Recent moves towards ‘participatory’ budgeting have raised hopes and expectations that spending and revenue generation can be made more pro‐poor if informed citizens and their non‐traditional political organizations participate directly in budgeting decisions. This article reviews experiences of participatory budgeting and pro‐poor policy‐making in Brazil, Ireland, Chile, Mauritius, and Costa Rica. It draws attention to several important issues: Who participates? What kind of institutional framework is necessary? What happened to the revenue‐generation side of pro‐poor budgeting? It points out that making spending and taxation more ‘pro‐poor’ has historically depended on pro‐poor political parties gaining power.
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Deborah Bräutigam (2004) studied this question.
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