A central-government target for every council to run participatory budgeting mostly produced small discretionary grant schemes rather than the budgetary authority Porto Alegre's citizens held.
In 2008, the UK government set a target for every local authority in England to be using participatory budgeting by 2012, explicitly citing Porto Alegre and similar Latin American cases as the inspiration. On paper, this looked like exactly the kind of successful policy transfer this project is built to document.
In practice, what was transferred was the label, not the mechanism. Where Porto Alegre delegated real authority over a significant share of the city’s investment budget, most English councils implemented “PB” as small discretionary grant rounds - residents voted on how to spend a limited pot of money, often for community projects, while the council’s core budget was decided exactly as before. A national Participatory Budgeting Unit was set up to support councils, and hundreds of local schemes launched over the following years.
The distinction mattered more than it looked like it would. Because the process never touched the budget decisions residents actually cared about - schools, social care, roads - engagement was hard to sustain once the initial launch events were over. When the 2010 spending cuts arrived, councils facing real budget pressure had little incentive to protect a programme that had never been given real budgetary teeth in the first place. By the mid-2010s, most of the original schemes had quietly stopped, and a national policy that started with an explicit reference to Porto Alegre ended up illustrating almost exactly what happens when a model is imported without the authority that made it work.
Rated 0–3 on each dimension. A low score is not a disqualification - it is a list of what to check before you try.