Global perspectives on participatory budgeting  Event

“Participatory Budgeting in Global Perspective” by Brian Wampler, Stephanie McNulty and Michael Touchton. The authors present a unique “theory of change” to account for how participatory budgeting programs theoretically produce social and political change, as well as provide explanations of different program designs, typologies, and cross-regional comparative analysis with a global perspective.

Comparative analysis is also carried out in “Why Citizen Participation Succeeds or Fails” by Matt Ryan, co-director of the Centre for Democratic Futures. In this book, Dr Ryan reveals the factors behind the success of this form of democratic engagement with guidance for future public involvement in taxation and spending.

 

 

 

As discussants:

Dr Carla de Paiva Bezerra (she/her), researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and at Cebrap (Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning). Her research interests are comparative politics, participatory democracy, civil society, political parties and public policy in Brazil and Latin America. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of São Paulo (USP). Her forthcoming articles are "Why do political parties promote participatory governance? The Brazilian Workers’ Party case", in Critical Policy Studies, and "Why has Participatory Budgeting declined in Brazil?", in Brazilian Political Science Review.

Dr Maggie Shum, research and program associate of the Global Policy Initiative (GPI) in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She earned her PhD in political science from Notre Dame, specializing in comparative politics with a regional focus in Latin America. She is interested in participatory policies, policy diffusion, and party organizations. She also studies contentious politics in Asia. Her article “When Voting Turnout Becomes Contentious Repertoire: How Anti-ELAB Protest Overtook the District Council Election in Hong Kong 2019” is forthcoming in the Japanese Journal of Political Science.

 

 

Joining us: 

Dr Brian Wampler Professor of Global Studies and Political Science at Boise State University. He is also the author of several other books like Democracy at Work: Pathways to Well-being in Brazil (2020, Cambridge University Press). Wampler has published extensively on democracy, participation, civil society, and conducted field research in Brazil, Kenya, Indonesia, Ethiopia, and Spain.

Dr Stephanie McNulty, Professor of Government at Franklin and Marshall College. She is an expert on participatory development models, Latin American politics, decentralization, and gender. She has written several articles and two books on nationally mandated participatory governance reforms: Democracy from Above? The Unfulfilled Promise of Nationally Mandated Participatory Reforms and Voice and Vote: Decentralization and Participation in Post-Fujimori Peru. Her work has been funded by the American Association of University Women, Fulbright, the Hewlett Foundation, and USAID. She resides in Lancaster, PA with her family and several pets.

Dr Michael Touchton, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami. Touchton studies the political economy of development and underdevelopment in a comparative setting. Much of his research occurs in Latin America, but Dr. Touchton has spent considerable time addressing these questions in many other parts of the Global South as well as Europe and the United States. Touchton is the author of three books and more than 30 articles

Dr Matt Ryan, Associate Professor in Governance and Public Policy at the University of Southampton and has a PhD in Politics by the same University. His research interests lie on crossing the boundaries between political theory and comparative politics, with a strong focus on innovative research methods. He is co-director of the Centre for Democratic Futures and since January 2020 he is UKRI Future Leader Fellow leading the Rebooting Democracy project.

Finally, the event will be moderated by Dr Paolo Spada, Lecturer in Comparative Politics within Politics at the University of Southampton. He has a PhD in Economics by the University of Bologna and a PhD in Political Science by Yale University. He is a leading expert in Participatory Budgeting and has conducted fieldworks in Brazil, the US, Italy, Cameroon, Canada, the UK, Portugal and the Czech Republic. His most recent research focuses on participatory systems that aim at combining multiple participatory processes together, civic technology, online discussion platforms, and gamification