Abstract
As participatory budgeting (PB) processes proliferate around the globe and within the United States, there remain questions regarding PB’s contested role as an empowering, pro-poor tool for social justice. This analysis of the New York City PB process focuses on the interactions between everyday participants in PB and city agency representatives, the bureaucrats involved in the process. In New York, PB has successfully broadened notions of stakeholdership for many constituents. Still, the agencies’ micropolitical practices—especially regarding contested politics and local versus technical knowledge—help to forward a model of managed participation, sidelining deliberative aspects of the process. Combined with a context of austerity, these practices limit the ability of such participatory institutions to retain volunteer participants, as well as the ability of constituents to substantively shape state priorities.
Participatory budgeting (PB)—a process in which community members, rather than elected officials, decide how to allocate public funds—has received tremendous attention since it first began in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989, spreading to over 3,000 cities worldwide. As PB becomes institutionalized in the United States, there remain questions on whether it can reach and sustain engagement among the traditionally disenfranchised, as in past cases (Lerner, 2014).
This article traces the contours of implementing meaningful participation in New York City’s PB process (PBNYC), the largest in North America, by focusing on the interactions between everyday constituents 1 and city agency representatives there. It briefly reviews how participatory democracy, volunteerism, and citizen–bureaucrat dynamics in public administration converge in analyses of PB. I then examine motifs from interviews with budget delegates (who volunteered to vet proposals and develop them into ballot items) and city agency representatives (who worked to ensure the feasibility of final project proposals).
Budget delegate interviewees repeatedly stated that interactions with city agencies significantly shaped their PBNYC experience. In this study, I examine how two of the agencies’ micropolitical practices—balancing local and technical knowledge, and navigating contested politics—help to forward a model of managed participation, sidelining deliberative aspects of the process. Combined with a context of austerity, these practices limit the ability of constituents to substantively shape state priorities. To sustain engagement and facilitate opportunities for collaborative coproduction, participatory experiments must engage in critical training of and secure buy-in from city bureaucrats (and other stakeholders) and volunteer participants, and ensure that participants’ intensive efforts feel worthwhile.
Dynamics of Participant Experience
Over the past few decades, nonprofits and governmental institutions have increasingly developed new “participatory frameworks” in which everyday constituents help to shape the policies that govern them. The deliberative and participatory democracy literature has articulated the principles and contours of participatory alternatives to individual-focused, electoral, market-based models of decision making and governance, across a range of contexts in both the Global North and the Global South (Cornwall & Coelho, 2007; de Sousa Santos, 2005; de Souza Briggs, 2008). Fung and Wright’s (2003) empowered participatory governance framework, for instance, highlights three principles: problems should be practical and concrete, participation should be bottom-up, and decision making should focus on reason-giving.
Still, as the need for ground-level analysis gained institutional legitimacy and political credence, both policy makers and scholars have also questioned whether calls for greater public involvement in holding governments accountable were actually being realized. By the early 2000s, some practitioners and scholars labeled “participation” the “new tyranny,” a way for institutions to nod to participation while maintaining status quo inequalities (Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Hickey & Mohan, 2004). Nonprofit organizations implementing participatory experiments, too, have struggled to address issues of equity across class, gender, and race (Mansbridge, 1983; Ostrander, 1999).
With this participatory turn, tensions embedded in democratic experiments’ potential for both empowerment and co-optation have only deepened (Cornwall & Coelho, 2007; de Sousa Santos, 2005; Fung & Wright, 2003). Rather than prescribing universal templates for participation, this now formidable literature has moved beyond vanguard models to emphasize more context-specific triumphs and challenges from cases around the world. These include policy innovations and the context-specific manifestations of contested politics in these experiments, especially in diverse and unequal landscapes (Baiocchi, 2005; Boulding & Wampler, 2010; Gilman, 2016; Lerner, 2014; Silver, Scott, & Kazepov, 2010).
In participatory experiments, volunteers often devote hundreds of hours of unpaid work in research, deliberation, and advocacy. The overlap between the political participation and volunteerism literatures, then, can highlight conditions that shape not only who participates but also who continues to do so—beyond get-out-the-vote efforts centered in the political participation literature, and beyond the specific service projects highlighted in much of the volunteerism literature (Wilson, 2012).
The extensive volunteerism literature has largely focused on individual-level characteristics of volunteers (such as motivations, religiosity, identities, life course phase, and resources) and on the impacts of participation (Caputo, 2009; Cohen, 2009; Hager & Brudney, 2011; Steen, 2006). Yet, studies also suggest that volunteer commitment is profoundly shaped by “the organization of the volunteer experience,” and that this middle stage of the “volunteer process model,” between antecedents and impacts, remains understudied (Wilson, 2012, p. 201).
