ABSTRACT
This chapter is about a potential benefit of participatory budgeting, which is a sense of belonging. The first section is about the League of the Iroquois. Their successful democracy could be attributed, in part, to their strong sense of belonging. They did not rule by coercion; rather, they ruled by consensus, or near consensus.
C. Wright Mills believed that people in modern society had lost their sense of belonging. However, he thought that it was really a loss of political belonging because people had no control over anything nor even a voice in anything. Mills’ solution was for people to deliberate in public forums about issues that were important to them.
Talpin found that some participants in participatory budgeting (PB) changed as a result of their experience with PB. Part of the reason that some had changed was due to the emotions of face-to-face relationships. Social capital is composed of several social phenomena. Some of these social phenomena are consistent with a sense of belonging. Baiocchi studied a PB process in Porto Alegre, Brazil that gave people a sense of belonging to a community while they were building social capital.
