Peru’s Participatory Budgeting: Configurations of Power, Opportunities for Change

ABSTRACT

In 2003, Peru adopted the “Framework Law on participatory budgeting”. It requires all the municipal and regional governments to institutionalize a yearly “participatory budgeting process”. The Peruvian Participatory Budgeting (PB) is inspired on the PB-experiment in Porto Alegre, Brazil, but differs on a number of important principles of design. Building on the existing evaluations of the Peruvian nation-wide implementation of PB (2003-2007), this article addresses both the pitfalls and the transformative potential of Peruvian PB. It does so by contrasting the Peruvian PB with PB in Porto Alegre along the four dimensions on which transformation has been recorded in Porto Alegre: (1) citizens, (2) civil society, (3) the state and (4) civil society – state relations.