Inviting people into politics
IT IS easy to dismiss ‘participatory budgeting’ as a gimmick, a distraction from the serious business of government.
We pay deputies to make decisions for us. Why get involved?
And yet those communities that have embraced the PB system say they get a lot out of it. Doubters have been converted to the cause and are willing to extol the virtues of Next Generation Democracy.
For a start it bridges the gap between politicians and people, something that has never felt wider. Those who feel disenfranchised by the current system and have turned their backs on politics might think otherwise if they had a genuine input.
Young people are particularly keen. They like identifying visionary solutions to problems and actually seeing them enacted rather than the tortuous frustration of traditional politics.
The PB concept is simple. Residents young and old get together in brainstorming meetings and online to come up with a bunch of good and bad ideas.
Their concepts are looked over by volunteers and some developed into feasible projects.
These in turn are vetted by experts and whittled down to a handful of the best.
The community then votes to divide its available budget among the successful few.
The budget has to be big enough to make setting up the scheme worthwhile but, as this stage at least, it is a fraction of total government spending.
Projects tend to be small-scale but with high public profile such as traffic safety projects, wifi in parks and school laptops.
Guernsey’s wishlist would, of course, reflect its unique nature.
Now might just be the perfect time to set this up. Such schemes have been around for almost 30 years, yet dissatisfaction with politics has never been greater. Voter numbers are down and many have given up on getting anything achieved.
And the technology behind collating the ideas and developing them is getting better every day.
That’s the positive side. Some people are rightly wary of diverting too much money to the people’s projects and the workload should fall more to volunteers than over-stretched civil servants.
Yet it could be very positive for politics in the island. That is a rarity these days.