participants sought, particularly in Niger. But access to key documents from government, donors and civil society organizations help mitigate this to a large extent.
Practical implications
A major practical implication is the importance of adaptation to local socio-economic contexts and circumstances. As shown in the study, a blanket introduction and implementation of PB across societies based on a standardized model is unlikely to succeed and be sustained in the long run. A great deal of flexibility is required to accommodate indigenous realities on the grounds.
Originality/value
The study contributes to shed light on public sector budgeting regarding participatory budgeting practices in an under-researched setting: Francophone Africa.
... A sizeable and growing literature exists on public participation in decision making, especially in the area of public budgeting (Miller et al. 2019). This literature has mainly investigated: participation methods, and particularly the different selection, communication, decision, and authority devolution modes (Nabatchi 2012;Shybalkina 2021); the role played by the actors involved (Liao & Schachter 2018;Zhang & Feeney 2018); the conditions for a successful implementation (Barbera et al. 2016;Gordon et al. 2017); and the outcomes of citizen participation (Brun-Martos & Lapsley 2017;Hong & Cho 2018). In this last respect, scholars encourage public involvement as a way to build trust, legitimacy, and political support (Irvin & Stansbury 2004), as well as public interest and value (Nabatchi 2010;Reich 1990). ...
... This concept has been mentioned also by some recent research about public participation. This research is particularly interesting in that it links citizens' understanding to transparency issues and recognizes its importance for meaningful participation (Brun-Martos & Lapsley 2017;Muthomi & Thurmaier 2020). With specific respect to financial reporting, the popular reporting literature points out that having informed citizens is a precondition for establishing an effective dialogue with them (Jordan et al. 2016;Weeks 2000). ...
This study investigates the conditions under which transparency contributes to citizens’ understanding of financial reporting and examines how this enhanced understanding is associated with public participation. To this end, a survey experiment was conducted in which two attributes of financial reporting transparency (i.e., content clarification and presentation format) were the manipulated variables, whereas citizens’ understanding and public participation were the outcome variables. Results demonstrate that the provision of explanations to clarify obscure technical jargon does have a positive effect on citizens’ understanding. A similar effect was found for the provision of graphical and visual representations. However, the study reveals that there is no additional benefit in simultaneously providing both explanations of technical jargon and visual aids. Furthermore, findings show that the levels of public participation are highest among the individuals who felt they understood the financial information the best, but yet possessed the lowest level of actual understanding.
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... As part of the PFM agenda, PB seeks to enable the engagement of multiple actors in resource allocation and promotes operational efficiency by selecting projects and programs that deliver outputs and outcomes relevant to grassroots needs: recognizing the crucial role of local citizens and communities (Grillos 2017). PB contributes to a sense of community, fostering the feeling of being a good citizen and delivering on civic responsibilities (Hong and Cho 2018;Brun-Martos and Lapsley 2017). In addition, the democratic values, knowledge, skills and responsibilities of major stakeholders-politicians, bureaucrats and citizens-are expected to be enhanced in the process of implementing PB (Rocke 2014). ...
... One implicit but important factor in current PB research concerns the financing of the PB process. Unlike the pattern in richer developed countries, where the financing of the process more or less automatically ensues from the decision to carry out PB (Burn-Martos and Lapsley, 2017;Michels and de Graaf, 2017), in developing countries finding such resources to fund the process is often problematic (not only during the initial phase, but persistently) and hence a varying degree of donor support is sought (e.g. Fritz et al. 2017). ...
The principle of participatory budgeting (PB), as a mechanism to foster the involvement of local communities in sub-national public financial management (PFM) systems, rarely generates strong opposition given its inherent ability to embed ‘pro-poor’, equitable, and/or inclusive approaches to the allocation of public resources. Yet, and somewhat paradoxically, the depth and/or extent of its implementation and efficacy in many countries are seen to be limited in scope or lacking in dynamism. Drawing from a fieldwork of PB practices in selected municipalities in Benin and insights from different actors in the field (elected representatives, government officials, community groups, civil society organisations, donors), we add to existing expositions on PB’s emancipatory features, in terms of the space and voice it can offer for local engagement. At the
same time, we see the need for a step change at the PFM supra-national policy and national/sub-national levels to ensure PB can be developed in a more strategic, sustainable and inclusive way - while minimizing the risks of ‘PB capture’. Our key recommendations are (i) the incorporation of PB within broader PFM frameworks and PEFA assessments at national level, and improving PEFA’s proposed subnational government indicator on public consultation, (ii) the promotion of a community of practice, by PEFA partners and the development agencies, to share good experiences and mechanisms, with the involvement of international PB networks, (iii) the need to embed a PB feedback process at national/sub-national levels to foster a cycle of learning, sustainability and inclusion within the community.
... O Orçamento Participativo (OP) é um mecanismo democrático que permite a participação direta dos cidadãos na tomada de decisões sobre a alocação de recursos públicos. Esse processo busca equilibrar a democracia representativa com a participativa, oferecendo aos cidadãos a oportunidade de influenciar a gestão financeira e orçamentária das entidades públicas (Avritzer, 2003;Brun-Martos & Lapsley, 2017 Estudos indicam que a QICF impacta diretamente a tomada de decisão e controle interno (Chen et al., 2017;Dos Santos, 2020). Uma informação contábil de qualidade melhora a gestão pública ao reduzir assimetria de informação e riscos financeiros (Bushman & Smith, 2003;Hadani et al., 2011). ...
Este estudo investiga se os municípios brasileiros que implementaram o Orçamento Participativo (OP) apresentam Qualidade da Informação Contábil e Fiscal (QICF) superior. Utilizando dados de 2019 e 2020, aplicaram-se modelos econométricos, incluindo Mínimos Quadrados Ordinários Agrupados (Pooled) e modelos de dados em painel. Os resultados indicam que municípios que adotaram o OP apresentam maior QICF, com PIB per capita e eficiência no planejamento positivamente correlacionados. O estudo preenche uma lacuna ao relacionar OP e QICF, oferecendo evidências empíricas que contribuem para a literatura sobre finanças públicas e participação cidadã. Além disso, valida modelos econométricos e amplia o debate sobre práticas participativas. No campo prático, sugere que o OP pode melhorar a transparência e a eficiência da gestão pública, reforçando sua relevância como instrumento de governança democrática. Dessa forma, a pesquisa fortalece o entendimento sobre os impactos do OP na qualidade da informação contábil e fiscal nos municípios brasileiros, contribuindo para políticas públicas mais eficazes.
... Existing work unfolds the experience of a large number of local governments that have adopted PB in the last decades (Bartocci et al., 2022). For instance, in a study of PB in UK local governments, Brun-Martos and Lapsley (2017) found that PB has the potential to further improve democratic accountability and city management through the enhancement of transparency. Ahrens and Ferry's (2015) study examines Newcastle City Council's political decision to involve grassroots groups and citizens in the budgeting process following large budget cuts, to make citizens aware of the changing financial situation of the council. ...
This report examines the first stage in the design of a new Blue and Green Infrastructure (BGI) Strategy for Colchester Borough, which is in the early phases of development. Closely connected to ‘green infrastructure’, BGI refers to an integrated approach to managing, improving and/or reintroducing natural and semi-natural green (vegetation) and blue (waterways) spaces. Whilst we are used to thinking about ‘grey’ infrastructure, BGI moves our focus to nature-based features situated in built-up areas. Types of blue-green infrastructure include green roofs and walls, parks, cemeteries, private gardens, allotments, verges, greenways, forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers, lakes, and ponds. Blue-green infrastructure is important for climate change mitigation and adaptation, promoting biodiversity, human health and wellbeing, and developing prosperous communities (Brown and Mijic, 2019; Natural England).
... Diterapkannya, prinsip transparansi membuka akses bagi masyarakat untuk memperoleh informasi tentang pengelolaan keuangan desa dari proses perencanaan, pelaksanaan, hingga pertanggungjawaban. (Brun-Martos & Lapsley, 2017). Implementasi transparansi pada organisasi sektor publik dapat meminimalisir asimetri informasi antara pengelola dan pemangku kepentingan (Laswad et al., 2005). ...
This research aims to explore the application of transparency principles in village financial management. This type of research is qualitative research. This research was conducted in Sambo Village, South Dolo District, Sigi Regency. The data used is primary data obtained through open interviews with the Village Government, Village Officials, Village Consultative Body (BPD), and the Community. The research results illustrate that the principle of transparency is starting to be applied at every stage of village financial management. At the planning stage, it is realized in the form of deliberations and billboards. The implementation stage is realized in the form of involvement of the BPD in implementing the work program and budget. Finally, at the reporting and accountability stage, the application of the principle of transparency is realized in the form of involvement of the BPD in preparing the Village APB realization and accountability report, submitting the report to the sub-district, and direct delivery to the community through the Village APB accountability meeting.
