Participatory budgets are becoming increasingly popular in many municipalities all over the world. The underlying idea is to allow citizens to participate in the allocation of a fraction of the municipal budget. There are many variants of such processes. However, in most cases they assume a fixed budget based upon a maximum amount of money to be spent. This approach seems lacking, especially in times of crisis when public funding suffers high volatility and widespread cuts. In this paper, we propose a model for participatory budgeting under uncertainty based on stochastic programming.

Research supported by MINECO Project (Grant no. MTM2014- 56949-C3-1-R), Corporate Community (Grant no. IPT-2011-0871- 430000), Democracy4All (Grant no. IPT-2011-0869-430000) and the AXA-ICMAT Chair in Adversarial Risk Analysis. We are very grateful to the discussions by the referees and Manuel Arenilla, Head of INAP.

Peer Reviewed