This is a CTP of initiative: Participatory Budgeting Amsterdam (PB Amsterdam) (Netherlands)
The critical turning point as described by the co-founder of the Centre for budget monitoring and Citizen Participation (CBB) is the moment that the local municipality gets involved in budget monitoring in fall 2012. This moment is a turn in the developments because the municipality rejected an initial request to become involved. However, the involvement of local government is critical for budget monitoring to reach one of its main aims, namely to support local democracy and bring citizens closer to their government. This turn was manifested in a call the co-founder got from the District Alderman after the participants of budget monitoring held a public speech at a council meeting in June 2012 (see CO-PRODUCTION and RELATED EVENTS). In that call the District Alderman proposed to get together and make plans to collaborate.
Inspired by how budget monitoring was done in Brazil, intellectual citizens of the Indische Buurt in Amsterdam aimed to implement the same methodology in their neighbourhood. As outlined by the co-founder of the CBB: “[...] we thought that we can dump it as is in the Indische Buurt”. A first step was to approach the local government to become involved and to make data available. As put by the co-founder of the CBB: “The only thing that we wanted from them was that they participated in our initiative. Thus, that they make available data so we can analyse it.” When the local government did not respond affirmative, the initiators decided to continue anyway. They used publicly available financial data and analyzed these. Based on this analysis, they were able to question the municipality during a District Council Committee meeting on June 27, 2012. A few weeks later the initiators received a phone call from the District Alderman of finance inviting them for a conversation about their data analysis results and about a possible collaboration.
The pro-active approach of the CBB together with their thorough research and clear arguments led to the involvement of the municipality, and thus this CTP. Rather than voluntarily engaging, the municipality was ‘forced’ to engage with the group of citizens and budget monitoring by their public questioning of municipal budgets as a result of the first round of budget monitoring. What started as ‘forced co-creation’, using the words of the co-founder of the CBB, is now completely accepted at the municipality as testified by a recent promotion video of budget monitoring. According to the co-founder of the CBB: “There you see the Alderman discussing budget monitoring as if he himself had devised it”.
Several events and circumstances made this CTP happen – both within the citizenry as within the municipality. This includes a learning trip of the initiators to Brazil in 2011, a public speech of the participants at a council meeting in June 2012 (see RELATED EVENTS) and the perspective of the Districts Alderman of finance about budget transparency and participatory democracy.
Firstly, some of the initiators of budget monitoring in the Indische Buurt had visited Brazil to learn more about budget monitoring there. After their return, they decided to set up a foundation, the Centre for budget monitoring and citizen participation (CBB). The foundation focuses on organizing and providing trainings about budget monitoring.
Crucial for the CTP to happen was the perspective of the Districts’ Alderman of finance, Jeroen van Speijk, with regard to transparency of budgets and participatory democracy. As outlined by the co-founder of the CBB: “At that moment it turned out that Jeroen, out of own interest [...], he was anyhow busy with a number of civil servants to establish more transparency of government data on neighbourhood level. He just did not want to put this out in the open, because it was an experiment of his and he first wanted to know how this would work”. Thus, within the municipality, the Alderman, together with two civil servants, was already exploring how financial data could be made accessible on the level of the neighborhood. The two civil servants, Ilan Stoelinga and Sander Meijer, were working on an online application called the neighbourhood budget instrument. These two: “were busy to develop a kind of interface, and to gather data from the different policy departments”.
At the District Council committee meeting on June 27 2012, where the participants of budget monitoring – at that moment without involvement of the local municipality – pointed to flaws in the district’s budget, the District Alderman of finance assured the council to enter a discussion with the participants. “Which is why we got the phone call by Jeroen saying ‘let’s talk’”. This phone call resulted in a meeting where the founders of the CBB exchanged data and developed a first version of a neighborhood budget with two civil servants. The CBB, the Alderman and these two civil servants came to realise that they actually had a common interest: ”we arrived at a common interest between the Alderman of Finance, and us the neighbourhood, namely to quickly develop a nice interface”.
The co-founder of the CBB explains that their motivation to get the municipality on board was to obtain the budget information that was needed to make budget monitoring work. Otherwise, they would have to disappoint the participants by not being able to offer them the data they needed, which leads to irritation and frustration. “This leads to irritation and we have to say the whole time that we cannot deliver and stuff. There is nothing to it. Thus, on part of the inhabitants, this only leads to frustration and we are doing this to support local democracy and not to increase the gap between democracy and inhabitants”.