... In the two decades that followed the first implementation of PB, researchers focused on formal political logic (Cabannes, 2004;Goldfrank and Schneider, 2006;Rossmann and Shanahan, 2011). The unconventional logics mentioned above have recently inspired researchers to look at the relationship between resource allocation and citizens' preferences (Im et al., 2014), the potential of PB to enhance governmentality and transparency (Brun-Martos and Lapsley, 2017), organisational complexity as a suitable environment for the adoption of innovations such as PB (Ewens and van der Voet, 2019), the contribution of PB to better urban governance (Kuo et al., 2020), influences and effects of PB on public policies and programmes (Aleksandrov et al., 2018;Touchton and Wampler, 2020), and links between PB and public spending (Shybalkina and Bifulco, 2019;Calabrese et al., 2020). Differences between the adoption of PB and the managing of budgetary routines (Balážová et al., 2022;Murray Svidroňova et al., 2023) and the application of tools to manage PB itself Sintomer et al., 2012) have also been examined. ...
Participatory budgeting was introduced in Latin America in 1989, and within 10 years, this innovation spread all over the world. At the same time, researchers outside Latin America showed a growing interest in the issue, resulting in more diversified research. A few scholars have already tried to provide comprehensive literature reviews; however, these efforts have had a narrow focus or have appeared as embedded parts of analyses of specific issues. This article aims to (1) identify recent worldwide research trends in participatory budgeting, (2) identify the most popular issues addressed by international research and (3) suggest avenues and subfields of further research. We employed bibliometric techniques to analyse articles published in journals that were indexed and abstracted in the Web of Science database from 2001 to 2020.
... While technologically supported participation has the potential to open up governance structures and provide a venue for meaningful interaction, it also requires careful design considerations (Schulz & Newig, 2015, p. 55). A properly formed PB procedure should be based on solid axiological (ethical) grounds, including openness (Rossmann & Shanahan, 2012), democracy and transparency (Brun-Martos & Lapsley, 2017), accountability (Zawadzka-Pąk, 2021), trust and legitimacy (Swaner, 2017;Lotko, 2019), equality and representativeness (Fischer, 2012), civic engagement (He, 2011), and truth (Zawadzka-Pąk, 2022). Also dialogue, as one of the public values (Jørgensen & Bozeman, 2007, pp. ...
Ordinary citizens today support the local decision-making authorities in the domain of public spending using the instrument of participatory budgeting. The situation is of particular interest in Cracow, the second largest city in Poland in terms of the number of residents, as it stands out for its intensive and advanced use of technology. Here, participatory budgeting is a formalized, multi-stage procedure, composed of an information and education campaign, preparation and submission of projects, verification of submitted projects, submission and examination of protests, voting, implementing of projects, and informing about the concluded projects. Using participatory budgeting, the residents communicate their needs and obtain funds to satisfy them. Participatory budgeting covers on average 0.5% of the municipal budget and is decided by 5–7% of Cracow’s residents. The research covers the years 2019–2021 and takes into consideration the changes resulting from the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic. The article aims to examine the coexistence of forms of communication, supporting dialogue between residents and local officials in the participatory budgeting process. According to the adopted hypothesis, the two forms of communication used within participatory budgeting—the traditional ones and information and communication technologies (ICTs)—are not separated but are integrated into governance process and reinforce each other. The literature, legal provisions, the website on participatory budgeting, media information, social media, and evaluation reports based on qualitative and quantitative methods were analyzed. The results show that the introduction of participatory budgeting resulted in a new type of dialogue and relationship between residents and local officials, based on the traditional tools of communication and ICTs. ICTs cannot replace the traditional forms of communication but their potential should be used to a greater extent. As both forms of communication, direct and indirect (technologically supported), coexist and have their own advantages and limitations, especially under normal, non-epidemic conditions, the two should facilitate and reinforce each other.
... The theory and practice of participatory budgeting (PB) indicates concrete avenues to improve the legitimacy, transparency, accountability, and government effectiveness at local level (Sintomer et al. 2008;Wampler 2012;Brun-Martos and Lapsley 2017;Wampler et al. 2018). PB is regularly portrayed as a means to enhance democratic quality and an opportunity for mobilizing a 'countervailing power' able to neutralize the power-advantages of political actors (Fung and Wright 2003a). ...
Participatory budgeting gains momentum around the world, and increasing evidence provides mixed results about its effects. Under these circumstances, it is unclear if citizens consider it a source of empowerment and an avenue for effective decision-making in the life of their local community. We know very little about how participants in participatory budgeting perceive the collective empowerment. This article seeks to identify the factors that shape these perceptions about the empowerment potential of participatory budgeting. It focuses on the critical case of Cluj-Napoca and uses 25 semi-structured interviews conducted in October–November 2020 with three categories of participants. Our findings indicate that participants acknowledge the potential for collective empowerment and praise the limited political involvement but identify design issues and resource allocation as weakening the empowerment potential.
... Initial studies on PB have come from scholars of public administration and political science (Ebdon and Franklin, 2006;Ganuza and Baiocchi, 2012). Only recently has a growing interest among accounting scholars been registered (Bartocci et al., 2018;Brun-Martos and Lapsley, 2017;C el erier and Cuenca Botey, 2015;Zhang and Yang, 2009). Despite its potential outcomes for increasing transparency, accountability, trust, sense of community and enhancing democracy, the ambiguities and limitations of PB have been highlighted by a few accounting studies (e.g. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explain how public sector accounting has changed and is changing due to public governance development.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper conducts a traditional literature review based on selected studies in the fields of accounting, public administration and management. The aim of the review is to explain how diverse forms of public governance influence the fate of public sector accounting, including accountability, performance measurement, budgeting and reporting practices.
Findings
Public governance is developing into more inclusive but also complex forms, resulting in network, collaborative and digital governance. Consequently, the focus and practices of public sector accounting have changed, as reflected in new types of accountability, performance measurement, budgeting and reporting practices.
Research limitations/implications
Drawing upon literature from different fields enables a deeper understanding of the changes in public sector accounting. Nevertheless, the intention is not to execute a systematic literature review but to provide an overview and resolve the scattered body of knowledge generated by previous contributions. The areas of risk management and auditing were not included and deserve further attention.
Originality/value
This paper discusses the need to continually redefine and reassess public sector accounting practices, by recognising the interdependencies between different actors, citizens and digital technologies.
... Throughout the interviews conducted in this study, the vendors expressed the desire to provide some suggestions that could enrich the market and the brand, among which features a suggestion for a public meeting once a month. The community felt the openness of the brand managers in seeking other opinions related to some issues but did not feel that their opinions resulted in actual implementations, but only in a lack of transparency (Brun-Martos and Lapsley, 2017). ...
Purpose
This study aims to explore the role of local community in tourism co-creation. Despite the importance of internal stakeholders, there is a dearth of research on the process of place branding co-creation with the local community, considering their interconnections and influencing relationships.
Design/methodology/approach
An old and picturesque local market under a rebranding process was used as a case study. The research involved 10 interviews with market vendors to understand their views regarding place identity, their involvement in brand co-creation, their expectations about the process and the perceived results of such co-creation. Public information was also collected as secondary data to illustrate the rebranding process.
Findings
The vendor community had limited involvement in the market rebranding and felt they should have been more widely involved in the decisions as a group rather than individually. However, their satisfaction with the results of the rebranding led to the continuity of the sense of place and to the proud adoption of the new brand.
Practical implications
This study proposes greater integration of local communities as important internal stakeholders of place branding in addition to residents and suggests group meetings to involve the local community in the co-creation process.
Originality/value
This paper explores the context of a vendor community in a local market. This context has deserved little attention in the tourism literature. This study reflects the importance of local community to co-create place brands from a group perspective, taking into consideration. their roles, rights, responsibilities and relationships.
... The general trend of seeking methods to increase the effectiveness and transparency of local governments in meeting the local needs of inhabitants was of great importance for the development of PB [11][12][13]. The efforts were made to introduce administrative procedures in which the inhabitants decide on the local public investments and land development methods and in which the democratic authorities support and implement these arrangements on a yearly basis [14][15][16]. PB allows local communities to report investment needs regarding public resources, participate in the preparation of projects, and then vote on which tasks are to be implemented. The projects that received the most votes are financed by the municipality within the nearest, usually annual, budget [17]. ...
Participatory Budgeting (PB) is considered a human-centered method of public resource management and investment planning, which strongly reflects the needs of the inhabitants of the municipality. The aim of this article is to assess the structure of the inhabitants’ needs expressed in the PB procedures in Częstochowa, Poland and their relation to the social and demographic characteristics of the city districts. The standard methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis were used (Pearson correlation coefficient and content analysis of the municipal documents), based on the data about: (1) the projects implemented in Częstochowa PB in the years 2015–2019; (2) the age structures and population density in the districts; and (3) qualitative data on district development characteristics. Based on the authors’ typology of projects, it was found that the most popular tasks were related to the comfort and safety of mobility and recreational facilities used for spending free time in public spaces. A relatively lower level of activity of the citizens was found when expressing their needs in central, densely populated districts with a high share of people aged over 65, and a relatively higher level of activity was found in the districts with a high proportion of people aged 0–18 and with lower population density. In the densely populated central districts, relatively high interest in the development of green areas was observed, while in the less populated developing peripheral districts, the preferred infrastructure was related to mobility. These correlations can be logically explained by the conditions related to the development processes of individual districts. The authors conclude that PB can be an important mechanism in determining local needs for the development of public spaces; however, it rewards the needs of the most active social groups.
... There, a noticeable innovation-the management executive plan-has been developed since 1995. In this sense, PB can reveal significant results to public affairs governance (Bell & Hindmoor, 2009) with regard to the democracy-governmentality-transparency triangulation (Brun-Martos & Lapsley, 2017). This shall be attributed to the fact that by increasing the level of citizens' participation toward direct democracy and budget transparency, local administrations are supposed to become more prone to render better accounting performance and decreased corruption. ...