Existing research on volunteer dynamics suggests that participants become committed when they have training, incentives, and social recognition—in other words, when institutions demonstrate that volunteers are worthy of monetary outlays and staff time (Tang, Morrow-Howell, & Choi, 2010). In contrast, volunteers who felt like they were wasting their time experienced burnout (Kulik, 2007). More ethnographic research is needed on the institutional contexts of participation and the experiences themselves, including how volunteers relate to others (Wilson, 2012).
Public Administration and Community Participation
This focus on the experience of participation itself—what happens after recruitment and outreach have taken place—widens our scope of inquiry beyond individual participants themselves, to those with whom they interact. Nonprofits and public administrators—city managers and agency representatives—also come to the fore. Public actors are also concerned with improving participation, and how policy designs construct citizenship and affect the wider public (Bryson, Quick, Slotterback, & Crosby, 2013; Ingram & Smith, 2011).
One significant barrier to implementing participatory governance is the dominance of New Public Management (NPM) in public administration. NPM began in the 1980s, when Reagan forwarded neoliberal policies unleashing market forces and competition in the public sector (Salamon, 2002). In the 1990s, Clinton further institutionalized NPM through large-scale implementation of performance metrics and incentives for a “customer-driven government” (Thomas, 2013, p. 788). In this model, “entrepreneurial” public managers develop a combination of insurance, subsidy, and other products to deliver government services to recipients deemed “customers,” rather than citizens.
Widening inequalities and deepening distrust of government prompted calls for another model of public administration, in which public managers “govern, not just manage, in increasingly diverse and complex societies” (Bryson, Crosby, & Bloomberg, 2014, p. 447). In this emerging model, alternately called New Public Service (Denhardt & Denhardt, 2000), public value management (Stoker, 2006), and new civic politics (Boyte, 2005), citizens are not just customers or voters but partners in policy making; public managers act as collaborators and capacity builders. Government responds to active community participation to deliver collectively defined public goods.
Some articles present a spectrum of “responsiveness to collaboration” in citizen–bureaucrat relationships (Vigoda, 2002), much as canonical articles on participation presented a linear ladder (Arnstein, 1969). Recent works focus on the conditions necessary to make participation possible, politically acceptable, and administratively sustainable in an era of austerity (Cooper, Bryer, & Meek, 2006). In particular, community participants remain consistently perceived as “emotional, illogical, and lacking in credibility” (Bryer, 2013, p. 263). Ill-implemented attempts at democratizing public administration may further discredit community input, or “ultimately reinforce and extend neoliberalism by embedding market logics more deeply in progressive uses of state power” (Dahl & Soss, 2014, pp. 496-497; Durant & Ali, 2013).
Micropolitics in PB
Questions of political participation, volunteerism, and public administration overlap in the case of PB. PB is by far the most prominent example of participatory democracy globally and in North America (Wampler & Hartz-Karp, 2012). PB is a notable example of coproduction, giving stakeholders opportunities to draw upon local knowledge, articulate proposals with neighbors, deliberate priorities, and select—not just consult on—which proposals receive public funding. A large literature examines how PB deepens participation by the poor, increases efficiency, and redistributes resources (Lerner, 2014; Wampler, 2010).
Questions of contested politics, volunteer experience, and citizen–bureaucrat relationships suggest that there is a need to go beyond the functional design of PB institutions (e.g., how decentralized they are), to examine their micropolitics. Here, micropolitics is defined as the use of formal and informal powers to achieve goals within an organization or process, and to negotiate the general logics that guide each party’s behavior (Bacharach, Bamberger, & Sonnenstuhl, 1996; Blase, 1998). Micropolitical power is not embodied in authority but in social relations (Willner, 2011). A micropolitical analysis focuses on the practices that shape participant experience, highlights their underlying logics, and articulates conditions that might lead to more meaningful outcomes.
Case Study Setting and Methods
PBNYC began in 2011 and is co-conducted by city councilmembers and their staff, lead community organizations, and hundreds of volunteers. The 2016-2017 process engaged of 31 of New York City’s 51 councilmembers. A steering committee—with representatives from the Participatory Budgeting Project (an organization providing technical assistance to PB processes in North America), various community organizations, and district-level committees—codesigns rules along the way.
Each autumn, councilmembers host neighborhood assemblies in their districts, and thousands of New Yorkers pitch proposals for community projects. Each winter, volunteers work with city agencies to develop ideas into full-fledged proposals, and select some to appear on ballots. Each spring, constituents vote for the proposals that win PB funding.
As a member of the research board headed by the Urban Justice Center Community Development Project (CDP), I work with other researchers to hone key research questions, instruments, data collection, and analysis.
This interpretivist study included two distinct phases of inquiry (Stake, 1995). In the first phase, I draw upon rich quantitative and qualitative data sets from the first two cycles of PBNYC: survey data from neighborhood assemblies and voting periods, participant observations during neighborhood assemblies and budget delegate meetings, and semistructured interview notes and transcriptions with current and past budget delegates.
