Hybrid participatory budgeting: local democratic practices in the digital era

Participatory budgeting (PB) is an innovative democratic practice that consists of giving citizens in a local community the power to identify spending priorities, put forth and develop concrete proposals, finalize them into feasible projects, and select which projects are worth financing and implementing. It gained attention for its capacity to include people in policymaking at the urban level. Begun as a face-to-face participatory process, PB today is shaped by ICT that combines online and offline participation venues. This chapter presents this new wave of “hybrid” PB and analyzes citizen participation data from nine recent Italian case studies in six municipalities that have benefited from a Web platform specifically developed for PB processes.