A companion to “Your Two Cents, Their Million.” That essay traced the campaign’s funding and the groups positioned to profit from it. This one weighs Measure 26-267 against the record of participatory budgeting in the country that invented it.
As Portland voters consider whether to turn over the power of the purse to any resident, they should be aware of the problems participatory budgeting’s founding cities faced. Those issues, in many cases, ended the experiment Measure 26-267’s supporters would encase in constitutional concrete here.
More than 7,000 cities worldwide have adopted participatory budgeting.1 That is the number the backers of Measure 26-267 put first, and they use it to settle the debate before it begins. The figure is a legitimate data point. Its source is not neutral, and the promoters have reason to define participatory budgeting broadly. They leave out a second figure, one that should weigh more heavily on a Portland voter. In Brazil, where the model originated, the number of cities with such programs dropped by more than half in a decade. Measure 26-267 would write this model into Portland’s charter just as evidence turns against it.
Paolo de Renzio, Paolo Spada, and Brian Wampler, the leading advocates of participatory budgeting, document its decline in their essay “Paradise Lost? The Crisis of Participatory Budgeting in Its Own Birthplace.” The essay draws on Spada’s longitudinal survey, which counts only Brazilian cities with more than 50,000 residents and programs that last at least two consecutive budget cycles. That rule separates a standing institution from a one-time event. By this measure, the number of such cities rose to 133 between 2001 and 2004, then fell to 58 by 2013–2016. Even Porto Alegre, where it began in 1989, now faces an uncertain future.2
The campaign’s 7,000 figure relies on a different counting method. The Participatory Budgeting World Atlas, the source of the larger number, reports more than 11,000 cases across 71 countries, yet it describes the Brazilian situation as a “huge crisis.”3 The two counts measure different things: one tallies every reported case using a broad definition; the other includes only lasting programs, and indicates that the model is in retreat. Both numbers date to the same period. The count the campaign cites traces to the 2019 World Atlas. The decline it leaves out extends through 2016, the last year a consistent survey covered Brazil’s programs. No survey since shows a recovery.
Portland’s version of participatory budgeting takes its name from Porto Alegre but little else. In Porto Alegre, residents governed a large share of the city’s investment budget, an actual transfer of fiscal authority.4 Brazilian cities are moving away from the redistributive model. Portland would keep the language, strip the substance, and freeze the 2 percent share in the city charter.
De Renzio, Spada, and Wampler cite three reasons for the decline. The first is especially relevant to Portland: participatory budgeting thrives when governments have discretionary, additional funds for resident-chosen projects. Without new money, the cost comes from other priorities, and the process becomes an empty exercise. In Brazil, that money dried up after 2000. Portland faces the same risk: Measure 26-267 would carve $16 million from existing services like parks and emergency response.5 The funding structure scholars identify as a failure case is now on Portland’s ballot.
The second reason is political, and here Portland draws the wrong lesson from the right diagnosis. In Brazil, participatory budgeting became the emblem of one party, Lula’s Workers’ Party. When the party won national power, it shifted focus. Centrist and conservative governments, having watched it serve as a partisan tool, avoided it. The program rose and fell with one party’s fortunes. In Portland, four of six councilors behind Measure 26-267 are members of the Democratic Socialists of America; the measure has the same single-faction origin. Portland’s solution is to entrench the program in the charter, so no future council can reduce or redirect the money.
Supporters are correct to argue that charter protections would shield the program from repeal, unlike Porto Alegre. But this trades one failure for another. Funding participatory budgeting from a fixed budget, as the scholars warn, forces new projects to come at the expense of existing services. Portland’s measure would do just that, making it permanent. A set-aside that cannot be reduced when revenue falls leaves other services to bear the cuts. Porto Alegre lost its program when discretionary money disappeared; Portland risks keeping the program and losing essential services.
The third problem is time itself. Participatory budgeting is most effective in its early, small-stage years. Over time, residents propose more than the budget can fund; unbuilt projects accumulate, interest wanes, and the cycle that sustained early enthusiasm stalls.
The United States offers its own precedent. New York City adopted citywide participatory budgeting by popular vote in 2018, suspended it during the pandemic, and returned with a smaller version in 2022. In its most recent cycle, only about 2 percent of adult New Yorkers participated.6 The largest such program in the U.S. draws turnout in the low single digits and has already been suspended. Portland now proposes to commit to it permanently.
None of this settles whether Portlanders should have more say over public money. The impulse behind participatory budgeting is serious, and the case for resident control does not disappear because the first attempt failed. Previous analysis showed that groups positioned to administer the program funded nearly all of this campaign,7 a reason for skepticism. The Brazilian record is another issue, independent of who profits. Even without vested interests, similar programs have not endured under the fiscal conditions Portland would write into law. Under Measure 26-267, the city would adopt the form its inventors see fading, the shape their research warns against. Now it proposes to lock $16 million annually into a program the city that invented it could not sustain. Porto Alegre has already shown how this ends.
Notes
1. Participatory Budgeting Project, “Learn About PB,” participatorybudgeting.org: “PB has spread to over 7,000 cities around the world.” The figure derives from the Participatory Budgeting World Atlas (2019).
2. Paolo de Renzio, Paolo Spada, and Brian Wampler, “Paradise Lost? The Crisis of Participatory Budgeting in Its Own Birthplace,” International Budget Partnership, November 25, 2019. Figures from Spada’s longitudinal survey, 1989–2016.
3. Participatory Budgeting World Atlas 2019 (Oficina), which reports more than 11,000 cases worldwide and 436 in Brazil while describing the Brazilian situation as a “huge crisis.”
4. On Porto Alegre’s origin (1989) and the size of its participatory budget under the Workers’ Party, see de Renzio, Spada, and Wampler, “Paradise Lost?” (note 2).
5. Measure 26-267 requires “at least 2% of the city’s adopted General Fund discretionary ongoing expenses,” estimated at $16.4 million in FY 2027–28. Multnomah County Voters’ Pamphlet, Measure 26-267 (multco.us).
6. 2018 NYC Charter Revision Commission, ballot Question 1; pandemic suspension via Gotham Gazette; participation (approximately 140,000 in the most recent cycle) via the NYC Civic Engagement Commission, “The People’s Money.”
7. “Your Two Cents, Their Million,” Academic Gadfly; campaign finance per Oregon Secretary of State, ORESTAR, committee “Community Budgeting for All.”
Cover image: adapted from a photo by Ganice, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.