Effective Participation: Examples of Community Engagements in Participatory Budgeting from Bangladesh

Rahman A¹*

1. Unnayan Shamanay, Shahbag, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Participation is a process through which stakeholders influence and share control over priority setting, policymaking and recourse allocation. Most policies are taken in countries like Bangladesh without the benefit of citizens’ involvement, to the detriment of communities. However, decisions are always better if they can be brought to the decision-making table as they know better their communities than agencies that are supposedly taking care of them. Citizens mostly turn to themselves and neighbours for help when they are in stress. They also know how to live in a community for generation after generation making best use of the social capital which may be in abundance in a locality provided they cultivate social networking and solidarity.

Participation is, however, not always effective. In can be passive, co-optive and as well as ditched if it is not property understood and nurtured. One may thus come across many types of participation. The following table indicates typology of participation.

Bangladesh is indeed a social laboratory where all kinds of experimentations, mostly by civil society/non-governmental organisations are going on. As a result this country has been showing interesting signs of social development on the grounds despite many negative images at the macro level. Besides micro level community engagements, Bangladesh has also experienced a number of innovations in the field of participatory budgeting. Examples include Sirajgonj Local Government Development Fund Project (SLGDF) where central and local governments have been promoting participatory planning, decision-making and monitoring of local infrastructures, pre- and post-budget participation of stakeholders facilitated by a non-government research institute Shamunnay, public hearing on local budget facilitated by a NGO called Hunger Project, grassroots level initiatives Union Parishads (local government) on MDGs monitoring through civic engagements.

The proposed paper will try to document all the above experimentations and distill lessons learned using creative human stories and illustrations. The objective of this exercise is to find out replicable models of participatory budgeting for other communities as well.

The outline of the paper will be as follows:

1. Conceptualising effective participation
2. Conceptualising participatory budgeting
3. Global examples of participatory budgeting
4. Examples of participatory budgeting from Bangladesh
5. Lessons learnet from global and Bangladesh experimentations
6. Conclusion

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