Introduction

Participatory budgeting is a tool for public administrators to engage citizens in the process of resource decision-making and allocation, which yields greater public involvement. Its goals are increased transparency and accountability. A product of the emerging Brazilian democracy of the latter part of the 1980s, participatory budgeting was born of a desire to “confront social and political legacies of clientelism, social exclusion, and corruption by making the budgetary process transparent and public” (Wampler 2007, 23). Subsequently, this method of citizen engagement has materialized in more than 1,500 governments across the globe (Baiocchi and Ganuza 2014; Gordon 2014). The United States, often at the forefront of such democratic experiments, was uncharacteristically late in its exploration of participatory budgeting. Since 2009, more than 20 examples have been implemented in American localities. This volume describes five of those cases: Chicago, Illinois; St. Louis, Missouri; Boston, Massachusetts; Greensboro, North Carolina; and Clarkston, Georgia.