Between 2012 and 2014, the research board collected more than 22,000 surveys, hundreds of interviews, and observation field notes on both experiences with PB and potential barriers to participation. In 2015, the board collected another 22,000 surveys. Given limited resources, it analyzed 7,420 of these surveys, chosen randomly. The survey results were published in reports in each of the first five cycles. 2
I also draw upon notes and transcriptions from semistructured interviews conducted by other research board members (or their assistants) in 2014. Of these, 44 interviews were conducted with then–current budget delegates, and 30 were conducted with past budget delegates. For these interviews, protocol questions included how participants first got involved and what they largely saw as strengths and weaknesses of PB.
Through discussions of these interview data with both researchers and community members, the research board came to prioritize city agency–budget delegate interactions for further investigation.
In the second phase of my inquiry, I conducted 25 additional interviews with PB participants and allies, including outreach staff and representatives of all city agencies involved in PBNYC, in 2014 and 2015. New interview protocols were developed with the research board. These protocols included questions on how successful proposals are evaluated. 3 I interviewed representatives from the following agencies: arts and cultural affairs, environmental protection, health, libraries, parks and recreation, public housing, public transit, sanitation, school construction, and transportation.
In addition, I attended PBNYC assemblies and events between 2011 and 2017, during both phases of the inquiry. I coded observation and interview data according to themes, engaging in several iterations of fieldwork and data analysis. I not only read analytical memos by other research board members, based on the same budget delegate interviews, but I also reviewed original notes and transcripts myself (Miles & Huberman, 1994).
New, Contested Roles for Everyday Constituents
PBNYC has broadened some notions of stakeholdership, engaging traditionally disenfranchised constituents in the city (Su, 2012). According to survey data, constituents from traditionally marginalized subpopulations participated in PB at much higher rates than in traditional elections in every cycle thus far. Notably, half of 2014 PB voters had never worked with others on a community issue before. One third were foreign born. In one district, more than two thirds of distributed ballots were in languages other than English (Kasdan, Markman, & Covey, 2014). Almost one quarter of PB voters in 2015 had a barrier to voting in regular elections, largely because of age or lack of U.S. citizenship (Kasdan & Markman, 2015).
PB has also expanded the contours of participation, to include not just voting but also ideation, research, proposal development, and public outreach. The most intensive phase of the PBNYC process is winter—after autumn neighborhood assemblies in which residents pitch thousands of project ideas, and before spring votes determining winning projects. During this phase, hundreds of New Yorkers—called budget delegates—devote many thoughtful hours to articulating community needs and priorities, and using these priorities to decide which projects appear on ballots. They spend months volunteering to sift through constituents’ ideas, conducting research and visiting proposed project sites, and developing ideas into full-fledged proposals. Many of these activities are time-intensive and challenging, involving deliberations and negotiations with both city agencies and other constituents. Along the way, they learn about municipal budgeting, intricate city feasibility codes, and technical funding criteria; many conduct de facto cost-benefit or cost-effectiveness analyses. They grapple with difficult decisions in allocating limited resources across neighborhoods.
Budget delegates interviewed spoke of the need for training on governmental budgeting and urban planning. City agency representatives, who help to define which project proposals are “feasible” and “appropriate,” figured prominently in interviews and shaped participants’ experiences in profound ways.
Delegates stated that city agencies were sometimes difficult to work with because, first, many representatives were slow to respond to inquiries and, second, so many organically developed project proposals were deemed ineligible. For instance, one constituent complained that “the [agency] is not responsive and it took almost a year to do a walk-through with them and even then we didn’t go through every [location suggested]” (January 2014). Another delegate lamented, “Agencies are too vague and don’t allow the team to change their proposal to be realistic and implementable” (March 2014). Third, other delegates felt frustrated by the lack of coordination between agencies, or because the same project idea—for example, a greenroof—might involve different agencies, depending on who owned the parcel of land. Several delegates spoke about struggles to build new community gardens on identified vacant lots: [PB] wasn’t really impactful . . . We searched . . . a number of areas; some areas weren’t feasible and the areas we chose were under [two agencies] . . . It became very difficult . . . because of all the agencies involved. (January 2014)
Another delegate similarly noted, [The agencies] have the power to say if they will give the money to the project . . . [like] with the second proposal I worked on about a community garden that was going to be built in a public housing facility. They agreed to do it, the City Council agreed to do it, but it broke at the level of the city agency without further explanation. (April 2014)
Overall, many delegates suggested that agencies rejected their proposals because of technicalities, rather than collaborating with them to make the project feasible. As one delegate recounted, “It’s a jurisdictional nightmare. All the agencies . . . say, ‘It’s not our problem, talk to [this one, that one].’ So, a lot of them know more than they’re willing to let on, I think” (January 2014).
