Participatory Budgets in Italy: Reconfiguring a collapsed panorama

Abstract

Over the last decade, Italy has undergone extensive political transformations that focused in different ways on the panorama of participatory innovations at the local level. The country, which hosted the first and most enduring of European Participatory Budget experiments (Grottammare, a small tourist town on the Adriatic coast, which began in 1994), has gone through at least four generations of experiments, each marked by single features which have already been identified in the recent literature (Putini, 2010; Allegretti, 2010; Sintomer and Allegretti, 2009). This article aims to briefly address these waves of experiments, to focus on a concise description of the last and least known one, which began to take shape in the last three years.