Participatory budgeting (PB) is designed to leverage local knowledge about community needs and translate spending preferences into tangible community development action by giving communities control over key budgetary resources. Moreover, PB participants learn about decision-making processes in development policy and can organize to pursue their communities’ interests beyond the PB process by engaging with government and civil society. PB advocates hope that infrastructure, service delivery, and, ultimately, well-being will improve for underserved communities and groups that have been historically excluded from the perspective of representative democracy. This article presents the theoretical logic connecting PB to community development and summarizes the global evidence from studies that test the theoretical propositions above. We find evidence for PB’s impact on community development performance in several important contexts. However, we also note that many hypotheses have yet to be tested in rigorous, large-N, comparative studies. There is thus considerable room to evaluate PB’s impact in the future.

参与式预算 (PB) 旨在利用当地对社区需求的了解，通过让社区控制关键预算资源，将支出偏好转化为切实的社区发展行动。此外，参与式预算参与者了解发展政策中的决策过程，并且可以通过与政府和民间社会的接触来组织在参与式预算过程之外追求社区利益。PB 倡导者希望基础设施、服务交付以及最终的福祉能够改善服务不足的社区和群体，这些社区和群体历来被排除在代议制民主的视角之外。本文介绍了将 PB 与社区发展联系起来的理论逻辑，并总结了检验上述理论命题的研究的全球证据。我们在几个重要的背景下发现了 PB 对社区发展绩效的影响的证据。然而，我们也注意到许多假设尚未在严格的大 N 比较研究中得到检验。因此，在未来评估 PB 的影响有相当大的空间。