Participatory Budgeting in France: Opening Local Budgets or Lipservice?

Many works have been studying how participatory budgeting has been adapted within a country. While PB used to be in Brazil a first step towards a much bigger discussion about local assets and source of incomes, comparing open data initiatives related to local budgets to PB shows they are following distinct patterns. Looking at how this policy transfer in France has been adopted in 2017, this paper analyses 61 active cases of local PB and around 30 cases of open budgets based on web mining and a database for french newspaper. Both are not compulsory by national law, which create an open framework for local authorities to increase accountability for representative democracy. More than 4 millions people are able to have a say about local budget through participatory budgeting. Most of the winning proposals in PB are related to very traditional policies and capital investments such as sport facilities, community gardens and basic infrastructures whereas submitted proposals are covering broader issues. Only 13% of local authorities provide online explanation why rejected proposals are unfit for the vote. This could mean than informal cherrypicking is still happening. Poor accountability happens in most cases during implementation. Only 9% publish basic online data about the current status of proposals or final costs. Even if it’s based on online platforms, PB is far from being linked to some open government strategy: less than 10% of cases are implementing both PB and open data for budget. French PBs are not about raising awareness about finance constraints or making budgets more transparent. These early results should be deepened in order to understand how local authorities are framing public participation about public spendings. The current wave of PB in France doesn't help to foster accountability and appears unlikely to increase citizenry trust or democratize bureaucracy.