Asia

The emergence of Participatory Budgeting in Asia can be classified as late and marked by discontinuous development. The logics of implementation and the models often associated with these processes on the continent are closely linked to the history of the region, the current regimes and the dominant political and social rationales. According to the data collected, Asia currently accommodates from 2773 to 2775 PB initiatives, which represents about 23% of the total worldwide. At the domestic level, the East Asian sub-region stands out, with around 77% of all PB identified in the continent. These results must be treated with some caution because, on the one hand, they do not take account of the initiatives known to exist in countries with Thailand, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and, on the other, they are strongly influenced by Japan's figures. Once the conceptual adjustments have been made and the PB has been accommodated to the logic of the regimes that prevail in the region, this is a continent from which it is expected that Participatory Budgeting will exponentially increase in the coming years.

Numerous highlights deserve special attention in this region of the planet:

1. From 2012 to 2016, the Philippines developed Bottom-Up-Budgeting (BuB) as a national program designed to give a voice to civil society in defining projects, reaching more than 1500 cities and financing almost 55,000 investments. Taking into account the model designed, it can be extrapolated that this was perhaps the first attempt to conceive a PB at the national level, with its specificities, qualities and failures, since the budget allocated was set by the government of the country, the consultation process took place in almost all the territory and the implementation of investments was done in a decentralized manner;
2. The Russian Federation, which has 120 active PB, has justifiably paid particular attention to the very significant investment in the triggering of the regional PB, with 55 cases currently being reported, which corresponds to 46% of the total number of initiatives underway in the country.
3. Indonesia was the first Asian country to create legislation to make PB (musrenbang) mandatory at the local level. In addition to the 514 cities, there is also an expectation to expand the process to 74 thousand villages in the country, which, if it were to happen, would determine an enormous growth of these initiatives in the country and in the world;
4. South Korea was the second state in the region to enact legislation linking its 243 municipalities to the development of the PB. It was also the second nation in the world to create a process of PB at the national level, which, among other things, assumed the fact that it was implemented on the basis of a methodology of mini-group representing the population of the country;
5. Japan, the country where the traditional PB model, based on the presentation and voting of projects by individual citizens, was not successful. According to the data collected, there are several approaches currently underway in the country, with emphasis on the preference of Japanese local governments for participatory methodologies involving civil society organizations. However, PB data in the country reach very significant numbers due to the fact that the national government has legislated on the possibility of citizens paying their local taxes to municipalities where they do not live, as a way to help the territories that suffer from depopulation. It is a policy of appealing to the feelings of belonging of the population to the places where they were born, giving rise to the name "furusato" (home town)3. The measure faces a huge controversy, as the large population municipalities began to have very significant drops in revenue, while smaller local governments began to allocate offers to citizens who decided to offer them their taxes. According to Akira Matsubara4, this process takes the form of a PB insofar as of the 1788 municipalities that decided to institute this "hometown tax", 1708 allow the taxpayer to choose how the government of the territory should spend that money. This is a reality that deserves more careful analysis in future studies on Participatory Budgeting.

The overwhelming majority of PB identified in the continent, or about 98%, are developed by local governments. Only about 2% are promoted at a regional level, highlighting the decisive role of the Russian Federation in this dynamic, bringing together 55 of the 57 practices identified. It is also worth highlighting the existence of 2 national PB, one in South Korea and the other in Taiwan, the second of which is a thematic initiative dedicated to culture. According to the data collected, the region has 29 Participatory Budgeting cases developed by cities with more than 1 million inhabitants and 15 driven by capital cities.

Again, with Japanese supremacy as the determining variable in numerical terms, around 95% of PB in the region are located in countries with imperfect democracies, while the remaining 5% are territorially confined to states considered authoritarian. Approximately 77% of identified cases are developed in countries ranked second best in the corruption ranking; the 23% are at the next lowest level, i.e. the third worst in this index. About 81% of Asian PB belong to countries that have a very high level of human development; less than 1% are part of nations with high levels of HDI; the remaining about 18% have average levels in terms of the index under analysis. More than 99% of PB on the continent are based in territories positioned at the second highest level of the happiness ranking.

The Asian continent has quite different purposes among countries with regard to the development of Participatory Budgeting, which makes it difficult to define consensual Keywords that help to understand the way in which these processes are viewed. It is still possible to say that these initiatives tend to serve mainly as instruments to promote dialogue between administrations and citizens, to strengthen good governance and transparency.