Presupuesto Participativo — Peru's National Participatory Budgeting Law

Peru's Congress passed Law No. 28056 (the 'Ley Marco del Presupuesto Participativo') in 2003, requiring every regional and local government to run an annual participatory budgeting cycle: convening registered civil-society 'agentes participantes', training them, holding prioritisation workshops, and formalising the resulting project list against each jurisdiction's development plan. The Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) regulates and monitors compliance through an annual guidance document and reporting platform. Villa El Salvador, a district in Lima, pioneered the practice in 2000-2001, inspired by Porto Alegre, Brazil, three years before the national law made it mandatory everywhere.

In its first fully reported year (2005), MEF recorded 801 regional and local governments running the process — all 26 regions, 111 of 195 provincial municipalities (57%) and 664 of 1,634 district municipalities (41%) — engaging 30,061 registered participants in decisions covering over S/.2.6 billion (about US$780 million at the time) and 12,473 prioritised projects. A 2010 World Bank evaluation found that by 2007 the process was debating roughly 36% of subnational budgets nationally (about US$393 million).

Independent case-study research (IEP, 2020, covering 2014-2016) found that how many prioritised projects actually made it into the executed budget varied enormously by government level and location, from 83% in the district of Río Negro down to just 10% in the region of Amazonas, and that even budgeted projects were executed at a lower rate than ordinary investment (36% vs 52% in one province studied). The same research and a 2010 World Bank gender review found women made up only 32% of participants, 26% of oversight-committee members and 20% of technical teams, and documented some jurisdictions running the process largely to satisfy the legal mandate rather than for real deliberation.