• Bologna
• context
• participation
• policy
• process
• Vienna

Participatory Budgeting (PB) has emerged as an innovative policy to engage citizens in decisional processes and address the complex challenges of contemporary transitions, such as social and environmental transformations. PB can be defined as a decision-making process that involves opening the mechanisms of the state to the direct and effective participation of the population in determining priorities and allocating public investment resources. Since its birth in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the end of the 1980s, PB has been implemented in many countries around the world, from North America to Asia, from Europe to Africa.
This thesis explores the processes of the PB initiatives in Vienna and Bologna, aiming to understand the factors that influence their development and outcomes. With a comparative approach, the research examines how these factors shape the design, implementation and evolution of PB practices in the two cities.
Vienna places the climate issue at the heart of its Participatory Budgeting (PB), with the primary aim of promoting a culture of ecological transition. The initiative, called Wiener Klimateam, invites residents from three districts each year to submit proposals that, following a selection process, are transformed into feasible projects.
Bologna, on the other hand, leverages the democratic potential of PB not around a single theme but to surface the most pressing issues within its various neighborhoods and address them. The process begins with Laboratori di Quartiere, where residents gather to discuss the priorities and challenges of their local area. This dialogue sets the foundation for a participatory process that also culminates in the realization of citizen-proposed projects.
The analysis is structured around a multidimensional framework that considers four critical variables: context, sovereignty, politics and policy. A mixed-methods methodology was adopted, combining qualitative and quantitative techniques, including interviews with key stakeholders, collaboration within a research team and an in-depth analysis of official documents and contextual data.
The findings reveal that the contextual factor plays a pivotal role in shaping the trajectories of PB in both cities, influencing their governance structures, inclusiveness and adaptability to local conditions. The comparison between Vienna and Bologna highlights how different socio-political environments, administrative traditions and levels of civic engagement affect the procedural dynamics of PB. By focusing on the processes rather than on effectiveness or impact, this study shows the critical mechanisms through which participatory governance tools are negotiated, contested and institutionalized within the phases of the policy.
This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the complexities of participatory governance, offering a complete view of the similarities and differences. It emphasizes the importance of tailoring PB processes to local realities while maintaining their core principles of inclusivity and transparency.
Further research should be performed in order to pursue more advanced objectives, building on the insights presented in this work, such as learning from these experiments in terms of participatory effectiveness and comprehending if participatory policies are the most suitable to tackle the challenges of the ecological transition and social justice.