The role of Institutional Entrepreneurs in the Participatory Budget implementation

Purpose: The implementation of the Participatory Budget (PB) could be useful to re-establish the relationship with citizens, involving them in the public decision-making process. However, to ensure an increase in collaboration between collectively and public institutions, the implementation of PB is not enough, but it is necessary that the PB process is designed with specific characteristics. The present study aims to understand the role of individual actors in the Local Governments (LG) and the impact the on the PB implementation, in particular we will focus on the endogenous forces using Institutional Entrepreneurship’ lens.

Design/methodology/approach: An ethnographic, descriptive and explanatory single case study is performed. In the present work, the case study chosen is the Municipality of Rome, is the capital city with the highest number of inhabitants in Italy. The data are collected through unstructured and semi-structured interviews conducted with the politicians and managers that are responsible for PB.

Findings: The preliminary findings suggest that the decision to implement the PB has been first driven by the politicians, especially the Mayor of Rome, who, at the beginning of her mandate, stated in her program that the increase of the citizens’ engagement was a priority. In the first step, PB was implemented with a bottom-up approach at the District level and then, from 2019, it was applied for the entire Municipality. With the following interviews we want to understand, in detail, what are the skills, what is the background and how are the individual characteristics of public managers involved in the project, that help the Mayor to pursuit her objectives.

Originality: Considering the increasing attention given to the Participatory Budget both by scholars and practitioners, this study could contribute to the understanding of the reasons and the internal and individual forces that affect he PB implementation. It could also improve the existing literature, filling the gap related to Institutional Entrepreneurship applied to LG participatory practices.