Increasing interest in participatory budgeting has been observed in local governments around the world. This paper stresses direct citizen participation in the budgeting process leads to good governance, deepens democracy and improves social justice, while also highlighting some challenges in its efficiency and effectiveness. Unlike participatory budgeting, the Sub‐borough Chiefs Forum is a community‐based representative democratic mechanism; it could be regarded as a form of participatory budgeting in a broad sense. If so, then did the Taipei programme simply duplicate the goals of the Forum or lead to a better governance by making up for the inadequacies of the Chiefs Forum? To find out whether the Taipei participatory budgeting programme made a difference, we carried out qualitative and quantitative comparisons of projects passed under the participatory budgeting process and at the Forum. We also interviewed several participatory budgeting participants and sub‐borough chiefs. The findings suggested that participatory budgeting and the Forum generated different proposals and budget requests, and the Taipei programme supplemented the shortcomings of the Forum and therefore led to deeper civic engagement and better urban governance.

中文翻译：

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是用于城市治理的新工具还是仅仅是言辞？台北市参与式预算案

世界各地的地方政府都对参与式预算越来越感兴趣。本文强调公民直接参与预算编制过程将导致善政，加深民主和改善社会正义，同时还强调了其效率和效力方面的一些挑战。与参与式预算不同，Sub-borough Chiefs论坛是一个基于社区的代议民主机制。从广义上讲，它可以被视为参与式预算的一种形式。如果是这样，那么台北计划是否只是复制了论坛的目标，还是通过弥补酋长论坛的不足而导致了更好的治理？要了解台北参与性预算计划是否有所作为，我们对参与式预算过程和论坛中通过的项目进行了定性和定量比较。我们还采访了几位参与性预算编制的参与者和副区长。调查结果表明，参与性预算编制和论坛提出了不同的提案和预算要求，台北计划补充了论坛的缺点，因此导致了更深入的公民参与和更好的城市治理。