Could the Big Society Network get more than they bargained for with participatory budgeting?

As David Cameron comes under fire from left and right for failing to present a clear vision of the ‘Big Society’, and a poll suggests that a majority of voters still haven’t heard of it, it’s interesting to look at what’s coming out of The Big Society Network, the independent-of-but-nonetheless-strikingly-close-to-government organisation which aims to demonstrate practical manifestations of the idea.

One of the Network's most intruiging new projects is ‘Your Local Budget’. Announced last month, the project aims to work in partnership with a few bold councils to pioneer new ways for citizens to get involved in taking spending decisions.

Your Local Budget is the latest UK incarnation of Participatory Budgeting (PB). Originally developed in Porto Allegre, Brazil, PB now refers to a wide variety of approaches which give citizens a degree of control over public spending decisions. In the UK, there’s a growing use of PB, mainly in the form of ‘community kitties’ where relatively small pots of money are set aside by local authorities for direct allocation. For example, Tower Hamlets’ You Decide programme allocated £2.4 million in the first half of 2009 at a series of deliberative events.

The Big Society Network’s programme, which it is running in partnership with NESTA and the PB Unit, (an independent charity which acts as the UK’s centre of expertise on PB) is even bolder. It seeks to offer participants a role in setting priorities for Local Authorities’ entire budgets rather than merely limited pots. This is a huge, and potentially promising advance for PB in the UK. But this broad scope also makes it more limited in power. Instead of making direct decisions on spending, participants will necessarily be limited to an influencing role.

There are other challenges too. As the network freely acknowledges, part of the value of this project is to help to steer, and build legitimacy for, the heavy cuts which local authorities will be called on to make. But ‘we’re going to take slash something, what do you think it should be?’ is hardly the most empowering question the public could be faced with. And, as I’ve written before, building public engagement around cuts is liable to be divisive and acrimonious, with a risk that people could end up pointing the axe towards tabloid bogey-men, be they asylum seekers or benefit claimants. It will take careful facilitation to ensure that participants are given spaces to reflect on and critically examine their own views before they reach a conclusion

 While its focus on engaging community and local decision-making makes it seem a comfortable fit, in some ways PB is a surprising choice of venture for the Big Society Network. When PB was developed in Porto Allegre it was intended to redress the imbalance of political power. By giving poor people direct access to decision-making, it led to a major increase in the proportion of the state budget that was spent on poor areas, leading to a one-third increase in access to running water and a doubling of access to sewerage. In essence, it gave the disadvantaged a new resource to challenge elites in both the state and the public sector. It’s difficult to believe that the aims of this project are quite so radical: it’s hard to discount critics who see the Big Society project as “social action without having to worry about social justice”. But it holds out the tantalising prospect of form following function: with the deprived communities who are being hit hardest by budget cuts using what power they can muster through PB to challenge them.

No doubt much more about the project will become clear when Paul Twivey, founder and CEO of the Big Society Network speaks at the PB Unit’s conference in London on 9 November. For the interested, there are still a few tickets left, and it promises to be a memorable event, to say the least.