On the wave of the success of the participatory budgeting (PB) implemented in Porto Alegre, Brazil, a number of administrations around the world jumpstarted new forms of nonfinancial balance reporting. This trend was supported by an increasing consensus from the international community. PB aims to enhance mutual trust between the different social stakeholders and foster public administrations transparency. For this reason, PB is recognized as an effective tool for facilitating good governance, sustainability, and development. Previous field research does not highlight local voting and corruption figures. To shed light on these variables throughout a case study, this article makes use of original mixed methods techniques to analyze the PB experience of a municipality in Southern Italy. The combination of data regarding census, voting shares, and projects' features is a methodological innovation, used here for the first time. Fieldwork has been conducted to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. These data were employed along with official demographics statistics to inspect existing public management and development dynamics. Four distinct data sources, intersecting population and voting data through the PB tool were examined. After mainstreaming PB, referring to the world's benchmark of Porto Alegre, this article investigates the good practice of Casamarciano, Campania. Evidence shows compelling features from the local experience and encouraging involvement of the community, rating the poll participation even greater than Porto Alegre engagement. The qualitative data pinpoints the local administration's management choices—noteworthy, the town's PB model—and the innovation behind the public management strategies. These outcomes may help to better understand PB dynamics, yielding improved local development and sustainability indications for public affairs governance.
... As a result of attending neighbourhood assemblies and meetings mediated and led by community facilitators, participants learn some lessons which transform inhabitants into "citizens", as they learn how institutions work, what the place they live in is like, what inequalities exist and, above all, how public resources are managed (Allegretti, García-Leiva and Paño, 2011;Wampler, 2007). There is evidence that citizens perceive high levels of transparency not only when they have access to budget information, but also when they understand it and experience shared meanings with other participants during these budget processes (Brun-Martos and Lapsley, 2017). Thus, participatory budgeting is not only a process of deliberation and decision-making, but also a space for informal education that promotes important learning experiences about citizenship and democracy (Lerner and Schugurensky, 2007). ...
Los trabajos que asocian presupuestos participativos e ingresos fiscales son escasos siendo, además, inexistentes los que tratan de encontrar una relación de causalidad potencial entre participar en este tipo de procesos e incrementar el cumplimiento tributario de los individuos. Por ello, con el presente trabajo se pretende dar un pequeño paso hacia adelante aportando evidencia empírica a este respecto. Partiendo de 530 cuestionarios de un municipio que cuenta con una determinada trayectoria participativa, y mediante un sistema de ecuaciones estructurales, se demuestra cómo el hecho de participar activamente en un proceso de presupuestos participativos podría dar lugar a una mayor conciencia fiscal.
... It is usually praised for its potential to cure social injustices, to enforce democratization, and to invest more effectively the local finances [23,24]. Participatory budgeting increases the legitimacy and transparency of decision makers and provides the citizens with a tool through which they can promote their ideas [25][26][27][28][29][30]. In addition, earlier research has demonstrated the potential of participatory budgeting. ...
In contemporary times, a large number of ecology projects are put on the public agenda through participatory budgeting. There is variation in the support they receive from citizens, but until now we have not known what drives this support. This article aims to identify the factors that could determine the support for ecology projects in participatory budgeting. It includes all 36 projects on ecology, which passed the technical eligibility check, submitted to the participatory budgeting in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) between 2017 and 2019. We use quantitative analysis to test the extent to which five project characteristics have an effect on the public support for the ecology projects: the requested budget, the type of project, the number of arguments, the use of jargon, and images and videos in addition to text descriptions. The results show that citizens take the environmental matters seriously and do not vote for schematic projects that are limited in scope and which have limited contribution to the general welfare.
... Even explicit efforts to engage citizens with accounting and thus improve government accountability have not been particularly successful. The most prominent examples have been open government initiatives, participatory budgeting, and popular reporting (e.g., Barbera, Sicilia, & Steccolini, 2016;Biondi & Bracci, 2018;Brun-Martos & Lapsley, 2017;Safarov et al., 2017;Worthy, 2015;Yusuf, Jordan, Neill, & Hackbart, 2013). ...
Abstract: The purpose of the paper is to provide theoretical and empirical insights into NGO accountability in the context of public sector accounting. We present a case study of two advocacy Italian NGOs which act as informational surrogates in the accountability relationship between local governments and the civic public. We extend the concept of surrogate accountability by integrating accounting education as one of its features. Alongside making data accessible, NGOs in our case explain accounting terms and organise educational events. By doing so, they aim to “repair” the weak information link in the accountability mechanism of local governments.
... It also allows citizens to identify, discuss, promote and prioritise public spending projects, as they have a significant influence on real decisions about how to spend money [3,4]. The adoption of the participatory budget, which is neither a concept with formal and legal definition nor an obligation for local government authorities, is an increasingly common practise [5,6]. In the years 2005-2012, experiments with participatory budgeting in Europe increased from 55 to over 1 300, involving more than 8 million European Union citizens. ...
In recent years, participatory budgets are one of the most dynamically developing institutions of social participation. The implementation of the participatory budget in local government units is an endeavor to increase the degree of involvement of the inhabitants of a given community to co-decide on spending budget funds. Implementation of a participatory budget requires a well-constructed procedure, which will engage the highest possible number of residents and lead to a more rational and efficient utilisation of budget resources of local government units. We analysed the problems of the implementations of participatory budgets in the Polish communes of Jaworze, Cieszyn, Kęty and Bielsko-Biała (South of Poland) and discussed challenges, which accompanied this process. We hypothesised that the complicated and ambiguous participatory budget procedure is the reason for a low efficiency of spending funds under participatory budgets in the analysed communes. The analysis was based on the literature review of amendments to Polish legislation that define the notion of the participatory budget and lay foundations for its functioning. We compared various constituents of the procedure applied in the examined communes, used in the process of the participatory budget implementation. Research results indicated that the participatory budget model should be changed to optimise expenditure of local funds, increase local community satisfaction and accelerate the development of the commune. The results may be used to assess the effectiveness of the spending of funds under the participatory budget in other municipalities of the region.
... It is highly important as the smart city actions' planning (i.e., the selection and prioritization of them) reflects not only ambitions of some politicians (who usually focus on impressive actions, supporting their 'political marketing', but not on substantial ones that are more beneficial for the society), or the promotion plans of ICT firms (who usually focus on promoting specific products according to their marketing priorities); it is imperative that citizens' relevant perceptions, needs and preferences, as well as knowledge and ideas, should also be taken into account. This is in line with the more general trend of citizens' participation in government planning, policy making and even budgeting, in order to make them more socially rooted and responsive to citizens' problems, needs and values, and also exploit the 'wisdom of the crowd' (citizens' knowledge and ideas), and even co-create value with citizens, advancing toward a more open, participative, collaborative and smart government (Allen et al., 2020;Brun-Martos & Lapsley, 2017;Ferro, Loukis, Charalabidis, & Osella, 2013;Loukis, Charalabidis, & Androutsopoulou, 2017;Noveck, 2015;Webster & Leleux, 2018); for this purpose government agencies use a variety of techniques, both quantitative (mainly questionnaire-based surveys) and qualitative (such as focus groups-citizen panels, urban/living labs, consultation spaces, social media). However, though some methodologies have been developed concerning citizens' participation in individual smart city actions and co-production of public value through cooperation between citizens and municipal authorities (Allen et al., 2020;Castelnovo et al., 2016;Webster & Leleux, 2018), there is a lack of methodologies for citizens' participation in the higher level planning of smart city actions: for the participatory planning of smart cities interventions (Castelnovo et al., 2016;Dameri, 2017). ...
We analyze and compare 11 city cases in three continents to find out differences and commonalities in the green dimension in smart city plans globally: Shanghai (China), four cities in Japan, Iskandar (Malaysia), New York (United States), and Amsterdam, Málaga, Santander, Tarragona (Europe). The aims of the work has been to test whether there is an environmental ethic embedded in long-term strategic commitments in these local contexts, how different environmental values are, and what lines of research might be interesting to tackle from scientific perspectives in future works where the green dimension is addressed in smart city plans. We find that plan design is very different in the search of a model of a smart city in the 11 cases studied. As we expect choices in plan design to have a long-term impact in terms of environmental outcomes and further resilience, both locally and globally, the environmental ethics attached to the local plans, or the lack thereof, we argue have a strong impact.