Delegates wanted more specific criteria and guidelines for city agency decisions to help them develop better proposals, but they also asked for more dialogue overall. They requested an “appeals process . . . we felt the agency misunderstood or misrepresented the projects” (March 2014). Budget delegates did not view agency representatives as neutral parties but as simultaneous facilitators and gatekeepers with distinct stakeholder interests.
Cumulatively, these tensions speak to the relative lack of collaborative coproduction and deliberation between city agencies and constituents. Interactions largely remain focused on rejection or approval, rather than codesign. Consequently, even as PB has succeeded in engaging traditionally marginalized constituents, the contours of the constituents’ new roles in coproduction remain contested.
City Agencies and Micropolitics
Combining the views of participants above with those of city agency representatives highlights the micropolitics in the budget delegates’ experiences. The city agencies participating in PBNYC did not interact with constituents in monolithic ways. Some dynamics of participation align well with Vigoda’s (2002) types of “public administration-citizen interactions.” Vigoda’s heuristic articulates how each of these types is multidimensional and shapes a different subject position for citizens (Fischer, 2006), that is, as clients/consumers in the responsiveness model and as partners in collaboration.
Most of the agency–participant interactions aligned with Vigoda’s responsiveness category. Some agencies prepared helpful flyers for budget delegates, including typical projects eligible for PB funds. Several agencies’ presentations graphically dimmed more ambitious projects, as to manage PB participant expectations. Later in the cycle, after project proposals were developed and before voters determined which would be funded, some of the agencies also conducted outreach on behalf of the PB process. The tendency for projects selected to fall within traditional agency missions underlines the difficulty of implementing policies perceived as “mission-extrinsic”—even when they could also be characterized as “contextual” policies, through which agencies can fulfill their primary missions (Durant, Thomas, Brown, & McClellan, 1986; Rosenbloom, 2014; Wilson, 1989).
One agency, however, stood out as enthusiastically devoting significant staff time and resources to the PB process. Greater community participation was seen as part of their agency mission, broadly conceived. Thus, the representative claimed, “We could not not get involved.” This agency did not track whether specific agency-related projects won PB votes but simply worked to promote PB overall.
In PBNYC, no agency consistently engaged constituents in collaborative or “merely” responsive ways; some that attempted to contain or almost discourage PB delegates’ demands 1 year, for instance, moved onto enthusiastically develop project proposals the next.
Agencies also engaged different constituents in different ways—debating the strengths and weaknesses of various ideas with some delegates dialogically, and avoiding such conversations with other delegates.
In other words, all of the agencies’ interactions with participants spanned more than one of Vigoda’s categories. Their micropolitical practices remain relational, dependent upon both agencies and constituents involved. Two practices in particular—balancing local knowledge with technical expertise and negotiating contested politics—speak to tensions faced by all of the city agencies.
Balancing Local Knowledge With Technical Expertise
In interviews, a number of city agency representatives spent considerable time asserting that PB promises to be a great political, democratic experiment, but that they work in an exceptional policy arena in which local knowledge plays little role; technical expertise reigns supreme. At first glance, such statements corroborated budget delegates’ frustrations with city agencies, and with their impressions that agency representatives devalued their perspectives and stonewalled them. Yet, in interviews, representatives pointed to a range of conditions that shaped their ability to meet alongside PB imperatives. For instance, agencies varied greatly by organizational structure and funding streams (especially regarding the level of government funding them).
City agency representatives acknowledged that PB allowed community members to identify local priorities, and to draw upon local knowledge (Scott, 1998). One representative, for instance, stated that “the community is good about identifying the need and saying, ‘Yes, this is a really dangerous [spot]’” (August 2014). Different constituents drew upon different bodies of local knowledge in their deliberations; for example, youth budget delegates were especially adept at pinpointing locations that felt unsafe specifically during after-school hours.
Nevertheless, a far more common sentiment among city agency representatives concerned the relative lack of technical expertise of budget delegates, for example, “budget delegates should be put in a room and educated” (May 2014). A specific frustration concerned the cost of proposed projects, and what representatives felt were outsized expectations by PB delegates. “They need to understand what things are worth. You can’t get a [project] with this money, you can [only] get a . . . study” (May 2014). Another agency representative quipped, “I think the[ir] weakness is [a] champagne taste with a beer pocketbook” (August 2014). In those cases, these bureaucrats felt that they were easily villainized, and that the PB process punished the messengers of high cost figures.
Representatives thus repeatedly asked for more participant education before meetings with them. As one agency representative stated, “These are the relative costs of certain things . . . To build a new sewer costs this . . . much per foot” (May 2014).
Over the past few years, however, budget delegate training has improved, and representatives, too, have prepared helpful presentations on eligibility criteria. Thus, the most common mistakes—thinking that electronic tablets are capital eligible, for instance, when the city rules that they are not—are now largely avoided. Furthermore, even agency representatives who complained that the PB process felt like “a waste of time” enjoyed this educative role, conversing with well-versed policy “geeks” (May 2014).
