Scotland's Community Choices — National Participatory Budgeting Programme and the 1% Mainstreaming Target, Evaluated 2016–2018

Community Choices is the Scottish Government's programme supporting participatory budgeting (PB), backed by a COSLA agreement to put at least 1% of local government budgets under PB by 2021.
The Scottish Government commissioned an evaluation in 2015; Glasgow Caledonian University carried out fieldwork from 2016 to September 2018, focusing on impacts on communities, local services, local democracy and tackling inequalities, and ending with a discussion of moving PB to the mainstream under the 1% framework.
In 2017-18 a £1.5m fund received 91 applications to run PB processes, with 17 public bodies and 17 community organisations funded, and PB Scotland reports 57,000 people (97,000 votes cast in its own count) took part in government-supported processes.
Cautionary note: the interim evaluation said impact on local services to date was limited with no demonstrable evidence of change, and scaling from typical ~£10,000 allocations to as much as £1m per ward in Glasgow would be a major institutional shift. We did not verify the final report's conclusions on the 1% target.

Read the full analysis: https://www.gov.scot/publications/evaluation-participatory-budgeting-activity-scotland-2016-2018-2/pages/1/