Achilles Tendon of Local Fiscal Governance: City Councils and Participatory Budgeting with Chances and Uneasinesses for Türkiye

Abstract

Since its early implementations, the issue of participation has been disputed within the contexts of representative and direct democracy. Participatory budgeting, which is undertaken to internalize civil society and democracy at the local level but is unclear to what extent it is addressed and why it is prescribed, as well as having a scale problem for its participants, packs a punch in terms of contributing to the fiscal dilemmas of city councils. Drawing on global experiences, this study argues that the local fiscal sphere constitutes a critical vulnerability for city councils, as budgeting processes often shift away from genuine individual, citizen, and civil society engagement and evolve instead into politically driven participation dominated by political actors. This manuscript offers a general observation of participatory budgeting and examines the feasibility, advantages, disadvantages, fiscal chances, and uneasinesses of participatory budgeting in the Turkish example as a unitary and decentralized state. The argument that comes out is that technological and democratic evolutions would not necessarily increase participation in favour of low-income and disadvantaged groups, namely due to political conflicts and economic inequalities.