Reports of some deliberation with delegate groups have become more common. One reported, “In this case, it was obvious the greenroof would come through us and not [the Department of Environmental Protection] because it was on our property. The delegates already knew that much” (August 2014). Another stated that by the third year, Groups . . . came to us with projects laid out and with details of the project and the specifications of the project. I think the more homework they do, the better. And we . . . also have that information for them; we were able to show up to the meeting with cost stuff and have a much better discussion. (July 2014)
Other common frustrations involved technical details of eligibility and coordination that were difficult for lay constituents to grasp, and that could not be covered in city- or borough-wide trainings. For instance, several representatives stated that they could not work on certain improvements—building repairs, intersections, gardens, and so on—because, for instance, “It’s actually adjacent to a highway; it’s a combination of state land, park land, [and an agency] facility” (August 2014). Other representatives complained that their employers were technically not agencies, but authorities, and that constituents did not understand the intricacies of how they worked differently.
There thus remain questions regarding how much “typical” constituents should be expected to know, to participate in PB. To what extent should budget delegates—many of them volunteering amid holding one or more full-time jobs, and many of them from traditionally marginalized constituencies—limit their proposals to ones that perfectly fit individual agencies’ respective criteria? One former volunteer facilitator, a high-level professional, lamented that the PB process was quite intimidating even for her (September 2015). These questions are inextricably tied to equity; after all, well-educated and well-resourced constituents may well be the ones to master technical criteria more quickly (Su, 2017).
Negotiating Contested Politics
A related tension concerned the disparate ways in which representatives portrayed their relationship to contested politics. In deliberations on which project ideas should move forward, agency representatives expressed concern over constituents’ abilities to deliberate and make wise choices, especially when different constituents might have different views on community needs and priorities.
In keeping with technocratic discourse around policy making, many of the agency interviewees asserted that they are apolitical: “We have no vested interest in any of the projects that are being voted on or . . . discussed . . . I don’t want to give any information that would . . . alter plans” (May 2014). These interviewees also stated that they are “not really interested in taking their money to do things we’re supposed to be doing. So they were all, at the end of the day, mostly pleasant interactions, if they had issues” (May 2014). This representative continued, “To be honest, I’d say spend your money on other things, just tell me what you need done, and we’ll go fix them if it’s an issue.” Such statements, while friendly, also worked to keep delegate expectations contained. They dovetail well with scholars’ findings that regulators “feared commitment to ideas or decisions reached by non-expert . . . stakeholders,” as inevitably distorting definitions of the “public good” (Bryer, 2013, p. 264).
Likewise, other agency representatives spoke about how PB might encourage rent-seeking, citing examples where a small group of active constituents might end up with “millions of dollars” to build “their own clubhouse,” rather than a facility to serve a broader range of residents; “that’s a waste of money . . . And what you had was the groups that bang on the table the loudest, won . . . They beat out, quite frankly, other projects that were more beneficial” (May 2014). Because of this, “we would be really hesitant to support a program that put a lot of money into it because . . . there’s a lot of passion involved, and a lot of competing interests” (May 2014). Agency representatives also stated that contested politics emphasize certain, “sexier” projects (new buildings rather than repairs, for instance) and unrealistic, shorter timelines. In these cases, agency representatives did not necessarily speak to greater outreach and training for marginalized constituents as alternative approaches. Rather, they emphasized the extent to which they had the public interest in mind in doing their jobs. Their remarks also implied that there are clear, objective ways to define such the “public interest.”
One (noneducational) agency representative, for instance, cited inequalities in political participation in his reasoning: I think PB is a good process . . . in theory . . . but especially in the education committee, only . . . already really well-organized [groups] were able to get parents to come out and vote and have the time to be budget delegates and get involved. The schools that weren’t organized weren’t able to do that, though [their] needs are, you know, [dire] needs. (May 2014)
In such cases, representatives viewed themselves as conducting objective needs assessments, acting as neutral arbiters of public needs, and helping to protect constituents without the resources to lobby for projects at so many evening meetings. The agency representatives’ aversion to contested politics could be seen as an attempt to protect “quiet wheels” from proverbial “squeaky” ones that “get the grease.” This view of contested politics denigrates disagreements as inevitably destructive and corrupt.
Yet, in doing so, they risk sidelining not just “dirty politics” but constructive, deliberative arguments as well. Participants grapple with difficult choices regarding community needs, such as prioritizing flood prevention catch basins or improved playgrounds for disabled children. In neighborhood assemblies, participants often disagree on their community needs; some noted that they learned about others’ needs and changed their minds about favorite proposals during these disagreements. One youth delegate commented, “I do . . . miss the people getting heated, ‘I want this project,’ ‘No, I want this project’ . . . I miss that; [that] whole friendly competition is cool” (March 2014). Participants also construct proposals that speak to current political moments. Three recent ballot items, for instance, focus on portable showers for homeless neighbors, bystander/“upstander” trainings on “how to respond to increased harassment and hate crimes” during President Trump’s administration, and workshops for parents addressing racial segregation in schools. 4 In these debates, conscientious constituents might respectfully disagree on top priorities and still have constructive discussions.
