By Sara Miller Llana
The Christian Science Monitor
PARIS — France might be the model of a centralized state, with its capital’s grip on administrative power near absolute.
But the city of Paris is undertaking one of the biggest experiments of its kind in putting financial power in the hands of the people.
Parisians have been given control of 5 percent of the city’s investment budget, in what leaders tout as the largest “participatory budgeting” experiment in the world – and one they hope will bolster faith in the democratic process.
The concept of “participatory budgeting,” at its most basic, is to give community members the power to directly decide how to spend part of a public budget, in order to tap into citizens’ knowledge as the users of the space they inhabit.
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