The allocation of participatory budgeting funds within the context of population ageing and social inequalities

Abstract

In Brazil in the late 1980s, participatory budgeting was introduced to help develop deprived neighbourhoods. Modern European cities must face environmental and social threats that cause intra-urban inequalities to grow, especially with respect to the elderly. Local governments are urged to reformulate their policy agendas to withstand these trends. Is participatory budgeting not becoming a threat to tackling these issues rather than a solution as it originally was? To address this question, the intra-urban concentration of funds must be investigated. Do neighbourhoods with a higher share of the elderly – less politically active yet emotionally bound to their surroundings – tend to get less funding, as the theory of elite capture could suggest? While this question has been discussed in literature, neither the intra-urban age composition nor the specificity of Polish participatory budgets was considered. The overall goal of the study was to investigate the relationship between the age structure of neighbourhoods in Wrocław and their performance in participatory budgeting editions run between 2016–2017. By means of clustering and multiple correspondence analysis, a typical “winner”  of the two editions can be determined. It is a neighbourhood incorporated into the city at later stages of suburbanisation, with single-family housing and an above-average share of residents aged 25–44. The analysis performed does not reveal any similar connections for other types of neighbourhoods, including those with above-average shares of the elderly. It is safe to argue that territorial city expansion and age-related inter-city differences cannot be seen independently of each other.