Matching Items (4)
Description
As a democratic innovation involving deliberation and decision making, participatory budgeting (PB) often catalyzes powerful changes among individual participants and within their respective communities. Certain models of PB designate autonomous spaces for young people to determine how to spend a portion of a particular budget, typically that of a municipality or school. These processes of youth PB may address recent trends in the underrepresentation of youth in civic spaces. Following the initial launch of youth participatory budgeting (youth PB) in Cluj (Romania), I spent three weeks in Cluj conducting 45 semi-structured interviews with youth PB participants and one focus group with youth PB facilitators. This thesis explores two areas: (a) the main dynamics of the online Cluj youth PB process (team development and organization, themes of projects proposed and their intended impacts, and inclusion throughout the process) and (b) impact of youth PB on participants (participant learning, change, and empowerment). Main findings suggest that organized groups with ongoing projects dominated the youth PB process and that a majority of projects aspired to impact either all residents of Cluj or a specific youth group (e.g. young artists, young engineers), while very few projects intended to impact young people in Cluj broadly. More than 85% of participants reported feeling empowered by involvement in youth PB. Some differences in learning and change were found by gender, ethnicity, and age. Key recommendations for future iterations of this process include establishing deliberation between teams, encouraging informal group development, restructuring the voting process, and enhancing inclusion of ethnic minorities and migrants.
ContributorsBrennan, Ashley Jane (Author) / Schugurensky, Daniel, 1958- (Thesis director) / Almasan, Oana (Committee member) / Levine, Peter (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Participatory Budgeting (PB) can create changes within individuals and between them and their community. PB processes allow people to determine how to spend a portion of a particular budget (in the case of School PB, a portion of the school budget). These processes help address the underrepresentation of youth in the realm of civics.
I spent time with the steering committee and teacher coordinator of school PB in Carson Junior High to explore the impact of school PB on students’ knowledge, skills, attitudes and practices in relation to civic engagement. In the study I used quantitative and qualitative components. The participants were unique in that they all had prior experience in civic engagement programs in Carson Junior High that were organized by the teacher coordinator of school PB.
The main findings suggest that the participants reported a significant amount of learning in civic knowledge. In comparison, their overall perceived growth in attitudes, practices and skills were much lower. School PB helped the participants in the steering committee to grow in different ways than their other civic engagement programs by providing them with knowledge about budgets, their school’s mechanisms and other students within their school. They also became more familiar with the democratic process of voting and more comfortable with public speaking and presenting.
Recommendations for future research on this process include compiling quantitative and qualitative data from a larger sample consisting of students who had prior civic engagement experience and students who didn’t, and students with different ethnicities from different grades. Another recommendation for future research is to conduct a longitudinal study following school PB participants to high school and beyond to explore long-term impacts.
ContributorsKinzle, Lauren (Author) / Schugurensky, Daniel, 1958- (Thesis director) / Fischman, Gustavo (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Dean, W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
This dissertation examines whether participatory budgeting (PB) processes, as a case of participatory governance and an innovative approach to local governance, promote inclusive and deliberative government decision-making and social justice outcomes. The first chapter introduces the case of the dissertation, PB in the city of Seoul, South Korea. It reviews the history of PB and the literature on PB in South Korea and discusses three issues that arise when implementing legally mandated PB. The second chapter explores whether inclusive PB processes redistribute financial resources even without the presence of explicit equity criteria, using the last four years of PB resource allocation data and employing multi-level statistical analysis. The findings show that having a more inclusive process to encourage citizen participation helps poorer districts to win more resources than wealthier ones. The third chapter is a follow-up exploratory study; the possible reasons behind the redistributive effects of PB are discussed using interview data with PB participants. The findings suggest that the PB process could have been redistributive because it provided an opportunity for the people living in the comparatively poorer neighborhoods to participate in the government decision-making process. Additionally, when scoring proposals, participants valued ‘needs’ and ‘urgency’ as the most important criteria. The last chapter examines the 32 PB meetings in order to find the combinations of conditions that lead to a deliberative participatory process, employing qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). This dissertation contributes to the field of public management, and particularly participatory governance by providing a review of the literature on PB in South Korea, presenting empirical evidence on the redistributive effect of PB without explicit equity criteria, and finding the combinations of meeting conditions that could be used to promote deliberation in the context of PB.
ContributorsNo, Wŏn (Author) / Schugurensky, Daniel, 1958- (Thesis advisor) / Bretschneider, Stuart (Committee member) / Johnston, Erik W., 1977- (Committee member) / Hsueh, Lily (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
One of the ideals underpinning public education in the United has been that of educating young people to become engaged democratic citizens. Civics courses have been the main, and sometimes only, sign of public schools attending to their civic mission. An opportunity to offer citizenship education through the experience of democratic governance manifests itself through the implementation of school participatory budgeting. Though promising, the use of school participatory budgeting in the United States is relatively new. The literature is sparse and issues of process design as well as research methodology remain unexplored.
School participatory budgeting has the potential, at least, to offer students an opportunity to experience deliberative democratic decision-making and thus enhance those capabilities critical for effective citizenship. More ambitiously, school participatory budgeting presents an opportunity to delicately and steadily transform school governance to give real decision-making power to students.
The four stand-alone articles that make up this dissertation are four facets of a single case study on the first large-scale instance of school participatory budgeting in the United States. They began with the question: What were the accomplishments and challenges of school participatory budgeting in a large secondary school district in the Southwestern United States in its initial implementation?
This question was interpreted and answered differently in each article. The first article examines aspects of process design and how participatory budgeting might contribute not only to citizenship learning but also the expansion of student voice. The experiences of students, in the second article, and those of teachers and administrators, in the third article, are explored through analysis of interview data. The final article addresses this question by drawing on my own experience of implementing school participatory budgeting using analytic autoethnography. This dissertation presents school participatory budgeting from multiple perspectives and recommends more empirical research on the structure of the process before, during, and after implementation.
This dissertation examines this approach to citizenship learning dynamically by using various methodologies and bringing together the literature on student voice, citizenship learning, participatory budgeting, and curriculum studies in order to enrich the discussions and provide actionable knowledge for advocates and practitioners.
School participatory budgeting has the potential, at least, to offer students an opportunity to experience deliberative democratic decision-making and thus enhance those capabilities critical for effective citizenship. More ambitiously, school participatory budgeting presents an opportunity to delicately and steadily transform school governance to give real decision-making power to students.
The four stand-alone articles that make up this dissertation are four facets of a single case study on the first large-scale instance of school participatory budgeting in the United States. They began with the question: What were the accomplishments and challenges of school participatory budgeting in a large secondary school district in the Southwestern United States in its initial implementation?
This question was interpreted and answered differently in each article. The first article examines aspects of process design and how participatory budgeting might contribute not only to citizenship learning but also the expansion of student voice. The experiences of students, in the second article, and those of teachers and administrators, in the third article, are explored through analysis of interview data. The final article addresses this question by drawing on my own experience of implementing school participatory budgeting using analytic autoethnography. This dissertation presents school participatory budgeting from multiple perspectives and recommends more empirical research on the structure of the process before, during, and after implementation.
This dissertation examines this approach to citizenship learning dynamically by using various methodologies and bringing together the literature on student voice, citizenship learning, participatory budgeting, and curriculum studies in order to enrich the discussions and provide actionable knowledge for advocates and practitioners.
ContributorsBrown, Andrew Boyd Keefer (Author) / Schugurensky, Daniel, 1958- (Thesis advisor) / Barone, Thomas E (Committee member) / Sandlin, Jennifer A. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018