Participatory Budgeting, Citizenship Ecologies, and Insurgent Practice

• In Event: Renovating and Reimagining Local Democracy amidst National Retrenchment

Abstract

Protestors in the summer 2020 uprisings against police violence in the United States demanded not only that George Floyd’s (and Breonna Taylor’s, and so many others’) killers be charged and convicted, but that cities nationwide defund the police. A number of cities, such as Los Angeles, Nashville, and Seattle, have begun to tackle budget justice more broadly, articulating “people’s budgets” with new funding priorities in lieu of policing.
Integral to such efforts is participatory budgeting (PB), a process by which residents, rather than elected officials, allocate public funds. In the United States, PB has spread from a single local process in 2010 to over 500 currently active district, city, or institutional processes. But some researchers have argued that PB has morphed from an empowering process into a politically malleable, innocuous set of procedures that legitimize pro forma decisions by policymakers. Indeed, PB can be misused to reinforce existing racial hierarchies.
PB in New York City is by far the country’s largest PB process; since 2012, New Yorkers have decided how to spend more than $250 million on almost 1,000 projects through PBNYC, as the process is called. I draw on a decade of fieldwork on PBNYC to examine the limits and uses of the groundwork laid thus far, and how communities might build upon and revise PB processes for budget justice— defined here as public budgets that truly give historically marginalized communities resources to address their needs. I particularly analyze the extent to which PB, as it is understood and implemented in the United States, can address issues of racial equity when implemented in a largely unchanged larger administrative state. I build on empirical observations from my fieldwork in New York, that everyday residents often attempt to work towards enact social change by traversing both “invited” spaces like PB and “invented” spaces like mutual aid collectives in consistent, strategic ways. These observations corroborate research on the intersections of institutional and extra-institutional formations of collective action and democratic participation, such as “embedded” participation in “democracy-driven governance” (Bua & Bussu, 2023).
Notably, one of every four participants surveyed reported that they were not eligible to vote in regular elections; they lacked those citizenship rights as youth, formerly incarcerated residents, or undocumented residents. This begs the question, then, of whether PB can move beyond merely including citizens from marginalized communities, to facilitate a sort of urban citizenship, defined here as a sense of belonging and stakeholdership aside from that of formal citizenship.
Building upon emerging literatures describing this new landscape of citizen engagement as an ecosystem of participation, I argue that emerging practices form, in turn, a new ecology of citizenship. If ecosystems in the natural world are the biomes and landscapes—like deserts, rainforests, coral reefs, and wetlands—that host living beings, then ecologies refer to the symbiotic, collaborative, competitive, and other relationships between living beings in the context of a particular ecosystem, and between beings and the larger environment in which they live. At the heart of this ecology of citizenship lie contestations over citizen subjectivities. Namely, in New York, even participatory spaces like PB often implicitly employ citizen-as-consumer logics. In response, everyday residents struggle to forward what I call citizen-as-neighbor and citizen-as-maker logics, valuing solidarity in lieu of competition, and making claims over public resources despite austerity politics. To do so, residents develop micropolitical practices—emphasizing epistemic justice and collective experimentation—in invented spaces, to sneak into invited ones.
I draw upon an analysis of 2000+ project proposals appearing on PB ballots in the first 9 years of the New York City process, to examine which sorts of proposals appear to reflect projects that city agencies would have funded even without PB (if they had not been facing budget cuts), and which appear to forward new logics into the city budget. I particularly draw from interviews with PB participants, city agency representatives, and PB facilitators to examine which PB ideas tend to move forward in the process (i.e., from the generation phase, to the ballot, to winning funding), and why different stakeholders pursued specific tactics and strategies to forward particular budget priorities along the way. I examine when and how PB participants’ micropolitical practices might sometimes be considered insurgent, and to contribute to non-reformist reforms.

Author

• Celina Su, CUNY-Graduate Center