Can Democratic Innovations Help with the Energy Transitions in Cities? The Potential of Participatory Budgeting in Romania

Participatory budgeting is a form of democratic innovations that allows citizens to engage in the decision-making process of their community and to decide concrete avenues for action using some of the local budgets. Previous research discusses in detail the functioning of participatory budgeting and their impact on local communities in terms of projects and people empowerment. However, we know very little about the potential of participatory budgeting with respect to energy developments and changes although an increasing number of projects on energy is funded. This paper seeks to address this gap in the literature and analyzes the extent to which people, the driving force behind participatory budgeting, believe that this can help with the energy transitions in their cities. To this end, we will conduct semi-structured interviews in December 2023-January 2024 in four large cities in Romania out of which two used participatory budgeting in the recent years. We use the interviewees in the other two cities as a reference category to understand if the people’s attitudes are different in cities that did not experience this democratic innovation. We use thematic deductive analysis to interpret their answers and to understand the extent to which citizens see participatory budgeting as a driver to move the cities away from the traditional approach to energy governance and provide feasible alternative models for development.