Furthermore, some issues framed as “technical” by public agency representatives looked like political issues to participants. For example, participants regularly asked for closed stairwells in certain highly trafficked, public buildings to be reopened. In response, agency representatives stated that reopening the stairwells was impossible, because they would then technically have to build an elevator as well, as to be compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act. The latter would be too expensive. To the agency representative, this was an unfortunate situation she resigned to. One budget delegate, however, claimed the agencies “seemed to make up data compared to research that we had done. For example, [they made] disingenuous claims that a project wasn’t possible due to the Americans With Disabilities Act, when that wasn’t really true” (March 2014). To this delegate, the agencies might have deemed the project feasible if they looked harder for alternative solutions, or if constituents with disabilities had more political power.
Observations of PBNYC deliberations suggest that city agencies are right to be wary of power inequalities among constituents. Nevertheless, a reliance on a solely technocratic approach relies on cost-effectiveness models and evaluative frameworks to give us a “correct” answer to the question of who (and what) best represents our public interest. Participants implied that sometimes, there is no one right answer; deliberations can facilitate generative conflicts, exercises in incorporating different worldviews, as well as competing and potentially overlapping interests, in decision making. In such cases, a consensus on a “best” project might even seem suspect, as consensus often serves as a mark for domination.
Managed Participation in an Era of Austerity
Together, the micropolitical practices of emphasizing technical knowledge and avoiding contested politics contributed to a model of managed participation. This model appears collaborative at first glance, with binding decisions and substantive conversations between agency representatives and constituents. However, it ultimately constructs participants as citizen-consumers, rather than coproducers, in PB.
Agency representatives emphasized the need to fund programming and repairs amid shrinking budgets. Representatives reported feeling overworked and underresourced; as a result, PB did not feel like worthwhile or important to them, unless it garnered results in the form of additional funds (winning projects associated with their respective agency): “We don’t want to take our colleagues away from their regular responsibilities and jobs with this if it feels like it’s not going anywhere” (May 2014).
It is thus notable that with each cycle, a greater number of city agencies have embraced the PB process—on their own terms, emphasizing existing plans. One interviewee stated that as “projects take so long . . . it’s better to have an existing project cause it’s further along in design and there’s a potential for them to have that ribbon-cutting” (August 2014). Furthermore, “Existing capital projects are . . . more attractive than projects [constituents] conceived on their own . . . so we come to them with projects we know—that are capital, that we can do” (August 2014).
This approach appeared to resonate with several agencies because PB allows them to address budget shortfalls. As one representative declared, “So we try to think about projects that maybe have smaller funding gaps, not a twenty-million-dollar project that needs fifteen million dollars. Something that needs a few hundred thousand” (August 2014).
Another representative emphasized the context of austerity: For every dollar that we spend, we probably could spend another ten dollars . . . to actually meet our needs. So . . . we’re able to spend money [on bigger repairs,] whereas the [PB] discretionary projects are . . . very helpful . . . [for] “quality-of-life” [projects] that, you know, we normally would have trouble funding. (July 2014)
In fact, one interviewee predicted that PB votes are “going to become that much more competitive because agencies are going to see now you’re looking at [many more millions of] dollars out there” (August 2014). Indeed, a representative from yet another agency stated that they have recently stepped up their outreach, and that “patrons understand and see the need . . . [here], and that unfortunately, the officials don’t always supply the funds” (July 2014).
This dynamic serves as an incentive for PB advocacy among city agencies: We hosted a lot of the events before the vote. We reached out to our patrons and . . . pushed them to become delegates, and work with the councilmembers. So our patrons were the ones that got involved. (July 2014)
Such efforts paid off; the representative boasted that “because of our community outreach, all of our projects were voted on . . . all of our projects that people proposed in PB came through” (July 2014). These statements suggest that to some agencies, PB represents an additional source of funds more than an exercise in democratic decision making.
Given such sentiments, the department of health representative’s key assertion—that PB advances their core mission—becomes especially striking: “We need to be there just to see what it was . . . an innovative mechanism for the community voice to really be heard . . . for funding, for programs” (July 2014). The department of health did not express more interest in projects tackling proximal health factors, like poor diet in a proposal for a mobile cooking lesson van traveling to farmers’ markets in low-income neighborhoods, than they did in projects tackling distal health factors, such as education. Because greater participation itself was part of their work, “indirectly, many of the projects that were selected and funded will have an overarching environmental systems change effect on public health” (July 2014).
