Analysis of Participatory Budgeting in Chile: a Reflection of National Public Policy Evolution?

Talking about the trajectory and the evolution of participatory budgeting in Chile during the last twelve years, since they first appeared, and even considering that these are experiments with a poor impact in national policy, is talking about the general trajectory in political terms, particularly the definition and role of the State. The particular Chilean context, nowadays marked by the return to formal democracy, has greatly determined the characteristics and conditions in which the participatory budgets have emerged and were implemented by some local administrations. If the country has endured a slow transition from the strong Pinochet dictatorship, and still presents remarkable weaknesses regarding its democratization, the implemented participatory budgets have abundantly reflected those constraints and were merely fragile local initiatives with poor socio-political impact, however much one may consider them as one of the programmes – if not the programme – that has introduced the greatest level of innovation and logical shift regarding the traditional way of doing in national politics, at a local level, in recent years. Our thesis to associate the general background of national evolution, in political, economic, social and cultural terms, to a fragile, incipient and partial phenomenon as participatory budgeting is, is based on the consideration that the normative-legal frameworks, especially the economic, institutional and political-party systems, as well as socio-cultural framings have deeply marked the conditions that allowed a policy with this potential of democratization and social justice to be appropriated by local administrations. Even so, and despite these scenarios that have seriously restrained its impact, there are several signs, especially at the social movements level and, in a lesser extent, institutionally, of looking for a visible social transformation; among those signs, participatory budgets are the main practice of participatory democracy, which, institutionally, is one of the most important manifestations at a local level. In spite of the narrow structural framework determined by institutions, the potential of this tool, with the innovating approaches that characterize it, also causes changes that go beyond that traditional structure.