... It is highly important as the smart city actions' planning (i.e., the selection and prioritization of them) reflects not only ambitions of some politicians (who usually focus on impressive actions, supporting their 'political marketing', but not on substantial ones that are more beneficial for the society), or the promotion plans of ICT firms (who usually focus on promoting specific products according to their marketing priorities); it is imperative that citizens' relevant perceptions, needs and preferences, as well as knowledge and ideas, should also be taken into account. This is in line with the more general trend of citizens' participation in government planning, policy making and even budgeting, in order to make them more socially rooted and responsive to citizens' problems, needs and values, and also exploit the 'wisdom of the crowd' (citizens' knowledge and ideas), and even co-create value with citizens, advancing toward a more open, participative, collaborative and smart government (Allen et al., 2020;Brun-Martos & Lapsley, 2017;Ferro, Loukis, Charalabidis, & Osella, 2013;Loukis, Charalabidis, & Androutsopoulou, 2017;Noveck, 2015;Webster & Leleux, 2018); for this purpose government agencies use a variety of techniques, both quantitative (mainly questionnaire-based surveys) and qualitative (such as focus groups-citizen panels, urban/living labs, consultation spaces, social media). However, though some methodologies have been developed concerning citizens' participation in individual smart city actions and co-production of public value through cooperation between citizens and municipal authorities (Allen et al., 2020;Castelnovo et al., 2016;Webster & Leleux, 2018), there is a lack of methodologies for citizens' participation in the higher level planning of smart city actions: for the participatory planning of smart cities interventions (Castelnovo et al., 2016;Dameri, 2017). ...
This chapter provides an overview of the government characteristics relevant to smart urban governance. A systematic literature review was conducted and merged with the existing e-government literature on critical success factors for adopting IT in the public sector. Identifying the government characteristics of smart governance sheds light on key organizational attributes that can pave the way for the transition from government to smart urban governance. The qualitative analysis of 96 articles on the governance of smart cities identified three main characteristics. The first is local government governance, related to the nature of the relationship among individuals, interest groups, institutions, and government. The second is government assets, which we believe are useful for providing support to smart urban governance in the form of funding, technology, and human capital. The third includes local government management, involving elements of strategy and the positioning of local public administration. Compared to literature in e-government, the governmental characteristics are quite similar, however, the focus of e-government is to transform the organization internally, while in smart urban governance literature, the focus is to transform both internally and externally. Future research should focus on understanding how governments could develop organizational capabilities to achieve internal and external transformation.
... It is highly important the smart city actions' planning (i.e. the selection and prioritization of them) reflects not only ambitions of some politicians (who usually focus on impressive actions, supporting their 'political marketing', but not on substantial ones that are more beneficial for the society), or the promotion plans of ICT firms (who usually focus on promoting specific products according to their marketing priorities); it is imperative that citizens' relevant perceptions, needs and preferences, as well as knowledge and ideas, should also be taken into account. This is in line with the more general trend of citizens' participation in government planning, policy making and even budgeting, in order to make them more socially rooted and responsive to citizens' problems, needs and values, and also exploit the 'wisdom of the crowd' (citizens' knowledge and ideas), and even co-create value with citizens, advancing towards a more open, participative, collaborative and smart government (Ferro et al., 2013;Brun-Martos and Lapsley;Noveck, 2015;Loukis et al., 2017;Webster and Leleux, 2018;Allen et al., 2019); for this purpose government agencies use a variety of techniques, both quantitative (mainly questionnaire-based surveys) and qualitative (such as focus groups -citizen panels, urban/living labs, consultation spaces, social media). However, though some methodologies have been developed concerning citizens' participation in individual smart city actions and co-production of public value through cooperation between citizens and municipal authorities (Castelnovo et al., 2016;Webster and Leleux, 2018;Allen et al., 2019), there is a lack of methodologies for citizens' participation in the higher level planning of smart city actions: for the participatory planning of smart cities interventions (Castelnovo et al., 2016;Dameri, 2017). ...
The development of smart cities is a highly difficult undertaking, which requires participation and cooperation of several stakeholders, both in its planning, due to the multiplicity of possible smart city interventions available as options, and also in its implementation, due to its high complexity. Especially for planning (selecting and prioritizing) specific smart city actions to be implemented it is necessary to combine knowledge: (1) on one hand from the university and the industry, concerning the possible smart city interventions, the capabilities they can offer in general, as well their difficulties and challenges; (2) and on the other hand from the municipalities and the citizens, concerning the ‘real-life’ benefits and value that these possible interventions can actually provide, and their potential for addressing specific challenges, problems and needs of modern cities. However, there is a lack of sound methodologies for this required participatory planning of smart city interventions. This chapter contributes to filling this gap, by presenting a methodology for this purpose. It is based on a detailed taxonomy of possible smart city actions, which we have developed through a review of relevant literature, representing knowledge that has been developed in this area by the university and the industry, who can be viewed as the smart city actions’ supply side. This taxonomy is used for collecting assessment data from municipalities as well as citizens concerning these possible smart city actions, which incorporate relevant knowledge and preferences of municipalities and citizens, who can be viewed as the smart city actions’ demand side). Our methodology includes three layers of processing the above municipalities’ and citizens’ assessment data, which reveal: (a) the perceptions and priorities of these two important stakeholders concerning smart city actions (layer I–II respectively); and (b) points of convergence as well as points of divergence between them (layer III). These enable a rational participatory planning of smart city interventions. Our methodology has been applied in the context of Greece: assessment data concerning the above possible smart city actions have been collected from 144 Greek municipalities and 500 citizens, and their processing has led to interesting conclusions, which can be quite useful for planning the next steps of smart cities’ development in Greece.
... The findings of previous studies suggest that the interest among politicians to provide opportunities of participation for their citizens is not encouraging (Ivaldi et al., 2017;Kamlage & Nanz, 2017). On the other hand, recent developments show that there is a growing trend of introducing alternative ways to attract citizens' participation in public administration (Brun-Martos & Lapsley, 2017). For instance, e-participation and related plans to design smart cities are meant to mitigate and remedy urban challenges and problems in a sustainable way through innovation (Alawadhi et al., 2012;Caragliu & Del Bo, 2019;Rodríguez-Bolívar et al., 2018). ...
Citizens' demand for engagement and participation in the public administration is one area of concern for research and practice. Most recently, the essential role of e-participation tools in enabling the provision of information fostering citizen participation is recognised. The CONSUL application, used by 100 institutions, is the most widespread ICT tool in the world used to enable the active participation. Through systematic combining approach, based on an abductive process, the study analyses the case of Madrid (Spain) with the aim of contributing to the theory of the participatory platform on participation, accountability, and transparency. Even though overall citizen participation is still far away, the results of the study revealed focus areas with implication for research and practice. The study demonstrates that socio-demographic variables and support given by accessible financial and non-financial information must underpin future developments in e-participation and participatory governance.
Today's modern cities have many vital problems. Participatory budgeting (PB) plays an important role in solving these problems by ensuring the effective development of democracy. Participatory budgeting, which incorporates democratic elements such as ensuring citizen participation in budget decision-making, increasing accountability and transparency, attempts to solve the problems of the city by increasing communication between citizens and representatives at the local level and creating an organised society. In this way, it can be used as a tool to promote different types of sustainability in the political, economic and social spheres, from creating an organised society that will enable segments of the city with limited opportunities to become effective in the budget process, to social justice, from environmental problems to providing basic health services, clean water and wastewater systems, schools and kindergartens and living spaces for the poor, from the provision of better quality public services to the efficient use of resources due to accurately identified public services, and from corruption, bribery and nepotism to the solution of administrative failures. This study aims to present the concept, emergence, functioning and outcomes of participatory budgeting.
Participatory Budgets are intrinsically related to democracy and participation. These processes began in the late eighties in Brazil. This article introduces the issue of Participatory Budgets in schools, presenting the practical case of the municipality of Cascais, which differs from the others because it is articulated with the Cascais Participatory Budget (PB). In this way, this project in schools allows involved young people to simultaneously present proposals to the school (OPJ) and the community. This only happens in the municipality of Cascais, and it appears that several projects presented within the scope of the OPJ, in the community aspect, were winners within the scope of the Cascais PB. In terms of methodology, surveys were used to understand whether participation in this process gives the students involved a greater sense of democracy and participation.
In particular, strategies and activities of major economies regarding budget transparency can affect global economy. Therefore, analysis of budget transparency capabilities of large economies is of great importance. In this context, budget transparency performances of G7 countries, which have the world's largest economies, were measured in research with data of Open Budget Index (OBI) reports for years 2017, 2019 and 2021, and MEREC-based PIV multi-criteria decision method (MCDM). According to findings, it was observed that the most important year in terms of budget transparency of countries within
scope of MEREC method was 2019. Secondly, with MEREC-based PIV method, budget transparency
performances of countries were listed as Italy, England, France, Germany, USA, Japan and Canada. In addition, it has been observed that budget transparency performance of Japan and Canada is lower and lower than average budget transparency performance value compared to other countries. According to these results, it was evaluated that especially Japan and Canada should increase their budget transparency performances to contribute more to global economy. Thirdly, according to sensitivity and correlation analyzes in terms of method, it was concluded that budget transparency performances of countries can be measured according to t MEREC-based PIV method within scope of OBI
Research on PB in CEE has been rather fragmented and has focused on the diffusion of PB, and sometimes on determinative factors inside the countries. Some comparative studies exist but address primarily initial steps of PB. This paper presents the outcomes of a research that focused on the design of participatory budgeting in the Visegrad countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia). The main method is a secondary comparative analysis of existing literature and information on the subject. The findings are based on recently published country studies and other available information related to the national context in the countries. We use the country studies as input for a multi‐case study analysis (Zongozzi & Wessels, 2016) to make comparisons and, if possible, generalize some of the findings, but also to point out specifics determined by the context in which PB is being implemented and practiced. As the subsidiary method we used expert evaluation. To obtain extra information we consulted experts in all selected countries during July and August 2022. Analyzing PB processes in these countries showed similar features and that, on the whole, PB processes still belong to the group o the Porto Alegre model adapted for Europe as concluded in the literature published almost a decade ago. But this is only valid at a more abstract level of PB designs. Looking at PB processes in practice, it is seen in the V4 region that the actual practices vary over municipalities, even within one and the same country.