The department of health’s approach throws other agencies’ micropolitical practices of managed participation into sharp relief. It also suggests that managed participation is not inevitable. Yet, if current patterns continue, the city agencies most likely to embrace PB will be those most likely to win funding for projects through the process—especially in the context of austerity. Indeed, agency representatives themselves stated that they “worked together [with delegates] to make sure that [projects] fit . . . our existing priorities in other ways” (July 2014). This fits well with previous research on agencies “weaponizing” reforms for unintended purposes (Durant, 2008).
At its extreme, this dynamic embodies almost a consumer choice model rather than a deliberative one, with representatives giving pitches for PB funds, and telling delegates exactly what projects need funding in their neighborhoods. Some city agency representatives made statements, such as “we jumped in right away, [be]cause we already had a well-oiled machine when it came to soliciting funds, so we just tailored that towards PB” (August 2014). Delegates might then go through the motions of “choosing” the very projects the state would have forwarded in the first place. In a telling detail, one city agency titled its public presentation (ready made) “Funding Opportunities” in the second cycle, 2012-2013. Since then, several other agencies have followed suit.
As both constituents and agency representatives become adept at navigating the PB process, it becomes tempting to simply forward whatever proposals they now know to be most palatable to city agencies, even when these proposals sideline the concerns and local knowledge that compelled them to participate in the first place. One budget delegate described a hypothetical but, to him, archetypal set of responses: “I want new street lights. My street lights aren’t broken, but I want prettier street lights” . . . That often doesn’t affect the quality of life for constituents as much as other things. But that’s often how those things get done because . . . funds are available for that purpose. (January 2014)
Some of these participants appear to have given up on changing budget allocations, demanding more from government, or working toward reforms, but have instead either dissented via exit (Hirschman, 1970) or succumbed to forces of neoliberal governmentality (Foucault, 1991; Hickey & Mohan, 2004). Should it really be the job of busy New Yorkers to “choose” which curbs should receive extensions to be safe, or which schools “ought” to get basic repairs, and by extension, which do not? In such a scenario, discussions regarding taxation and the shape and size of the figurative public budget pie are sidelined by competitive exercises determining the slices of the pie; in other words, macrobudgeting questions are put aside in favor of microbudgeting (Schick, 1988).
Discussion
For some budget delegates, PB is a profound, transformative experience. In interviews, formerly incarcerated youth relayed the trepidation and fear they felt in speaking to principals, school safety officers, and other authority figures (March 2013). Such students often attend policed and even militarized schools, and feel pushed out when they struggle on funds-dependent standardized exams (Alonso, Anderson, Su, & Theoharis, 2009). Some spoke about how they only experienced state institutions as surveilling and punitive—until they participated in PB. Indeed, traditionally marginalized constituents—such as Black and Latino youth of color—are often perceived as troublemakers rather than legitimate political stakeholders; ideally, PB gives such constituents a chance to not just lend a hand but also voice concerns and engage public institutions in substantive ways (Su, 2012).
In examining the challenges of such work, this article makes two theoretical contributions. First, it argues that together, the political participation, volunteerism, and public administration literatures can help researchers to better analyze and construct new practices for volunteer recruitment and retention. This interdisciplinary approach brings into focus the ecosystem of actors shaping volunteer experiences and brings in new players who may have previously been neglected in analyses of participation (Parkinson & Mansbridge, 2012). This has implications for participatory frameworks outside of democratic experiments as well; for nonprofits seeking long-term volunteer participants, for instance, this contribution points to the importance of not just paid staff and supervisors but also colleagues and other informal facilitators-gatekeepers in shaping volunteer experiences.
Second, the article articulates how volunteer experiences are shaped by the micropolitics between them and other actors. Micropolitical practices can encourage or discourage sustained participation, and this analytical focus is helpful as more nonprofits and state institutions alike become more participatory, and volunteers do more than carry out service or “checkbook” participation. The micropolitical dynamics between participants and agencies—especially the balance between local and technical knowledge and negotiations over contested politics—combined with a context of austerity to forward a model of managed participation, in which constituents are constructed as citizen-consumers.
Managed participation embodies contradictory dynamics: Several agency representatives’ remarks reflect what Stone (1997) called the “rationality project,” a framework in which policy making is rational and scientific, leaving little room for constituent participation. Yet the agencies’ actions also revealed political savvy regarding outreach for voting, for instance, that deviates from purely technocratic practice. In extreme cases of managed participation, constituents “shop” for public projects using PB funds. Rather than a process in which constituents present agencies with their community needs, several agencies pitched to delegates’ hyper-local, large-scale projects already under way and in need of additional funding. Representatives presented these as giving budget delegates “extra bang for [their] buck.”
Table 1 summarizes key findings regarding the ideal collaborative coproduction and managed participation models of PB.
Micropolitical Tensions in Constituent–Bureaucrat Dynamics.
