Budapest Participatory Budget (Közösségi Költségvetés) — Annual HUF 1bn Vote With a Thin Delivery Record

Budapest's participatory budget (Közösségi Költségvetés) lets residents submit ideas and vote on how a ring-fenced city amount is spent, via the otlet.budapest.hu platform. Proposals run through five categories (Local Small Ideas, Local Big Ideas, Opportunity-Creating Budapest, Open Budapest, Green Budapest).
The 2025 cycle (fifth edition) offered HUF 1 billion (about €2.5m): 720 ideas were submitted, 126 reached the ballot, and nearly 150,000 votes were cast by over 15,000 people, each allocating 15 votes; a paper-voting option was used by 745 participants. Top results were rain gardens (3,631 votes, HUF 120m), park barbecue areas and health-screening buses. A local media guide reports that 32 projects from earlier cycles had been completed.
The evidence is mixed. An academic analysis of 2,595 proposals submitted 2020–2025 found over a third were 'Green Budapest' ideas, but only 0.4% reached full implementation, attributing the gap to strict professional screening, bureaucratic hurdles and delays, and warning that it risks undermining legitimacy and public trust. The two sources count delivery differently (completed projects vs. share of all proposals), so the true delivery rate should be treated as uncertain. No outcome or equity evaluation of funded projects was found.
Transferable lesson: participation volume is easy to generate; the binding constraint is the administrative pipeline that turns winning ideas into built projects, which should be budgeted and monitored from day one.

Read the full analysis: https://otlet.budapest.hu