Yves Cabannes

Participatory budgeting gives people real power to determine the future of their cities. It’s a democratic process where ordinary community members directly decide how to spend the public budget. It explicitly reaffirms the central place of collective deliberation for participatory democracy, and it also can contribute to the transformation of the city into urban commons. Though participatory budgeting was only born in 1989, it has since been practiced more than 2000 times in more than 45 countries around the world—groundbreaking success for a process that is one of the rare authentic democratic innovations in the past 30 years. In this book, Yves Cabannes offers examples from five continents of participatory budgeting in practice, outlining the successes and challenges of thirteen case studies from the United States, Brazil, France, Portugal, Spain, China, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Mozambique, and Cameroon. As much a best-of-guide as a how-to-manual for democratizing municipal financ...

This paper focuses on struggles for land by ordinary people in globalizing cities. By drawing on three cases in Istanbul, it explores the circumstances under which these struggles can be successful. It analyses the evolution of the self-built settlements of Ayazma, Yakacık and Hürriyet and their varied outcomes, from legalization to razing. Three conditions seem to explain why land titling was obtained in Yakacık and proved impossible elsewhere. One is specific to land ownership. The second reason revolves around the mediating role and political commitment of a district municipality, primarily through the engagement of one of its decision-makers in favour of poor residents. The third reason relates to the nature and form of Yakacık residents’ mobilization and organizations. All of these conditions are essential; none is sufficient individually. The difficulty of bringing all these conditions together at one time and in one place explains the exceptional nature of the case in point.

Participatory budgeting (PB) has been a major innovation in participatory governance worldwide, with more than 3,000 experiences listed across 40 countries. PB has also diversified over its 30 years, with many contemporary experiments (referred to as PBs) only tangentially related to the original project to “radically democratize democracy”. We propose a taxonomy to distinguish the logics currently underpinning PB in practice: political (for radical democratic change), good governance (to improve links between the public and citizens’ spheres), and technocratic (to optimize the use and transparency of public resources for citizens’ benefit). Illustrating these competing rationales through contemporary experiences, we reflect on the contributions of the good governance and technocratic frameworks to managerial and state modernization. Undoubtedly, these help explain PB’s growing attraction for proponents of the good governance agenda. However, rekindling PB’s promise for democratic d...

ABSTRACT Wherever living standards are high, local governments have played, and continue to play, a major role in their achievement – often the primary role. This can be seen in the wide range of responsibilities they have for infrastructure and services. They also generally have key roles in ensuring health and safety in buildings and enterprises, in disaster prevention and preparedness and in engaging with citizens and civil society. The pivotal involvement of local governments in implementing and ‘localising’ the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is rarely recognised or acted on by national governments and international agencies. This is also the case for much of the discussion on post-2015 sustainable development goals. The UN system and the official aid agencies and development banks fail to understand and thus to support the contributions of local governments, and even to acknowledge them as stakeholders. The focus is on goals and targets and not on who has to be empowered and supported to ensure these are met. There is a need to rethink goals and targets so that these focus on universal provision of basic services, on building local government capacity and commitment to such goals ensure their achievement, and to work with citizens and civil society in order to do so.

Après avoir souligné les motivations qui ont présidé à la réalisation du film Du Kene Ko, la cour en question}-, les spécificités de la démarche seront présentées. ... Les enseignements du film, tant en urbanisme qu'en sciences sociales ou en anthropologie visuelle, permettent ...

This paper describes the development of the participatory budgeting (PB) process in the rural villages and communities of the city of Chengdu in China between 2009 and 2012. During this period, more than 40,000 PB-funded projects were implemented in more than 2,300 communities. These projects addressed the growing divide between urban and rural development and increased security of land use rights, resulting in large improvements in the day-to-day lives of millions of villagers. But PB in Chengdu also introduced democratic changes at the local level through processes of deliberation and greater democratic autonomy for village residents. This paper describes the mechanisms through which PB operated locally, and discusses how the process has differed from other instances of PB in China, as well as its innovations in international terms. Despite its successes, PB in Chengdu faces some challenges, namely its expansion from village to township level, the permanent need for support from t...

For most small urban farmers, the lack of access to financing is a major bottleneck in their capacity to maintain and expand their activities, and more generally in the potential for scaling up affordable food production in cities. This paper reports on action research undertaken by local teams in 17 cities of different size in Latin America, Asia and Africa. In each city, the teams examined how urban farmers are financing their activities along the value chain, essentially with their own resources, what the gaps are between their needs and the existing practices of public and private institutions with regard to finance, and what mechanisms and innovations can help to close this gap. Financing is defined here as a complex, dynamic combination of resource mobilization, both monetary and non-monetary, plus savings, subsidies and credits.

Yves Cabannes is professor and Chair of Development Planning at the Development Planning Unit, University College London. For several years he was the convener of the UN-Habitat Advisory Group on Forced Evictions. His experience with issues related to public and low income housing began in the mid-1970s, then continued in Brazil where he worked at the end of the 1980s, in the aftermath of the dictatorship. Today he is one of the top specialists on issues related to the right to the city and urban social movements.

La promocion de la gobernabilidad local participativa, la erradicacion de la pobreza urbana y el mejoramiento de la gestion ambiental de las ciudades constituyen los ejes principales del PGU en su cuarta fase, junto con la construccion de la equidad social y de genero. Para impulsarlos, el PGU promueve el uso y distribucion equitativa y eficiente de los recursos y moviliza las capacidades e iniciativas de individuos, comunidades, organizaciones publicas, privadas y voluntarias y, fundamentalmente, de los gobiernos locales.

Harvard University Press selected and included in the recently released book “Studio works 12”, the works that some students realized in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 2005-2006 under my supervision, for their studio on participatory planning at local level. The groups worked on how to physically and socially blur the limits/frontiers between an improved favelas.