Paris participatory budget (Budget Participatif, since 2014)

Background

Participatory budgeting began in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989, and spread to European cities in the 2000s, often in small districts with modest sums. Paris had experimented at arrondissement level — research on the 20th arrondissement found few working-class residents at meetings and no social-justice criteria in allocation. In 2014 Anne Hidalgo, newly elected mayor, made a city-wide participatory budget a flagship of her programme, pledging that residents would decide 5% of the city's investment budget, about €426 million, over the 2014–2020 term. By the sums involved, it was large by international standards for a process of this kind.

How it is governed

• Who can take part. Ideas must come from Parisians, individually or collectively — associations, neighbourhood collectives, neighbourhood councils, or parents and pupils of a school. Proposals must serve the general interest, fall within the city's competences and be capital (investment) spending.
• Scales. Projects can concern the whole of Paris, a single arrondissement or a specific address.
• Cycle. Residents submit ideas online on the city's decider.paris.fr platform and at town-hall meetings and workshops. City departments check legal and technical feasibility and cost, and similar ideas are combined into projects. A public vote, online and in person, selects winners, which are then built by city services. Ideas could, for example, be submitted until 3 February 2025 for the following vote.
• Equity measures. A share of the budget is reserved for the city's priority "working-class neighbourhoods", and associations in those areas run ideation workshops, exploratory walks and help with online submission.
• Boundary changes. Large public-space works — squares, pedestrianisation, greening, cycle lanes, wider pavements — are no longer eligible and go through a separate "Embellir votre quartier" programme.

Economy and public goods

According to the city's ten-year review, since 2014 the participatory budget has received more than 21,000 ideas, produced 1,345 winning projects and led to more than 3,400 completed worksites, for a total of €768 million. Of that, €263 million (34%) went to working-class neighbourhoods. The city now presents a quarter of its investment as built and decided with residents, a wider category than the participatory budget alone. In 2015, for example, submissions concerned above all the living environment, followed by the environment and transport, then culture, education and youth, sport and solidarity.

Conflict and disputes

• Turnout and representativeness. About 143,000 people voted in 2024, in a city of over two million residents. Participation is higher among the already engaged; the city's outreach in priority neighbourhoods is a response to this.
• What counts as participatory. Critics question whether projects are genuinely new or would have been funded anyway, and point out that city services filter, merge and cost ideas before the vote, giving the administration substantial agenda control. The removal of large public-space projects in favour of a separate programme narrowed what residents vote on.
• Delivery. Winning projects depend on municipal implementation capacity; the gap between 1,345 winning projects and over 3,400 worksites reflects that many projects are split across sites and delivered over several years.
• Evidence gaps. Systematic, independent evaluation of who submits, who votes and how projects compare with ordinary capital spending is limited; French-language commentary has noted the lack of profiling of submitters against the population.

Outcomes

The programme has run almost every year since 2014 and continued into Mayor Hidalgo's second term from 2020; the city counted the 2025 edition as its eleventh. In 2015 it received 5,115 project submissions; in 2024 about 143,000 voters chose 121 winning projects from 235 on the ballot. It has made participatory budgeting a normal part of Paris's capital planning, and its scale — hundreds of millions of euros — has been cited by other large cities that adopted the model. The concentration of spending in working-class neighbourhoods (34% over ten years) suggests that equity rules can shape outcomes even when turnout is socially uneven.

Lessons for institution design

1. Scale changes politics. A participatory budget worth a meaningful share of investment attracts attention and administrative effort that small pots do not.
2. Administrative filtering is unavoidable but should be visible. Feasibility review and merging of ideas give officials power; publishing reasons for rejections and mergers helps keep it accountable.
3. Earmarks can counter skewed turnout. Reserving funds for poorer areas shapes outcomes regardless of who votes.
4. Boundaries move. Taking whole categories of projects out of the process is a quiet way to reduce residents' power; such changes deserve the same scrutiny as the budget itself.

Further reading

• Ville de Paris, "10 ans de Budget Participatif"
• Ville de Paris, Budget Participatif
• Wikipédia, "Budget participatif" (section on Paris)