Participatory Budgeting in Albania: issues and challenges

Abstract

The focus in this paper is on Participatory Budgeting in Albania, its application and the factors that contributed to PB’ implementation, as an innovative model of public budgeting. Participatory budgeting constitutes a model of budgeting and the related initiatives to promote citizen engagement, participation and input in public budgets. Participatory Budgeting is a recent model of public budgeting and initially was applied in different municipalities in Albania. The aim of this article is to analyse Participatory Budgeting, when and where it was applied initially, the factors that contribute to the advancement of this model and the barriers to implement it. The first initiatives were strongly related with necessary trainings of the local governments’ employees about PB, and with the application of some limited aspects of the model, in order to attract citizens to engaging in some activities that were referred to as PB. These activities or initiatives were mostly public hearings about the way in which local communities will direct their limited resources year to year. The organized public hearings, were related with the local governments’ units concerns and plans about investments, projects and public services for every municipality program, in each budgetary year. The analysis is based on primary and secondary sources of information in order to understand the contextual factors that help and the challenges faced for the implementation of Participatory Budgeting in Albania.