This paper builds on an intensive and unique survey of all Czech municipalities (n = 6,258) regarding the geoparticipatory spatial tools used in the decision-making processes of local administrations and the Index of Geoparticipation derived from the dataset. Furthermore, we have collected and analysed data regarding 238 participatory budgeting events in the Czech Republic from the years 2012-2020. This paper is divided into two sections. We investigate the relationships among the municipalities' membership in the Healthy Cities of the Czech Republic network (HCCZ), as well as the municipalities' levels of indebtedness and their performances in the Index of Geoparticipation and their usage of participatory budgeting. Our primary theory states that membership in HCCZ and higher values in the Index of Geoparticipation will support the use of participatory budgeting, while indebtedness will discourage municipalities from implementing participatory budgeting. We deepen the knowledge of participatory budgeting in the Czech Republic, while focusing on the qualitative analysis of projects that have been approved and implemented through the tool of participatory budgeting at the municipal level. Additionally, we examine what type of projects the funds are allocated to and how the characteristics of these projects change over time. ARTICLE HISTORY
There is a growing body of research in the democratization of science, participatory governance, and citizen science within the extant Science and Technology Studies (STS) literature. The COVID-19 pandemic is a challenge not only in the medical sense but also for public policy due to limited data availability and deliberation process in policy making. This study focuses on the role of data activists in citizen-centered public policy making during the COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey. We examine two cases to argue that there was a data vacuum and data activists got extremely creative with the available data to satisfy the public’s hunger for information and to facilitate the deliberation process through Twitter. In each case, data activists challenged the official discourse and provided their data analysis in a clear and concise manner that could be understood by the public easily. Twitter’s growing importance in the democratization of science became obvious, as it was the medium where most interaction happened.
The book is the result of joint work of researchers from leading universities in St. Petersburg and is devoted to one of the most pressing problems of modern Russia - state reforms.
Without claiming to cover the entire research field, the authors focused their attention on determining the influence of the institutional environment on achieving the goals set by the reformers. Along with modern reforms - transport, municipal solid waste management, urban self-government, are analyzed that have already become classic in Russia - administrative, land and judicial. In addition to domestic experience, the successful experience of reforms abroad is also considered.
The publication is intended for researchers dealing with issues of modern public administration, graduate students and students of higher educational institutions, as well as for those who want to broaden their horizons and deepen their understanding of the reform processes taking place in the Russian Federation.
Research on how public service management copes in difficult times is needed. This paper theorizes how collective action frames are created to nurture new practices in challenging contexts. The case concerns an Irish local authority, the 2008 financial crash and subsequent severe austerity. We draw on institutional work to make sense of collective action created for reform, actors’ reflexivity of their situated logics, and institutional embeddedness. This paper contributes by: (1) adding to knowledge of how public service management reform is implemented in difficult times, and (2) combining institutional work with framing concepts to understand how such reform processes unfold.
This chapter outlines findings of the research that focused on how ICT are used in municipal PB in Czechia. As such it connects participatory budgeting and e-participation. We looked at web pages dedicated to PB of all 66 municipalities that implemented PB in 2020 (using the same research protocol, we mapped situation either on official web pages of the municipalities or on their special web pages dedicated to PB). We found that ICT were clearly supporting PB processes in Czech municipalities and the analysis highlighted several interesting features of ICT in municipal PB in the country. Municipalities not only use the web pages for informing about PB; most of them also use online tools for voting. On the other hand, public hearings are organized online only scarcely.
La présente étude évalue le rôle d’une institution démocratique – le budget participatif – dans l’amélioration de l’efficacité du gouvernement. Les institutions participatives visent à améliorer la gouvernance, le partage de l’information et la réactivité des agents politiques vis-à-vis des citoyens, à des fins d’imputabilité et d’efficience budgétaires. En nous appuyant sur une base de données de 221 gouvernements municipaux en Corée du Sud autour d’une période d’adoption obligatoire du budget participatif, nous constatons que l’adoption des budgets participatifs est suivie d’une amélioration de plusieurs dimensions de l’efficacité du gouvernement. En particulier, les gouvernements municipaux connaissent des améliorations statistiquement significatives de leur viabilité budgétaire et de leur efficacité administrative. Dans une analyse complémentaire, nous constatons que les améliorations de l’efficacité sont plus prononcées en présence d’un leadership fort de la part des maires. Les résultats globaux suggèrent que les programmes de budgétisation participative contribuent à la santé budgétaire et à l’efficacité administrative, au-delà de leur rôle dans la garantie de la démocratie budgétaire. Remarques à l’intention des praticiens L’étude actuelle suggère que les systèmes de budget participatif contribuent non seulement à la qualité de la démocratie (comme l’ont constaté des études antérieures), mais améliorent également l’efficacité et l’imputabilité budgétaires en servant de mécanisme de gouvernance ascendante. Nous démontrons que l’introduction de programmes de budgétisation participative est suivie d’améliorations statistiquement significatives de la viabilité budgétaire et de l’efficacité administrative. Les résultats indiquent également que l’effet d’amélioration de l’efficacité diffère selon les municipalités, en fonction de leur environnement politique. Dans l’ensemble, cette étude fournit un argument fort en faveur du système de budgétisation participative en confirmant empiriquement son effet d’amélioration de l’efficacité.
Worldwide, open data initiatives aim at making information publicly available and transparent. Increasingly, local governments (LGs) are publishing financial statements in order to inform citizens, in their function as both service recipients and resource providers, about the LGs’ financial situation. However, it remains questionable as to whether LG financial statements are appropriate mechanisms of public accountability: it is debated, on the one hand, whether citizens are interested in accounting information, and on the other hand, if they are able to understand the information presented in financial statements. This study is the first of its kind applying the think aloud method to analyze citizens’ perceptions of LGs’ financial statements in a sample of 30 German citizens with diverse socio-demographic characteristics. The paper explores citizens’ general interest in accounting information and their ability to extract basic financial information from these statements so that increased transparency can be assumed. This explorative study reveals that although citizens demand transparency and financial information, they find it challenging to understand financial statements. Citizens seem to be overwhelmed by the information and call for delegation of the tasks or simplified reporting formats.
Among the success factors of participatory budgeting (PB), Barbera et al. (2016b) discuss responsiveness, in terms of “continuous attention to citizens’ needs” and the capacity to address collective needs. To date, there are diverse PB cases, that follow a managerial, more technocratic (less focused on citizens) logic, whereas others target radical democratic change or good governance improvement (Bartocci et al. 2019; Cabannes and Lipietz 2018). This paper aims to identify contingency factors, such as national, local and individual factors that influence the design of PB. Following the call for more comparative studies (Bartocci et al. 2022), needs of citizens in 17 municipalities in six European countries along the Baltic Sea region from originally 20,000 persons are analysed via a joint questionnaire. Relying on non-parametric tests, this analysis aims to identify links between citizens’ satisfaction, knowledge and expectations of their own involvement in the PB design and how it should be used from their perspective. The contribution of the paper is a critical rethinking of the respective stages and content of the PB creation process from the citizens’ point of view by highlighting which contingency factors drive citizens’ views on PB design stages and drawing managerial implications.
Keywords: participatory budgeting; citizen participation; needs’ analysis; PB design; citizen satisfaction
Disclaimer: The data were collected jointly by all partners of the Interreg BSR EmPaci project team. The project is funded by the European Union (European Regional Development Fund) with financial support from the Russian Federation.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore elites' prevalence in the process of participatory budgeting (PB) in a Ukrainian municipality.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on the elite control and capture literature to examine the occurrence of unintended consequences resulting from the process of PB. Data for this case study are derived from document analysis and semi-structured interviews.
Findings
This study demonstrates how the involvement of a non-governmental organisation (NGO) promoted PB in a Ukrainian municipality. In the process of orienting politicians and administrators to PB, its normative benefits tend to be prioritised, whilst very little attention has been paid to making inhabitants aware of their role in the process of participatory decision-making. Although PB is intended to propagate good governance and accountability, it has in fact turned out to be a means of promoting corruption and furthering the personal interests of rent-seeking actors.
Practical implications
The paper demonstrates how elites can capture and control PB in the context of emerging economies, thereby preventing its propagated benefits of ensuring equality, justice and emancipation in local communities from being realised.
Originality/value
Exploring PB in Ukraine, the authors urge that caution should be exercised with regard to the wholesale adoption of externally/NGO-propagated ideas. Each emerging economy context is distinct, and an appreciation of this uniqueness is key to the success of PB reforms in different countries.