In turn, instead of developing a website to publish the district’s budget, called the neighbourhood budget instrument (see CTP ‘Launch of neighbourhood budget instrument’), by themselves, the Alderman and the civil servants discovered that they could work together with citizens to make the budget publicly accessible. “Jeroen had thought that this was an activity that they just could do internally. And then, all of a sudden he realized: I can also do it together with citizens, that is thus also democracy, then I have a whole story to tell at the City of Amsterdam about renewal. When he had succeeded, we all received means to sit together with Ilan and everyone, and he could tell that the district Amsterdam-East had supported this. Thus, suddenly Jeroen was our foreman”. The alderman and civil servants thus played a crucial role in the collective development of budget monitoring and the neighborhood budget instrument.
Two events took place leading up to this moment: a conference in June 2011 about budget monitoring and a presentation in the district council committee social addressing the budget approval in June 2012. After the CTP, thus after the district municipality got involved, they organized a collective activity which was a survey resulting in a citizens perspective paper.
In June 2011, back from their own visit to Porto Alegre (Brazil), the initiators of budget monitoring organized a conference in Amsterdam on occasion of the visit by INESC, a Brazilian NGO aiming to deepen democracy and promoting human rights. This conference was held to deepen the understanding of budget monitoring locally. After the conference, the CBB approached the municipality to ask for funding a budget monitoring training and their participation therein.
In the fall of 2011, when the municipality had made clear that they were not willing to become involved, the CBB decided to do the first iteration of budget monitoring without their involvement. They researched and explored publicly available budget documents, policy programs and information on related decisions by the District Council. Based on their findings, two participants held a presentation in June 2012 and asked questions at the District Council meeting for the approval of the budget for 2013. They confronted an unprepared District Council with their questions and findings: “Then, really, the District Council and the District Alderman were taken by surprise. There were questions which they just could not answer”.
By showing that they were knowledgeable and serious about budget monitoring, they ‘forced’ the municipality into co-creation. During that particular meeting the District Alderman of finance promised the District Council he would take this up with the participants. That is why a few weeks after this incident, the CBB received a call by the Alderman of finance to co-operate. The first collective activity taken up was a neighborhood research in which civil servants and inhabitants held a survey on the streets. “That was also something, and actually the start of our close collaboration with the district [...] And on the basis of this [the survey] we wrote the Citizens Perspective Paper”. While according to the co-founder of the CBB, the Citizens’ Perspective Paper ended up in a drawer, it had served an important goal: “but what did happen was that the terminology we used was taken over by the civil servants, and that was something in terms of compatibility. Their language was not compatible with ours, and then they started to translate their priorities in our language. And this in-between-language became our language at this moment”.
In 2015, this whole process has led to a collective prioritization of themes and concrete activities which was taken up in the 2016 area plan for the neighborhood. The area plan is an action plan with clear activities (related to policy priorities) that is formulated by the area coordinator every year and is to be approved by the City Council as well. The 2016 area plan of the Indische Buurt is co-created in the third budget monitoring iteration and includes all the priorities of the inhabitants complemented with some focal points from the municipality. As put by the co-founder of the CBB: “This was a shared thing”.
Contestation was present in several ways. A first contestation was related to the initial rejection by the municipality, secondly critical voices about the initiative came from within the neighborhood, and finally contestations arose during the trainings.
The first contestation concerns the involvement of the local government in municipal budgeting. It were “old school civil servants”, who thought that the initiative for budget monitoring was not serious. The District Council reacted indicating that transparency, budget monitoring and the neighbourhood budget instrument was not a task for the CBB because formally budget authority belongs to the (District) Council and they were suspicious about CBB’s interest. “And yes, all the whining and moaning regarding ‘this is not how it works because we are the municipality’ and a number of council members said ‘how do we fit in the picture?’ or ‘that is not your domain and on top of this you are social entrepreneurs and of course want to earn money with this again’”. This CTP is actually about the change in the attitude of at least some of the civil servants at the district Amsterdam-East. On the central level, resistance continues (see CTP municipal reorganization). As outlined by the co-founder of the CBB: “now we have convinced our own district completely and they are converted and bid 7 times a day with us. But then you have the central city [Municipality of Amsterdam] which all of a sudden says: ‘this is not how it should be, because we are the central city’. And then the whining and moaning begins anew”. The co-founder of the CBB is not very optimistic about overcoming this contestation with the Municipality of Amsterdam but believes he should persevere: “I am already busy with this topic for 10 years and also don’t know if I still want to have again the same quarrel with the central city. But it has to happen. If we want to go on, then we have to do something about it”.
