Case Studies

South Korea – Participatory Budgeting/New Policy Design

Tags: Wellbeing Policy Design

An increasing number of local and national governments are using participatory budgeting to help identify policy priorities and new context-appropriate policy initiatives.

In 2018, South Korea’s Ministry of Economy and Finance began a National Participatory Budgeting initiative called “My Budget”. Citizens were asked to submit project ideas which are then reviewed by all Ministries before being sent to a citizens committee (composed of 400 representatives) for discussion and review. The citizens committee then voted alongside 2000 online participants for the project proposals they wanted to have submitted to the National Assembly.

Due to the success of this initiative, the government increased the participatory budget allocation for 2020 by 70% to 224 million dollars and approved 38 projects for the final 2020 budget (out of the 1399 projects received) which focused on the areas of youth unemployment and support for childcare, small businesses, and socially marginalised communities. Policy initiatives ranged from city forest development and ocean trash drone surveillance to counselling centres for sexual assault victims.

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