This chapter seeks to present a general overview of participatory budgeting in the Czech Republic. As far as we know, there is no publicly accessible database in our country which provides basic information about this topic. That is why we decided to create such a database of our own. The chapter provides quantitative statistics and information derived from the database. Furthermore, we search for the relationship between the municipal population and the money allocated to the participatory budgeting event. We also explore the relationships between the political parties (including political movements) and the money allocated to the participatory budgeting event.KeywordsParticipatory budgetingMunicipalitiesCitizens in decision-makingPublic finances
Participatory Budgeting (PB) is not Mittel für die Stadtwohner, but does not have direct access to them, as well as the Mittel's accessibility only, as well as any other postage. Specifically, it focuses on the scale, dynamics, and limitations of PB in all Polynesian cities with provincial capital status. First, literature on PB was synthesized. Second, documentary research has been mobilized to provide source material with empirically-based insights to promote understanding of PB practice in the chosen context. The results show great differences in financial terms, group and results of PB in Poland. There are no issues with Studying and Sachzwänge auf Entwicklung von PB can be found below: (1) Refer to the Rechtsgrundlage for PB in the Polish Rechtssystem; (2) Assessment of the transparency of the project selection process, including the lack of defining the assessment criteria object; and (3) too much influence from the authorities on the selection of the projects to be implemented. There are no more pictures of this book on the improvement of the functioning of the PB in Poland outlined.
We use a panel of Korean municipalities to examine the impact of participatory budgeting on local government expenditures. We find that participatory budgeting systematically alters the pattern of local spending. Municipalities using participatory budgeting reallocate resources toward more immediate and visible expenditures and away from long-term development expenditure. We also find evidence that participatory budgeting affects the municipal budget by a greater amount than the expenditures directly allocated through participatory budgeting. Our findings indicate that participatory budgeting leads to the reallocation of local public spending by increasing information flows between policymakers and service users.
As part of the “new public participation movement,” participatory budgeting is a systematic attempt to ameliorate institutionalized inequality, inequity, and injustice by enhancing how democracy works and expanding who participates genuinely. This commitment to more democratic, inclusive decision-making is important for empowering communities who have been subject to marginalization and exploitation. However, participatory budgeting must be implemented as community-based work if local participation in shaping government policies, programming, and funding priorities is to be considered a legitimate and trusted process. This article examines participation within the framework of community-based philosophy and epistemology. Guidelines are provided for how participatory budgeting facilitators should approach communities with a genuine sense of humility and openness. This dynamic requires facilitators to form collaborative, dialogical relationships with communities and allows local knowledge to inform and drive the budgeting process.
This paper explores the governmental rationales underlying China’s recent decision to adopt accrual accounting in its public sector. It aims to illustrate an extended role of accrual accounting in facilitating a relationship between the state and its market. Whilst neoliberal ideas of efficiency are seen to weaken state institutions under the logic of the market - with the widespread adoption of accrual accounting in public sectors being a model case, such rationalities have, on the contrary, been deployed to refine an understanding of a stronger state in China. Rather than being a mere effect of ideological reception around the idea of market efficiency, accrual accounting methods have been used to support particular possibilities for statecraft and government in China. Here, accounting offers a mechanism through which the Chinese state can strengthen governing efficiency, overcoming its major institutional weakness: the enduring conflict between political centralisation and effective local-level governance. Attesting to the diverse rather than monolithic conditions and processes of global NPM accounting reform, this paper highlights the power of accounting in facilitating the state’s different enactment of neoliberal ideas and governmental technologies, as shown in both China and beyond.
Purpose
This study aims to examine the role of organisational democracy (OD) in facilitating the knowledge sharing (KS) process within companies, thus considering the effect of different OD principles.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors used data collected through a questionnaire on a sample of 254 employees at private universities and colleges to test the relationship between OD and KS. Data were analysed using the structural equation modelling technique.
Findings
Overall, OD has a direct and significant effect on facilitating KS in organisations. Also, the results showed that there are different degrees and intensities among the individual principles (sub-concepts) of OD and KS.
Practical implications
The findings highlight the important role of democracy in an organisation to enhance the organisational climate and employees’ behaviours, thus leading to higher KS outcomes. Also, results, provide an opportunity for managers to consider enhancing democracy in an organisation for improving internal collaboration effectiveness in KS.
Originality/value
This paper sheds light and adds new knowledge to embryonic studies that are directed towards the integration of democracy within the main concept of knowledge management (KM). This emphasises the need to use and stimulate OD and its principles for improving the effectiveness of KM practices with specific attention to KS.
This paper investigates the ways in which dissensus has influenced governmentality during a longitudinal process of competitive tendering of public services. Data are from a field study conducted in the field of public care for the elderly from 2007 to 2015 in Finland. Public elderly care in Finland is under the responsibility of each municipality. Municipalities have local autonomy; including municipal taxation right. In addition to municipal tax revenues, the central government finances each municipality on a per capita basis annually. Every municipality is run by democratically elected local politicians. The elected politicians have the power to appoint leading public managers in charge of each public service sector. Findings showed that political dissensus arose from a lack of appropriate policies of governing for performance during a new and international competitive tendering process. Managerial dissensus arose from a low-level professional experience and a lack of appropriate technologies to deal with highly advanced profit-making companies competing for entry and expansion into a prestigious public elderly care market. In consequence, costs of outsourced services continued to increase. As time passed, however, political and managerial dissensus improved the process of governing for performance; key decision-makers took reactive measures to limit procurement risks in future competitive tendering processes. The potential contribution is to show the relevance of dissensus when it motivates public managers and political decision-makers to improve specific programs, techniques, and strategies used to manage public services
The current study evaluates the role of a democratic institution—participatory budgeting—in improving government efficiency. Participatory institutions aim to enhance governance, information sharing, and the responsiveness of political agents to citizens, leading to fiscal accountability and efficiency. Drawing from a database of 221 municipal governments in South Korea around a mandatory participatory budgeting adoption period, we find that participatory budgeting adoptions are followed by improvement in multiple dimensions of government efficiency. In particular, municipal governments experience statistically significant improvements in their fiscal sustainability and administrative efficiency. In additional analysis, we find that the efficiency improvements are more pronounced in the presence of strong mayoral leadership. Overall findings suggest that participatory budgeting programs contribute to fiscal health and administrative efficiency, above and beyond their role in securing fiscal democracy.
Points for practitioners
The current study suggests that participatory budget systems not only contribute to quality in democracy (as prior studies have found), but also improve fiscal efficiency and accountability by serving as a bottom-up governance mechanism. We document that introductions of participatory budgeting programs are followed by statistically significant improvements in fiscal sustainability and administrative efficiency. The results also indicate that the efficiency-improvement effect differs across municipalities, depending on their political environments. Overall, this study provides a strong argument for the participatory budgeting system by empirically supporting its efficiency-improvement effect.
Purpose
– This paper aims at offering a contribution which addresses one particular issue – heritage assets – as an exemplar of the challenges facing accounting practices in achieving transparency in government and public services.
Design/methodology/approach
– After having identified three levels of transparency, a documentary analysis is used as the primary research method.
Findings
– The investigation carried out reveals that the first level, or minimal level, of transparency is unlikely to be achieved for public organizations with heritage assets, mainly due to deep seated, pernicious problems of asset recognition and valuation.
Originality/value
– This paper contributes to the debate on what constitutes “good public governance” by examining whether accounting can foster or enhance “good governance” through the lens of transparency.
(PB), or orçamento participativo in the original Portuguese, has evolved dramatically. What was once an obscure process of popular participation championed by a few parties on the left in South America as a step towards reinventing socialism has become a "best practice" in the mainstream international development community's toolkit for reducing poverty and practicing good governance. Depending on how strictly one defines PB, it has expanded from about a dozen cities mostly in Brazil to somewhere between 250 and 2,500 locales throughout Latin America alone. The smaller figure would include those cities where PB began as a local government initiative, while the larger figure would include all the municipal governments recently required by national laws to consult civil society organizations on budget priorities, such as Bolivia's 327 municipalities, Nicaragua's 153 municipalities, and Peru's 1,821 districts, 194 provinces, and 25 regions. Whether this diffusion of PB is seen as cause for celebration or cause for alarm should depend on both how PB is interpreted and how it is being implemented in its new environs. Interpretations of PB, especially as practiced in Porto Alegre, the Brazilian city that named and publicized it, abound. Yet studies of how PB is practiced, especially outside of Brazil, are only beginning to emerge. Most importantly, systematic
The authors are concerned that a remaining refuge of substantive democracy in America, the public sector, is in danger of abandoning it in favor of the market model of management. They argue that contemporary American democracy is confined to a shrunken procedural remnant of its earlier substantive form. The classical republican model of citizen involvement faded with the rise of liberal capitalist society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Capitalism and democracy coexist in a society emphasizing procedural protection of individual liberties rather than substantive questions of individual development. Today's market model of government in the form of New Public Management goes beyond earlier “reforms,” threatening to eliminate democracy as a guiding principle in public-sector management. The authors discuss the usefulness of a collaborative model of administrative practice in preserving the value of democracy in public administration.
Purpose – This paper aims to identify the study of cities as an important and neglected focus for accounting researchers.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on a case study approach to visualizing and calculating the city.
Findings – There is a major preoccupation with the study of cities from numerous disciplinary perspectives. The positioning of cities is reaffirmed as a key part of modes of governing. This reveals tensions between disciplinary approaches based on space and design with the financial imperative of cities managed within a world which is dominated by New Public Management ideas and in which finances have primacy.
Research limitations/implications – The paper is based on one case study, and it demonstrates the need for longitudinal and interdisciplinary approaches to increase understanding of the twenty-first century city.
Practical implications – The significance of accounting as a technology, which is embedded within the public management of cities is profound. This has major implications both for the design of financial information systems and their capacity for, and the manner of, their interactions with other disciplines in planning and managing cities.
Originality/value – This study is distinct in the manner in which it studies and reveals the importance of accounting in the management of cities. There is an increasing trend to visualize the city and represent it in numbers. This study reveals that accounting provides the most important numbers in shaping and visualizing the city.
"What are the democracy effects of decentralisation reforms and projects? Most developing countries have launched decentralisation reforms for the purpose of improving service delivery, local development and management. In these reforms and projects, however, governments, international development agencies and large non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are transferring power to a wide range of local institutions, including private bodies, customary authorities and NGOs. Recognition of these other local institutions means that fledgling local governments are receiving few public powers and face competition for legitimacy. Under what conditions is the new plurality of approaches and local interlocutors fostering local democratic consolidation or resulting in fragmented forms of authority and belonging? Through case studies in Benin, Guatemala, India, Malawi, Russia, Senegal and South Africa, this issue explores the effects of institutional choices and recognition by governments, international development agencies and large NGOs on three dimensions of democracy: 1) representation, 2) citizenship and 3) the public domain. This article outlines an approach to the politics of institutional choice and recognition while drawing out findings from the articles in this issue."
Participatory democracy is a process of collective decision making that combines elements from both direct and representative democracy: Citizens have the power to decide on policy proposals and politicians assume the role of policy implementation. The aim of this paper is to understand how participatory democracy operates, and to study its implications over the behavior of citizens and politicians and over the final policy outcomes. To this end, we explore a formal model inspired by the experience of Participatory Budgeting implemented in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, that builds on the model of meetings with costly participation by Osborne et al. [2000. Meetings with costly participation. American Economic Review 90, 927-943].
Ethnographic methods can advance our knowledge of a setting through its documents as well as help the researcher to grasp a document in its setting. This chapter contests the idea that the study of documents only refers to close analyses of text. Taking pictures of documents, asking about documents and observing what people do with documents are approaches that can answer sociologically significant questions that cannot be addressed by merely analysing the content of a text. Moreover, audio and video recordings of interactions over documents enable analyses of how documents are produced in situ as well as how documents shape and pattern interaction. The recognition of such aspects of documentary data requires fieldwork rather than deskwork.
Through a multiple case study of eight Italian municipalities, our paper identifies the main shocks perceived by the local management as a consequence of the recent fiscal crisis and the related organizational responses. The analysis roots current responses in longer-term municipal financial management and strategies. Even in a context where the shocks are described and identified as being much the same, there is not a single pattern of response, but (at least) four different ways of reacting to shocks can be identified: reorientation, buffering, continuous adjustment, avoiding problems and catching opportunities.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is an intergovernmental organization established in 1960. Its membership includes many of the world's most industrialized countries. OECD works with governments to understand the drivers of economic, social, and environmental change and to seek solutions to common problems. The OECD work on chemical safety is organized under its Environment, Health, and Safety Program. In this Program, countries work together to coordinate their activities related to chemical and pesticide safety and set international standards, for example through the Mutual Acceptance of Data system. Many agreed methods, tools, and reports have been produced that are all available for free at the OECD Web site.
Transparency is a term that has attained quasi-religious significance in debate over governance and institutional design. Today, it is pervasive in the jargon of business governance as well as that of governments and international bodies, and has been used almost to saturation point in all of those domains over the past decade. This chapter maps out some of the different strains and meanings of the term and doctrine. Like many other notions of a quasi-religious nature, transparency is more often preached than practised, more often invoked than defined, and indeed might ironically be said to be mystic in essence, at least to some extent. The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham seems to have been the first to use 'transparency' in its modern governance-related sense in English. The chapter also discusses transparency in international governance, transparency in national and sub-national government, and transparency and corporate governance.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is an investigation of internal transparency in government budgeting.
Design/methodology/approach
– A case study which uses mixed methods – documentary analysis, some observation and elite interviews.
Findings
– Politicians do not want transparency. Despite the way in which the idea of transparency in government is beyond open challenge, this study reveals the manner in which politicians can inhibit and limit transparency through political will and action.
Research limitations/implications
– These findings raise serious challenges for policymakers who design government budgeting systems. They should raise concerns among other interested parties, including the media, the electorate and oversight bodies.
Practical implications
– Are government budgets rigorously scrutinised? This evidence suggests not. This has major implications for accountants in government and for those who seek to use this information.
Social implications
– This research needs to be extended beyond the case of a government body – the Scottish Parliament – which was designed for and committed to transparency in its activities. For those public service organisations which have no such commitment, is public accountability achievable?
Originality/value
– This study uses a novel lens of three levels of transparency as devised by Biondi and Lapsley (2014). It focuses on an emergent field of internal transparency in government budgeting.
This article explores what happens when the much-discussed doctrine of transparency as a key to good governance meets the widely observed behavioural tendency of blame-avoidance in politics and public administration. It begins by discussing transparency as an idea and distinguishing different strains of the doctrine, proceeds to discuss blame-avoidance and to identify three common types of blame-avoidance strategy, and then explores what can happen when a widely advocated governance doctrine meets a commonly observed type of behaviour. The article identifies ways in which that conjunction can produce nil effects, side-effects and reverse-effects in the pursuit of transparency. It concludes that the tension between the pursuit of transparency and the avoidance of blame is at the heart of some commonly observed problems in public management, and suggests that something other than the ‘bureaucratic’ strain of transparency may be called for when those problems are serious.
The results-oriented management reforms fostered by the New Public Management movement are often argued to emphasize the search for efficiency, quality and other typical market values at the expense of democratic accountability. On the other hand, challenging this view, some authors claim that results-based management reforms have the potential to enhance political accountability and representative democracy. There is however, limited empirical evidence of this relationship. This article uses some of the findings from a comparative study of public management evaluation systems in four Latin American countries to illuminate this relationship in practice. We discuss the fact that, in two of the four countries surveyed, the design features of the new systems were based on the explicit search for increased political accountability and the deepening of democracy. We also discuss the possible causes for the finding that the outcome and performance information generated is not being applied for decision-making purposes yet, as expected.
In political theory public administration does not appear as a defining element of democracy. Moreover, traditional public administration is by definition a non-democratic organization. This paper argues that the democratisation of public administration is both necessary and appropriate. It is necessary in order to overcome some of the theoretical and empirical limitations of the politics/administration dychotomy. It is appropriate because it allows us to tackle these limitations and the difficulties derived from it by helping improve the efficiency and effectiveness, as well as the institutional performance, of administrations. First, the paper addresses, from a conceptual perspective, the question of ‘Why democratise public administration?’. Second, it explores the mechanisms through which democratisation may be achieved both in public administration's internal and external relations – that is, ‘How can public administration be democratised?’. The conclusions point out some implications for traditional models of administrative efficiency and political responsiveness – that is, for democratic politics.
When organizations set out to manage their communications in accordance with the corporate ideal, they seem to take for granted that they are transparent, not only to their surroundings but also to themselves. The notion of corporate communications, in other words, builds on the assumption that organizations are able to have a general view of themselves as communicating entities. But is this really the case? And, if not, is it possible to articulate the challenge of corporate transparency in alternative, strategic terms? Since contemporary organizations increasingly relate to their surroundings as if they are transparent, these and related questions are highly relevant in both theoretical and practical terms. Discusses the notion of transparency both as a condition and as a strategy, and deconstructs conventional assumptions associated with the use of the term. Looking at corporate transparency as a staging process that involves strategic disclosure, institutionalisation and mimetic behaviour, asks fundamental questions about organizational openness in an age of transparency.
This book presents a disciplined, qualitative exploration of case study methods by drawing from naturalistic, holistic, ethnographic, phenomenological and biographic research methods. Robert E. Stake uses and annotates an actual case study to answer such questions as: How is the case selected? How do you select the case which will maximize what can be learned? How can what is learned from one case be applied to another? How can what is learned from a case be interpreted? In addition, the book covers: the differences between quantitative and qualitative approaches; data-gathering including document review; coding, sorting and pattern analysis; the roles of the researcher; triangulation; and reporting.
Public sector reforms in numerous countries have been inspired by ideas of New Public Management. Politicians are advised to keep an arm's length distance, giving administrators and managers more autonomy. This article analyses the impact of recent hospital reforms in Denmark, Norway and the United Kingdom on the involvement of MPs in hospital-related matters. The authors argue that reforms need to be analysed not only with respect to political-administrative relations but also to the allocation of political-democratic authority. The analyses show that parliamentary questioning on hospital matters is not restrained by managerialist reforms.
In The Netherlands many local governments make public policy in a participatory way. Civilians and other interested parties are invited by policy makers to design public policy cooperatively. As a consequence many actors and information are embedded in the policy making process, because these actors describe the issue(s) and solutions for the policy problem differently. Some municipals are able to cope with the growing complexity of the policy process, others not. In order to deal with the growing process complexity, local governments hire independent process professionals. These process professionals design and manage the participatory policy process. However this is far from easy in practice. The process-architects and process-managers are faced with a lot of dilemmas in their process-design and process-management activities of the participatory public policy process. This article will describe some dilemmas for process-design as well as for process-management of participatory public policy making, and ways of coping with these dilemmas.
