ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the largest participatory budgeting (PB) process in North America that of New York City, which just completed its fourth cycle in summer 2015. It examines PB's contested role as an empowering, pro-poor tool for social justice, and traces the difficulty of implementing meaningful collaborative governance. The PB process, introduced with a newly democratically elected government in the city in 1989, forced elected officials and roughly 50,000 residents to meet with one another and justify their budget priorities in public, deliberative assemblies. Much of the international participation literature was inspired by the need for constituents throughout the Global South to have a say in the mass-scale dam projects, economic policies, and other governmental decisions being made by elites, whether domestically or by international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. New York's PB process has dramatically broadened notions of stakeholdership, engaging traditionally disenfranchised constituents in the city.
