Abstract
Within five years of its launch, Participatory Budgeting in New York City (PBNYC) spread from four to thirty-one of New York’s fifty-one council districts, enabling city residents to directly allocate thirtyeight million dollars in public funds. During this period, PBNYC’s neighborhood-level forums remained largely unchanged, but, in order to sustain growth, administrative shifts altered the institution’s basic design. This article examines how and why this transition affected the degree of popular control afforded by PBNYC, specifically within its cross-district Steering Committee. Analysis of original interviews and organizational documents indicates that the transition brought important, if modest, gains but impeded aspects of community empowerment through bureaucratic resistance and imbalanced governmental-civil society roles. Key players responded by reforming PBNYC’s internal governance.This case sheds light on the factors that shape participatory institutions and their impacts, emphasizing the dynamic interactions between actors and the resulting gains and losses that aggregate toward longer term outcomes.
