Participatory budgeting gives people real power to determine the future of their cities. It’s a democratic process where ordinary community members directly decide how to spend the public budget. It explicitly reaffirms the central place of collective deliberation for participatory democracy, and it also can contribute to the transformation of the city into urban commons. Though participatory budgeting was only born in 1989, it has since been practiced more than 2000 times in more than 45 countries around the world—groundbreaking success for a process that is one of the rare authentic democratic innovations in the past 30 years.
 
In this book, Yves Cabannes offers examples from five continents of participatory budgeting in practice, outlining the successes and challenges of thirteen case studies from the United States, Brazil, France, Portugal, Spain, China, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Mozambique, and Cameroon. As much a best-of-guide as a how-to-manual for democratizing municipal finances, the book charts the unique trajectory of participatory budgeting, asserting its rich potential for realizing radical democratic goals and deepening democracy. The book also features a foreword by Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris, the city with the largest and most ambitious participatory budget in history.

Yves Cabannes, emeritus professor of development planning at University College London, is an urban specialist, activist, scholar, and an expert on participatory budgeting.