Following a Status Quo Analysis of participatory budgeting (PB) in the Baltic Sea Region, the “Empowering Participatory Budgeting in the Baltic Sea Region” (EmPaci) project introduces its second project output targeting administrative staff, local councillors and other decision makers in local governments in the BSR. The document “PB Type Groups” aims to provide insights into design principles of PB and to reflect on ideas how PB can be implemented based on specific preconditions of the municipality and its citizenry.

The background is as follows: Since the 1980’s the number of participatory budgets rose and currently thousands of different processes are implemented around the world. None is the other again and the differences are in the details. Therefore, a categorization is difficult but needed, to not “getting lost in a thousand and one examples”.
An all-round categorization is impossible. Therefore, this document takes a different approach and sets up a “construction kit” that provides more detailed information about factors related to citizens and the municipality that influences possible PB-process phases. The contribution lies in the short guidance tables and the resulting “PB type group construction kit” table. To show the application, the construction kit table is filled with the case of the successful PB process of Stuttgart.
The provided overviews raise the awareness for complex issues in the PB implementation. Practitioners will get advice for many important questions, like:
• Which phases are possible for a PB process?
• At which phases do legal restrictions influence the process design?
• Despite lower financial resources, what are cost effective actions to perform?
• What are topics for specific citizen groups?
• How do possible proposal restrictions look like?
• How should a project team for PB look like? Could citizens be included into the project team?
• Is the workload for the administration staff considered?
• Why is a feasibility check important?
• When should the feasibility check of the proposals be performed?
• What is a possible timeline for the process steps?
• Which incentives are possible to encourage a high participation?
• When is feedback possible?
• After all, is transparency of the whole PB process ensured?