Charting Uncharted Waters: Participatory Budgeting as a Novel Transitional Justice Guarantee of Non-Recurrence of the Conflict in Colombia?

During the last four years, Colombia has been immersed in a peace process between the Government and the FARC-EP guerrilla, to end more than fifty years of war. Two main features differentiate this negotiation from previous experiences. First, it places citizen participation at the centre of the endorsement and implementation of the agreements. Second, besides agreeing on traditional transitional justice mechanisms for truth, justice and reparation, the parties have also included a broad range of guarantees of non-recurrence to prevent the repetition of the conflict. One of them is participatory budgeting, which is a process that allows citizens of a locality to directly decide how to spend part of the local budget. This provides a novel case study to explore the theorization of transitional justice’s guarantees of non-recurrence of the conflict, and the relation between citizen participation and peacebuilding. Accordingly, I am currently exploring participatory budgeting processes in Medellin, Colombia, to examine whether these processes could foster peacebuilding and, if so, under what circumstances. The research is being undertaken through a qualitative comparative exploratory case study between offline and online experiences of participatory budgeting in the Communes One and Seven of Medellín. In this context, the paper proposed discusses the findings of my research so far, placing participatory budgeting in a wider theoretical debate regarding transitional justice, to lay the foundations for a further systematic analysis of empirical data, to produce a medium-level grounded theory of participatory budgeting in the context of transitional justice. First, the paper reviews the literature on transitional justice, democratic innovation, participatory budgeting, and citizen participation. Overall, the studies suggest that more research is needed to understand the nuances of citizen participation in changing institutional environments in post-conflict scenarios. Furthermore, the paper identifies four strands in the transitional justice literature that could be enriched with a study of participatory budgeting under a transitional justice lens, which are analyzed with reference to four themes emerging from preliminary fieldwork: (i) the inclusion of participatory approaches to transitional justice studies; (ii) the relation between transitional justice and economic, social and cultural rights; (iii) the links between transitional justice and development; and (iv) the theorization of the guarantees of non-recurrence.