South America

South America, a pioneer in the creation of Participatory Budgeting in the late 1980s, remained the region with the highest concentration of processes for nearly 27 years. The scenario observed in the last three years points to a regression dynamic, which is largely due to what happened in Brazil, with a significant crisis in participatory processes, caused by changes in majority political options at the municipal, state and federal levels. The South American continent currently comprises around 3061 to 3081 PB, which represents about 26% of the total number identified worldwide.

There are essentially five situations to be highlighted in this region of the world:

1. The huge PB crisis in Brazil, with a drastic reduction in the number of cases, especially after the 2016 municipal elections. The Brazilian Participatory Budgeting Network is inactive and the country does not have an updated accounting of existing experiences;
2. The existence of national legislation in Peru, established in 2004 and revised in 2009, which made it compulsory for all municipal and regional governments to adopt the PB. For this reason, the country concentrates about 68% of the continent's PB;
3. The creation of national legislation in Ecuador in 2010, which makes implementation of the PB compulsory for the 221 municipalities and 24 regions, thus becoming the second country in the region to legislate on the matter;
4. The difficulties of PB expansion in Chile. Former President Michelle Bachelet even set a goal for her second term, which ended in 2018, to increase these processes, setting the goal of achieving the 100 active initiatives in the country. The resistance of the vast majority of municipalities keeps Chile quite far from this number;
5. The expectation that the Peace Agreement in Colombia, signed in 2016, will create the political, institutional and social conditions that drive participatory processes at the budgeting and planning levels. This is, in fact, an explicit theme in the text of the Agreement, with the Government committing itself to concrete actions to encourage the development of participatory budgeting in the country.

The overwhelming majority of the processes identified in the region, i.e. around 97%, are promoted by local governments. Only about 2% correspond to regional Participatory Budgeting. There are 65 initiatives, of which 49, or 75%, belong to Peru and Ecuador, both of which have defined these processes through a legal requirement. It is also worth mentioning the existence of experiences involving other types of entities, in particular public schools. These represent around 1 to 1.5% of all PB identified in the region. According to the data collected, 17 cities with more than 1 million inhabitants are involved in the development of PB on the continent. A further 51 capital cities - national, state and regional - committed to these processes were also identified.

On the basis of the indexes developed in this Atlas, it is concluded that:

1. Excluding the 4 PB identified in Uruguay, a country with a democracy considered full, all the others, i.e. 99.8%, are located in imperfect democracies.;
2. The overwhelming majority of cases, i.e. 98.6%, are integrated in the second worst level of corruption. This is a particularity of South American imperfect democracies, as the levels of corruption are higher when compared to other countries with imperfect democracies. Only 1.4% of PB are developed in countries with the second-best level of corruption.;
3. A very significant expression of PB, i.e. 96.4%, is based in countries with a high human development index;
4. Some 68% of the cases are located in territories positioned in the second level of the happiness ranking. The remaining about 32% are located in countries with the highest level in this parameter of analysis.

South America is perhaps the region of the planet with the greatest transformative ambition in Participatory Budgeting. These have emerged in some places as a counter-cyclical action, which aimed to tackle numerous problems that afflicted the region. These processes were thus positioned as instruments for the construction of a high-intensity democracy, for the fight against corruption by the political elites, and for the fairer redistribution of public resources, that is, for the promotion of greater social justice.