O papel do Orçamento Participativo no desenvolvimento das Regiões Periféricas: o caso do Arquipélago dos Açores

Purpose: Participatory budgeting is a new form of public financing that intends to engage citizens in the political decision-making process. In this decentralized process, the population propose and votes for the most useful projects in a certain location with the aim of obtaining public resources to implement and benefit their own community. Design/methodology/approach: Taking the case of Azores, one of the outermost regions of Portugal, the objective is to evaluate how the participatory budgeting has been implemented in that region between 2018 and 2022. To accomplish that goal a content analysis of the approved projects is made in order to ascertain the area of intervention, the regional distribution, the financial relevance and the activities that the projects aim to implement. Findings: The results allow identifying the islands that have most contributed to the development and implementation of participatory budgeting in the Azores archipelago, the intervention areas where projects are targeted as well as and the patterns in terms regarding financial size. Originality: The contribution of participatory budgeting for the cohesion of the overall region is evaluated not only from the point of view of each Island (inter island comparison) but also at the level of municipality (intra island comparison).