Our final webinar of the Autumn semester took place on Wednesday 10 December with Gareth Mace (Freelance Researcher) who presented his PhD research on “How and why does Participatory Budgeting (PB) improve local democracy”.
In this episode we explored:
- How Participatory Budgeting strengthens local democracy by building relationships between communities and local governments
- Why design and embeddedness matters in shaping outcomes
- Comparative insights from case studies in Central Java and Scotland
Due to technical issues, there is no recording available for this session. We apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.
Abstract: Participatory Budgeting (PB) has grown rapidly as part of a range of democratic innovations with the aim of reinvigorating participatory democracy during a time of declining trust in institutions. However, questions remain about the potential of these instruments to contribute to transformative change. Against this background, the objective of this thesis is to investigate how and why PB improves local democracy. The study contributes to the literature by integrating three important aspects of PB — design, embeddedness and outcomes — which have been predominantly studied in isolation or limited combinations in existing research.
The research utilised a subnational paired comparison design centred around four specific case studies: two in Central Java, Indonesia (the cities of Surakarta and Semarang) and two in Scotland, United Kingdom (the local authorities of Fife and Moray), where PB has been nationally legislated. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 56 PB participants, organisers and civil society stakeholders. These responses were triangulated with observation notes and photography from field visits and other available secondary data.
Key findings include that PB is helping to bring communities and local governments closer together and that the mechanism brings modest results in responsiveness to community needs. However, a greater scale and ambition is needed to strengthen citizens’ perceptions of local governments. A relationship between PB design, embeddedness and PB outcomes was found in which improvements to design improved embeddedness and vice versa, and outcomes such as community-level change were more apparent.
In generating evidence across multiple case studies in two highly contrasting country settings in Europe and Asia, this thesis has developed a deeper understanding of how design and embeddedness factors interact and contribute to the improvement of government-community relations.
Gareth Mace is a researcher and practitioner focused on inclusive governance, civil society strengthening, and democratic renewal, with extensive experience in the international development sector across Asia, but with an increasing focus on finding solutions to the challenges faced by societies and states in the Global North. He is passionate about bridging research and practice for improved policymaking and social impact. He completed his PhD in June 2025, having begun in September 2021.