Participatory Budgeting: Neoliberalizing or Educational?
The article studies Participatory Budgeting (PBs) as a changing policy that although designed as an instrument of social education for fostering participatory democracy, in certain contexts and conformations becomes functional to the neoliberal project. The analysis of PBs also serves to ponder a new theory of human geography, which I metonymically call "fast policies." This theory reflects upon the "really existing neoliberalism" as it occurs globally: based on digital networks and nodes that foster horizontal accelerated and context dependent processes, without cores and peripheries. The article ponders the characteristics that PBs should maintain for not becoming neoliberalizing. Furthermore, it discusses some lack of concretion of the theory around the agents, the role of digital media, and speed of the new policies, all of them aspects that would have an impact on a new conformation of neoliberalism, and on the reformulation of transfer studies.