This article conceptualizes the diversity of citizenship and democracy in urban settings by studying the cultural and discursive structures of local public management reform. The reform in question is founded on the ideas of new public management. It has been suggested that in these kinds of reforms, citizens are transformed into consumers. However, this discursive case study shows that this is a simplistic and narrow view by conceptualizing the ways in which people's positions and democracy are interpreted locally. Definitions of local citizenship and democracy are framed simultaneously by multiple discourses, both local and global, yielding a local mixture of citizenship, consumerism and clientism. Representative, expert, participatory and user democracy are all present in the cultural structures of the plans for local government reform, but discourses that afford powerful positions to local citizens remain marginal. Citizens are not identified as being extensively involved in urban governance practices. A strengthening of political agency requires that diverse positions of local citizens and forms of democracy are considered in relation to each other and in relation to power structures and resources.
Since its publication in 2000, Public Management Reform has established itself as the standard text in the field, presenting a comparative analysis of recent changes in Public Management and Public Administration in a range of countries in Europe, North America, and Australasia. This completely rewritten second edition radically expands, develops, and updates the original. Two countries have been added to the comparison (making twelve countries in all) and a much fuller treatment has been provided of the European Commission (including a commentary on the recent reforms led by Vice-President Kinnock). Empirical data has been brought up to date, so as to cover many key developments of the last few years. The theoretical framework of the book has been further developed, including a challenging new interpretation of the trends in continental Europe, which are seen here as markedly different from the Anglo-American style 'New Public Management'. This second edition provides an unparalleled synthesis of developments in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, the UK, the USA, and the European Commission. It is organized in an integrated format, within an overall theoretical framework that identifies the main pressures for, and trajectories of, change. It includes a multi-dimensional analysis of the results of reform, and a chapter reflecting on the dynamic relationship between management reform and politics. Extensive appendices provide an invaluable information resource for students.
Purpose
– The aim of this paper is to add to understanding of how cities function. Specifically, through the lens of power relationships in political organisations, it seeks to study the manner in which accounting and politics are involved in the development of city transport strategies.
Design/methodology/approach
– The paper uses a comparative case study approach in which documents and media coverage are key elements of the visualising of the city.
Findings
– The findings are on a number of levels. First, the study explains the efficacy of congestion charging systems. Second, in the politicised organisation of the city, the context in which policy makers sit is crucial in the elaboration of strategies. Third, the adoption of calculative practices such as congestion charging may reflect political rationality rather than actual need.
Originality/value
– The focus of the study has been cities – a neglected field, but one with considerable research potential. Second, the mobilisation of concepts of power, as articulated by Clegg, Flyvbjerg and Clegg, represent a novel contribution to the accounting literature.
This paper describes the process of inducting theory using case studies-from specifying the research questions to reaching closure. Some features of the process, such as problem definition and construct validation, are similar to hypothesis-testing research. Others, such as within-case analysis and replication logic, are unique to the inductive, case-oriented process. Overall, the process described here is highly iterative and tightly linked to data. This research approach is especially appropriate in new topic areas. The resultant theory is often novel, testable, and empirically valid. Finally, framebreaking insights, the tests of good theory (e.g., parsimony, logical coherence), and convincing grounding in the evidence are the key criteria for evaluating this type of research.
A concern with the interrelations between accounting and the state is integral recent studies of accounting change. Yet there has been little explicit attention to ways of thinking about the nature of the linkages themselves, and the concepts that might be used to analyse them. Approaches that rely on an implied exteriority between accounting and the state are argued to neglect these interrelations. The theoretical limitations of “functional” and “external factor” approaches are discussed as a way of highlighting the importance of these issues. A framework is proposed that differs from these models. This focuses on the relays, linkages and interdependecies between the practices and rationales of accounting on the one hand, and the state defined as a loosely assembled complex of rationales and practices of government on the other. The theoretical framework suggested centres on a distinction between two aspects of government. Firstly, the programmatic and abstract field or rationales, statements and claims that sets out the objects and objectives of government, and that is termed “political rationalities”. Secondly, the range of calculations, procedures and tools that materialize and visualize processes and activities, and that is termed “technologies”. Whilst distinct, these two aspects of government are linked in a relationships of reciprocity. The specific rationales that articulate political rationalities allow congruences to be established between the roles of accounting and the objectives of government. The ways of calculating and intervening provided by technologies enable domains to be operated upon and enrolled within programmes of government. This framework is illustrated by reference to innovations in accounting and other practices of government across the “Colbert period” of Louis XIV's reign, 1661–1683. This was a significant period of innovation for private enterprise accounting, and for a range of practices of government. It is through a particular rationale of “order” that these two distinct sets of practices are argued to have been aligned, and roles for accounting articulated. An examination of these issue is considered to demonstrate the importance of examining the interrelations of accounting and the state.
In most of the existing academic literature the notion of transparency in monetary policy is defined in too simple terms to be of practical relevance. This paper suggests a conceptual framework, which distinguishes different - and potentially conflicting - aspects of transparency. When there are frictions in communication or imperfections in the processing of information, greater "openness" (i.e. more information) need not always enhance the "clarity" of central bank communication. In this perspective transparency primarily hinges on a shared mode of interpretation ("common understanding") between the central bank and its audience. JEL Classification: E42; E52; E58; F58.
Most of the research work concerning the French tableau de bord tends to locate its birth in industrial companies with engineers as lead roles and the State as supporting role (Lebas, 1996). Yet, a study in the Cr�dit Lyonnais archives shows that banks are not unequipped with this kind of managerial device. We have studied the period of birth and first development of the Cr�dit Lyonnais that is from 1870 to 1890. This period is characterized by the expansion of local branches, by the internationalisation of the bank and by the diversification of activities (Bouvier, 1961; Dagneau, 2003). Corporate managers then needed more information to control and compare their branches and activities. At the same time, and as a consequence of this quick growth, overhead expenses exploded. Therefore, the top management asked for more information, not only accounting information but also data concerning the number of clients per day, the number of complaints and the number of letters written to answer them, the number of market orders, etc. At the beginning, this form of tableau de bord was not very well formalised but, gradually, the management asked for more data in the shape of tables or cards. Comparisons year by year were also expected from branches. Furthermore, the Cr�dit Lyonnais corporate managers claimed for obtaining the same data than other French banks such as the Soci�t� G�n�rale. In this paper, we will relate the apparition and progress of non accounting data as a precocious hint of the French tableau de bord. We will also describe the external and internal conditions of this apparition and progress.
Changes in public sector accounting in a number of OECD countries over the 1980s were central to the rise of the “New Public Management” (NPM) and its associated doctrines of public accountability and organizational best practice. This paper discusses the rise of NPM as an alternative to the tradition of public accountability embodied in progressive-era public administration ideas. It argues that, in spite of allegations of internationalization and the adoption of a new global paradigm in public management, there was considerable variation in the extent to which different OECD countries adopted NPM over the 1980s. It further argues that conventional explanations of the rise of NPM (“Englishness”, party political incumbency, economic performance record and government size) seem hard to sustain even from a relatively brief inspection of such cross-national data as are available, and that an explanation based on initial endowment may give us a different perspective on those changes.
The ‘transfer’ of participatory budgeting from Brazil to Europe has been a highly differentiated process. In Porto Alegre, this innovative methodology enabled democratization and social justice to be articulated. In Europe, participatory budgeting relies on multiple procedures, and it is therefore necessary to give a clear methodological definition of it so that cases can be coherently compared and ideal‐types constructed to understand the variety of concrete experiments. The six ideal‐types we propose (Porto Alegre adapted for Europe; representation of organized interests; community funds at the local and city level; the public/private negotiating table; consultation on public finances; proximity participation) show striking differences that are highly influenced by existing participatory traditions. It is, above all, with the models Porto Alegre adapted for Europe and community funds that an ‘empowered participatory governance’ can develop and that a fourth power, beyond the three classical ones, is developing — that of the citizenry when it directly (or through delegates) assumes a decision‐making power. However, other models have their strengths, too, for example with regard to the reform of public administration which is a critical aspect in the search for ‘another possible world’.
Résumé
Le ‘transfert’ du budget participatif du Brésil à l'Europe s'est révélé un processus très différencié. A Porto Alegre, cette méthodologie novatrice a permis d'intégrer démocratisation et justice sociale. En Europe, comme le budget participatif s'appuie sur de nombreuses procédures, il faut lui donner une définition méthodologique claire afin de pouvoir comparer correctement les cas et élaborer des idéaltypes pour comprendre la variété des expériences concrètes. Cet article propose six idéaltypes : Porto Alegre adaptéà l'Europe, Représentation des intérêts organisés, Fonds communautaires au niveau local et municipal, Table de négociations public‐privé, Consultation sur les finances publiques, Participation de proximité. Tous présentent des divergences frappantes, fortement influencées par les traditions participatives en place. C'est surtout avec les modèles Porto Alegre adaptéà l'Europe et Fonds communautaires que peut se déployer une ‘gouvernance participative dotée de pouvoirs’ et que se développe un quatrième pouvoir, au‐delà des trois autres classiques : celui de l'ensemble des citoyens exerçant directement (ou via des délégués) un pouvoir décisionnel. Toutefois, d'autres modèles ont leurs atouts également, par exemple vis‐à‐vis de la réforme de l'administration publique donc d'un aspect crucial dans la quête d'un ‘autre monde possible’.
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