Why Nepal needs participatory budgeting
It has been more than two months that we are governed by elected local governments. What a fortune! We pay tax that goes to our local government; we need a service we go to knock the doors of our own Mayors in municipality or Chairpersons in villages. In principle, we do not need to go to Singh Durbar because it has been already moved to our neighbourhood. It is not the Ministry of Singh Durbar that has arrived to our neighbourhood, but the resources, the rights (forget about duties), the rules and regulations and you name it, all have arrived to our doorsteps.

What we need now is less rules, though, but more resources. Although we do not know yet about how we are going to effectively utilise the resources that we get from the top (the federal government), but we are concerned about the efficacy whilst delivering services (or, in other words, spending money). On the one hand, some of the federal ministries are concerned, and to some extent worried, about how our newly elected local governments are going to use the resources because local governments are so unfortunate to the extent that neither they have got adequate human resources nor capable set of minds to implement the expectations (that are set out in the Constitution). On the other, our local governments do not have clear framework on the basis of which citizens can have their voice on the budget. After all, at least 17% of the total budget has been already transferred by the federal government to local governments.
In recent weeks, we have seen that many local governments have already formulated their annual budgets and plans. Neither of these, however, were reported that they organised consultations (do not mention deliberations) at the neighbourhood level. What a misfortune to hear this! The elected politicians started to put themselves as if they are the masters while indirectly regarding their constituencies as slaves. Masters know what slaves need, or at least, slaves do not need to be asked about their needs.
Prescriptions matter but only when the prescriber is known. Here is a prescription, forget about who I am. I am just answering a question why we need participatory budgeting IMMEDIATELY.
Two dimensions of participatory budgeting are worth introducing at the beginning: citizen participation and participatory policy-making. Citizen participation refers to the degree to which ordinary citizens are provided opportunities in public spheres. For the government, enabling participation of people in public spheres is to hear, and thereby respond to, what public wants. It is generally believed that when the government responds to citizens’ voices, concerns of legitimacy, accountability and transparency are addressed. For citizens, participating in public spheres mean that their citizenship is respected. When they are asked about their needs and problems, half of their worries go away even if they are not heard.
Participatory policymaking refers to the situation in which citizens participate in each of the stages of an ideal cycle of policymaking: identification of problems, development of alternatives, and selection of alternatives. While policymaking is traditionally understood as a work of technocrats, elected politicians and judges, it is no surprising to notice how difficult would it be to involve ordinary people in the process of making public policies. Fortunately, however, we are living in a period of time when dozens, if not hundreds, of ways to engaging people in the policymaking are scattered in the cloud.
Coming back to why we need participatory budgeting, and how it can be implemented in Nepal, let us go back to some 18 years. The Local Self-Governance Act was promulgated in 1999, with the hope that decentralised governance would be institutionalised in the country. The preamble of the law said, “… [I]nstitutionalize the process of development by enhancing the participation of all the people including the ethnic communities, indigenous people and down-trodden as well as socially and economically backward groups in bringing out social equality in mobilizing and allocating means for the development of their own region and in the balanced and equal distribution of the fruits of development.” A range of institutions were created, thereafter, at the local level in the last two decades, though many of which were inscribed, in principle, on the premises of representative settings of local democracy. Participatory planning is one but it offers avenues for citizens to directly engage in the making of local public policies. Sadly, though, we do not have any convincing answer to the question: why did not the newly elected leaders endeavour to revitalise the planning process whilst formulating their annual budget and plans?
Two reasons are obvious. The first one is its rigid structure. Many people still think that the planning process was a 14-step method, which — in my understanding — is wrong. It is a 14-step process only when it is connected to the national planning process. We are talking about local planning process. It involves six steps in villages, and nine steps in municipalities. The second is that the planning process expects to play key roles by civil society organisations (not NGOs though). Allowing civil society to be the key actor in the planning process maybe a contested practice in Nepal as there lacks a clear definition of what civil society is. Nevertheless, certain organisations such as the Tole Lane Organisations in many municipalities feature good attributes of civil society organisations.
On the basis of the proposed legislation at the federal parliament, what can be argued is that the newly elected governments should revitalise the existing planning process to introduce participatory budgeting at the local level. The elected leadership at the local level should not delay in choosing participatory ways of making policies and budgets.
[This article has been sent to the Rising Nepal, an English newspaper in Kathmandu for publication]