Note. PB = participatory budgeting.
Together, these dynamics render it more difficult for participatory institutions like PBNYC to retain volunteer participants. In keeping with existing research on how training, incentives, and social recognition improve volunteer satisfaction and retainment (Tang et al., 2010), budget delegates interviewed in this study also cited substantive training, connections with community members (especially those whom they would not typically socialize with, outside of PB), and leadership roles as key benefits of PB (March 2013). However, whereas past research has documented that some organizational issues—like mismatches between volunteers’ interests and assignments—lead to less satisfaction (Wilson, 2012), the reasons for participant frustrations in PBNYC appear to be more subtle. Beyond matching volunteer interests with appropriate tasks, the micropolitical practices shaping how participants might collaboratively tackle these tasks also matter.
In interviews with past budget delegates, interviewees repeatedly cited time constraints and dynamics with city agencies as their greatest challenges in PBNYC. However, time was not always a decisive constraint; according to some interviewees, volunteering in PBNYC (no matter how time- or labor-intensive) would be worthwhile as long as they could really “make a difference” (February-April 2014). The chance to make a difference served as an incentive to participate deeply, and to devote dozens of hours to proposal development. Some past budget delegates stated that they did not participate again because they did not “succeed”—the project ideas they felt were most important were rejected by city agencies and did not appear on ballots, let alone win funding. To better retain volunteer budget delegates, then, participatory institutions must both broaden definitions of success (e.g., ensure that success is defined more broadly than whether the specific project that a delegate worked on wins funding) and (re)shape the participants’ experiences (e.g., ensure that ballot items better reflect community priorities alongside agency prerogatives). Participants wished to meaningfully contribute to coproduction; they were not satisfied with roles as citizen-consumers “shopping” for projects to fund.
This raises practical implications for democratic experiments, and for nonprofits that adopt participatory decision-making frameworks. For constituents to be true coproducers rather than citizen-consumers, PB must engage city agencies (and other de facto facilitators—gatekeepers) not as value-neutral referees but as political stakeholders. This may seem commonsensical in retrospect; however, elected officials, grassroots organizations (such as community groups focused on organizing low-income residents; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender [LGBT] constituents; and immigrants), academics, and civic leaders were included in the original rules-writing of PBNYC, but city agency representatives were not. Notably, when Boston started a youth-driven PB process in 2013, 2 years after New York, they engaged agencies and garnered their buy-in from the beginning. With strong words from the Mayor, this set a tone where collaboration was part of the agencies’ job, not an addition to their job; their coordinator stated that they did this because of PBNYC’s experience (August 2017).
Indeed, past studies of neighborhood councils also suggest that support from political leadership and capacity building for all parties are necessary for collaboration (Cooper, 2008). Learning and design forums, in which both participants and service departments seek to recognize common goals, appear to be especially helpful for building trust (Kathi & Cooper, 2005). Unlike the agencies in PBNYC, the service departments in the neighborhood councils studies voluntarily agreed to work with neighborhood councils; a crucial challenge, then, lies in getting agencies to participate in such learning forums in the first place.
In New York, a growing set of nonprofits—resource ally groups, which work with everyday constituents as liaisons and translators between constituents and government—were pivotal to successful constituent-agency dialogues. (Examples in PBNYC include CDP and the Center for Urban Pedagogy.) These groups are not membership based and do not represent specific constituencies; rather, they help lay constituents understand planning regulations or architectural blueprints, or translate public focus group data and technical documents into accessible, readable documents in multiple languages, with smart graphic designs. Without such experience, agency representatives had difficulty knowing the types of data visualization, exercises, and language that would facilitate deliberative conversations with volunteers. Resource allies, then, can serve as powerful interlocutors. Because they focus on process rather than specific project outcomes, both participants and city agencies see them as trustworthy collaborators.
Interestingly, one representative stated that she began trying to produce materials in nontechnocratic terms after serving as a budget delegate herself, in her home neighborhood and working on a committee that worked with an agency other than the one that employed her. She spoke to dramatically changing her mind about budget delegates’ capacities, and the PB process itself (July 2014). This suggests that alongside work by resource allies, other forms of critical training (such as constituent shadowing or mock processes) may be helpful for agency representatives and budget delegates.
Promising strands of future research include analyses of how and why micropolitical practices change within an institution (or a process such as PB), as well as impacts from an ecosystem perspective that includes more than budget delegates, city agencies, and resource allies. For instance, when a former budget delegate became upset that a higher income Parent Teacher Association (PTA) aggressively sought to win PB funds, she founded a new resource ally nonprofit, PTA link that helps lower income parent associations around the city navigate bureaucratic processes. Such promising developments show how, in an era of networked governance, the antecedents, experiences, and impacts of volunteer participation span across institutions.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author(s) received financial support for this article from PSC-CUNY grant # 67544-00 45.