One of the tasks I worked on during those three months with the UNICEF regional office is building a case for the engagement of young people in budget-making initiatives in Jordan. Participatory budgeting (PB) is a tool for participatory democracy, which was at first implemented in Brazil in the late 1980s and has since spread to over 3,000 communities large and small throughout the world. The idea for PB began when scholars John Lerner, Michael Menser, and Giampaolo Baiocchi met at the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2005, the place where it was first launched in 1989. PB is defined by the World Bank as “an approach to budgeting offering citizens at large an opportunity to learn about government operations and to deliberate, debate, and influence the allocation of public resources as a tool for educating, engaging, and empowering citizens and strengthening demand for good governance”. PB allows citizens to identify, discuss, and prioritize public spending projects, and gives them the power to make real decisions about how money is spent.
Participatory budgeting processes are typically designed to involve those left out of traditional methods of public engagement, such as low-income residents, non-citizens, and youth. However, cases of youth in participatory budgeting outside Latin America are very limited. It is particularly hard to implement in regions like MENA where the divide between leaders and youth keeps deepening every day; where initiatives for participation to public debate are extremely rare; and where youth are routinely dismissed. In collaboration with the UNICEF Country Office working on a fiscal space analysis to increase spending on adolescents and youth in Jordan within the limitations of existing budgets, we worked on building a case to help the Jordanian government envision how PB with adolescents and youth could work in Jordan. While documenting such initiatives from around the world, it was clear to me that there were many benefits to get from such policies on several levels. In addition to creating a more positive social environment, there is for example strong evidence of tax delinquency reduction. In Porto Alegre, where it all started, the city increased its tax revenues by 48%. The city of Recife, in Brazil as well, also implemented participatory budgeting, with a strong focus on children through the engagement of school teachers and principals. Another case from Congo focuses on the use of new technologies and mobile to engage with as many citizens in the process as possible. A rich publication from UNICEF on influencing domestic finance for children can be found here for more information on processes and tools. UNICEF identified four key action areas to implement such initiatives:
On our end, this deliverable is to be shared with the UNICEF Country Office and the Jordanian Ministry of Youth in September alongside the public space analysis being currently conducted. On my end though, it is to be shared in the two weeks, before I depart, but I hope to hear back about the possibility to implement this later in the year.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
August 2019
Categories |