Two parts of the same state imported the same Brazilian model. One quietly wound it down. The other wrote it into law and hit its target in 2023.
Reviewed and corrected by Jez Hall, Shared Future CIC, 14 August 2026.
In 2000, a group of British practitioners travelled to Porto Alegre to see participatory budgeting for themselves. Residents there had been deciding directly how a share of the city budget was spent since 1989, and the results were hard to argue with: paved roads, water connections and schools in districts that had been skipped for decades.
By 2008 that had become government policy. Under the New Labour government, the Department for Communities and Local Government funded a national support agency, the PB Unit, and set a target of participatory budgeting in every local authority area in England by 2012. A white paper, Communities in Control, backed it up, and from April 2009 councils carried a legal Duty to Involve. Pilots ran in dozens of places.
On paper it had everything: money, a delivery body, a legal duty and a deadline.
The English programme lost momentum after 2010 and the PB Unit's funding ran out in 2012.
The reason usually given is the change of government, and that is part of it. But the more precise explanation comes from practitioners who were there, and it is about what PB was understood to be.
In English policy circles, participatory budgeting was seen primarily as a mechanism for local grant-making to civil society — small pots distributed to community groups — rather than as public participation in mainstream services or capital investment. The drivers were managerial rather than radical. In Brazil, PB was about who controls the city's investment budget. In England, it was a better way of handing out small grants.
That distinction determined everything that followed. It made PB dependent on regeneration funding devolved from central government, which was already limited by highly centralised budget control and then shrank sharply after the 2008 financial crash. A national evaluation was carried out during this period and was largely ignored, as the government's priorities shifted. When the coalition government took office in 2010, policies identified with New Labour were abandoned or reshaped, and PB had never been embedded in legislation to survive that.
An informal successor, the UK PB Network, was set up in 2012 and maintained by Shared Future CIC. It never received significant funding, activity declined, and it was closed in 2024.
One correction to how this story is usually told, including by us: it did not simply stop. Participatory grant-making continued in many local areas using the same principles. As of 2026 a significant PB process is running in Newham, London, and dozens of processes have taken place across England over the past decade. What failed was not the practice. It was its adoption as policy.
From 2014, interest grew in Scotland — plausibly linked to the independence referendum and the SNP's interest in marking Scotland out as different.
What Scotland did differently is instructive. It tied PB to the Community Empowerment Act rather than to a departmental target. It funded testing and learning through the Community Choices programme. It built a national support body, PB Scotland, run by the Scottish Community Development Centre. And it secured agreement from all 32 local authorities to devolve 1% of local authority funding to participatory budgets. In 2023 the Scottish Government announced that target had been met.
Even this is not an unqualified success — practitioners who work in it will tell you it never reached its full potential, and the pandemic slowed it considerably. But it is still running, and PB continues to develop there in specific fields: school budgets, climate spending, and work focused on poverty and equality.
There is one uncomfortable factor worth naming. Because PB was being promoted by the SNP, it attracted a natural antipathy inside the UK-wide Labour and Conservative parties, in Scotland and in England. The Greens in both countries have backed it consistently. Political will has always mattered more to PB's adoption than evidence about whether it works.
What do people here think this is for? England and Brazil used the same word for different things. If the receiving system reads your idea as a small improvement to an existing process, it will be funded and defended like one.
Is real money at stake? A grant pot teaches a procedure. A share of the capital budget transfers control. Only the second creates people who will fight to keep it.
Is it written down anywhere? England had a target and a delivery unit. Scotland had an Act. One survived a change of government.
Whose idea is it seen as? If a reform is identified with one party, it inherits that party's fortunes. That is a fact to plan around, not to complain about.
And a warning about stories like this one. The neat version — England failed, Scotland succeeded — is too clean. Policy movement from the global South to the North is never smooth, and it would be wrong to conclude that PB did not work in England. Something more specific happened, and it took a practitioner with 25 years in the field to tell us what.
Shared Future CIC supports people initiating PB processes in the UK and publishes free resources and toolkits.
Substantially revised following corrections from Jez Hall of Shared Future CIC. Our original framing said the English attempt failed to check its preconditions and had stopped by 2012. Both were too crude: the more precise problem was how PB was understood in English policy circles, and PB activity has continued in England and Scotland since.
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