Participatory Budgeting as an Approach to Public Accountability: The Quest for Grass-root Institutional Strategy at Local Governance

Abstract

Participation of citizen is crucial for development (of) and democracy. It is recognized by world scholar that citizen participation has a positive effect on the quality of democracy. This study examines the relation between participatory budgeting and public accountability for the development of local government level in rural Bangladesh. The centre of attention of the study was on the relations between citizen and local government from citizens’ perspective. The Survey method was used to collect data from the respondents through a structured questionnaire. The data were analyzed with the combination of descriptive statistics, statistical tools of Likert’s 5-points scale and Spearman’s correlation coefficient. The findings show that the role of the citizen in the budget making is limited which hamper the accountability and development process. The study results argue that citizen involvement through participatory budgeting has a number of strong positive effects on accountability and development of local government level; as a result, people will be aware of the responsibility for public matters, increase public commitment, and give the confidence listen to various opinions to contribute a higher level of authenticity of decisions. The study concludes that for accountability at local government level, participatory budgeting is an effective mechanism due to direct say in decision making. Based on this outcome, the application of participatory budgeting practices in local government level may contribute to increasing the accountability in rural local government level.