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ABSTRACT. Much of the current U.S. academic literature on participatory budgeting is preoccupied with direct citizen involvement in budget formulation, reflecting a particular normative theory of democracy. In this essay we suggest that U.S. academics can learn from a contemporary international community of practice concerned with "civil-society budget work"-a quasi-grassroots, quasi-pluralist movement with member organizations throughout the developing world-as well as from the budget exhibits mounted by the New York Bureau of Municipal Research at the turn of the last century. The budget-work movement employs third-party intermediation and advocacy, through all phases of the budget cycle. U.S. academics and budget-work practitioners can learn from each other, and this represents an unexploited opportunity for all concerned. We propose a program of locally based action research and trans-local evaluative synthesis.
INTRODUCTION
Government budgets are important. In most countries today, they allocate a third or more of all economic output. But even in the most stable and ostensibly successful democracies, there is relatively little involvement by citizens in the processes of government budgeting. Why is there not more, given the obvious importance of the budget to social welfare? Progressive reformers at the New York Bureau of Municipal Research (BMR) thought that transparency was critical, and set out to improve it by means of their famous budget exhibits. In the words of one historian, "The peculiar genius of the budget reformers was to create a model that would serve the same functions of the machine[:] modern mass democracy . . . demanded some mechanism for making government intelligible to the people" (Kahn, 1993, p. 96).
Because of the same scarcity of fiscal resources that makes budgeting necessary, generally accepted norms of democratic administration call for administrators and elected officials to ensure that allocations are responsive to the interests of the governed. Citizen participation in public resource allocation is presumed to be an important means of ensuring this responsiveness, and is the subject of a small but growing academic literature in U.S. journals of public administration (PA). This literature is lively and offers a number of insights, but it is somewhat under-theorized (Ebdon & Franklin, 2006) and isolationist in its neglect of comparative research. These omissions constrain its explanatory as well as normative usefulness. In this essay we identify...