After the launch of the CBB in December 2011 the CBB was introduced as a new organization in the neighborhood. Not all received it positively. Critiques included the level of inclusivity of the budget monitoring trainings. As put by the co-founder: “Actually, you have to be 100% sure that you are doing everything to be inclusive”. In addition, the CBB also seemed to be working differently from the more established organizations. As explained by the co-founder of the CBB: “Traditional organizations, which are here already since 1985, and which are still looking after interests of specific stakeholders, they asked: ‘and whose interests are you guarding?’. Thus, you see a collision between a fluid and a traditional society. The traditional society, which is confronted with fluid, networks all the time, and that is the struggle in which we are engaged now. We are in the eye of the hurricane”.
The budget monitoring trainings also staged controversies in that some participants took part for personal gain. They assumed that budgets would be allocated as part of the training and that they could introduce their own projects. Such intentions disturb the atmosphere at the trainings as outlined by the co-founder of the CBB: “They create a climate that makes it unpleasant to be part of it”. The trainings were hosted from an attitude of welcoming everyone to participate, this includes that there was no “natural leadership”, meaning that not one person determines the direction. In the years that he is working on these matters, the co-founder experienced that these kinds of controversies however, solve themselves: “In ten years, I have seen that an invisible force exists which regulates, and there is self-selection. […]Some of the people do not come back or disappear and I don’t know what happens with them afterwards. It is a kind of self-selection without one having a conscious trajectory or strategy for it”.
When the CBB approached the district municipality for the first time, they were not yet really sure what budget monitoring in the context of Amsterdam was. As put by the co-founder of the CBB: “Back then we did not really understand how it should look like. See, Brazil knows its own version, and it just cannot be used as is here in our situation. Approximately everything is different”. However, it was clear that the district municipality would need to be involved at some point; this was expected and desired, thus also anticipated in a way, although there was no strategy to reach this.
The co-founder was aware on a more strategic level: “You see people at a chess board. You are doing one move and then you await the countermove”. The fact that participants of the budget monitoring training spoke at the district council meeting (see related events) had not been widely discussed, rather it was an activity the co-founder took as a chance. As outlined by him: “I do not know if the trainer back then had strategically thought about this so as to reach it [the involvement of the district municipality]. I know that I have taken advantage of it. Like, oh, there is a possibility, let’s see whether I can cease it. And it worked. It is me saying it, but that was quiet a smart move”.
Then a meeting (an event evoked by the CTP) was organized between the founders of the CBB and the civil servants working on the neighborhood budget instrument. This meeting was prepared by the founders: “But, before we went there, we talked with each other: ‘how are we approaching this’.”
The co-founder of the CBB explains that this type of strategic intelligence is needed: “[…] otherwise you are screwed and send from one to the other”.
The co-founder of the CBB outlines a number of learnings from this CTP.
The first learning the co-founder mentions is the use of a good method. He became aware of this when he listened to the public speech of the participants of the first iteration and noticed some mistakes that should have been tackled during the training already: “So the idea: ‘we are doing a training and then we are budget monitors’, is nonsense”.
Secondly, after the first budget monitoring training, the CBB had realized that cooperation of the district municipality was crucial. Its absence would lead to frustration while its goal was to bring citizen and government closer. Cooperation with the district municipality however also meant maneuvering between different interests. As the co-founder explains he found out that without “co-creation” budget monitoring is not possible: “that you cannot do anything without the government […] and thus the ‘horizontalisation’ of the relation”. Such a co-creative working style also has its consequences. According to the co-founder of the CBB: “And the co-creation involves diluting and the interests [of the other] [...] what are we making publicly available? Which conclusions can one draw and which not. And it is also true, because what we have concluded was also wrong. Reality is more complicated than that it can look on paper.”
In terms of content, the co-founder had learned how to operationalize budget monitoring. He wanted to monitor a complete budget, which turned out to be impossible: “The third thing we learned is to think big and act small. I had had talks and after that, I did not want to work on topics. I wanted to have the complete budget. But [the Alderman of finance] said that does not work. You have to work on it thematically. And I said” ‘No, I want to have it completely.’ I found out quickly, that this is not doable. You cannot as citizens; nobody can tackle the complete thing. Thus, this was a very good lesson learned”.
All these lessons learned have been incorporated in subsequent budget monitoring training and have also led to what the co-founder had identified as the second CTP. Namely that the co-operation with the municipality in budget monitoring activities now becomes integrated in municipal procedures (see CTP uptake of common work practices in policy cycles).
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