TY - JOUR AU - Pin, Laura PY - 2017/02/03 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Does Participatory Budgeting Lead to Local Empowerment? The Case of Chicago, IL. JF - Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research JA - AR VL - 28 IS - 0 SE - Articles DO - UR - https://alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/article/view/22420 SP - AB - <p>This paper uses Baiocchi and Ganuza’s communicativeempowerment framework to examine a case-study of participatory budgeting (PB) in Chicago, IL. Chicago hosts the longest ongoing PB project in North America: since 2009, the 49th Ward has allocated $1 million annually through PB. By 2016, the process had expanded to $6.2 million dollars of infrastructure funding in seven wards. Baiocchi an Ganuza’s framework provides a mechanism for examining the<br />relationship between the neoliberalization of municipal government and the growing popularity of PB. I argue that when one considers the empowerment dimensions of PB, the experience of Chicago has been decidedly mixed: limitations in the primacy, scope and reach of the participatory process limit the capacity of PB as currently constituted to function as a democratic challenge to elite policy making in municipal governance.</p> ER -