A framework for participatory budget elaboration support

Participatory budgets are becoming increasingly popular in many municipalities all around the world. The underlying idea is to allow citizens to participate in the allocation of a municipal budget. Little decision support methodology is used in this type of activities, frequently based on physical meetings and some kind of voting mechanism. We describe models and methods to support the elaboration of a participatory budget. We model this problem as one of resource allocation, in which citizens attempt to maximize group satisfaction in view of multiple criteria, subject to, possibly, other constraints. Based on a negotiation approach, we propose a general methodology to deal with such a problem. © 2008 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved.