Jaroslav Dvorak has worked as a professor and head of the Department of Public Administration and Political Sciences at Klaipeda University, Lithuania. He served as Klaipeda University’s representative at the Klaipeda region development council (2019-2021), and at the Klaipeda University Participatory Budget Lab, he promotes PB capacity building.
Read MoreJared is a postdoctoral fellow with the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research at Tulane University. He is currently working on a book that explores the causes and effects of large-scale participatory institutions in Latin America. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Read MoreMaggie Shum is a research and program associate for the Global Policy Initiative (GPI) in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She also earned her Ph.D. in political science from Notre Dame.
Read MoreGreta leads People Powered’s work to grow the collective power of organizations and advocates supporting participatory democracy. She previously served as founding executive director of the Mexican NGO Ollin.
Read MoreJarosław Olejniczak is an assistant professor in the Department of Finance at the Wroclaw University of Economics and Business.
Currently, he collaborates with researchers from Poland and the Czech Republic to examine the participation of young adults in local government activities, as well as citizen participation in rural areas.
Read MorePauliina is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Tampere Centre for Societal Sustainability, Tampere University. She studies participatory budgeting as a democratic innovation in different socio-cultural contexts, such as Finland, Poland and the United Kingdom.
Read MoreDavid joined the Poverty Alliance from the Scottish government’s community empowerment team, where he led its work on participatory budgeting and community development. Before that, David worked for the Scottish Community Development Centre ,working on ways power can be shared with citizens more equitably.
Read MoreEliza has over eight years of experience in implementing and coordinating participatory budgeting (PB) initiatives in Kenyan counties while working for Fahamu Africa. She is also a mentor for the People Powered Rising Star mentorship program and is a co-founder of the Nalotuesha Indigenous Women Organization, a platform that champions for the inclusion of indigenous women in governance.
Read MoreKayla started her career at the City of Boston's Youth Engagement and Employment Department, where she helped design and implement the first youth-led Participatory Budgeting process in the US. Since then, Kayla has been dedicated to improving economic development in communities of color and making government more accessible to immigrants and refugees. She currently serves as a program associate for the Participatory Budgeting Project, supporting training, consulting, and capacity-building services for government and schools.
Read MoreSvetlana Alenitskaya is a program manager at the German Federal Agency for Civic Education. She is responsible for the participatory projects and she has been coordinating the national PB Network since 2007.
The network currently consists of approximately 300 members and is available to German municipalities, interested civil society actors, and researchers. The network supports the work of practitioners and interested parties in PB by providing relevant information as well as facilitating the exchange of ideas and specific questions.
Within the framework of the network, national and international conferences on relevant topics are held annually. Thematic and demand-oriented working group topics for the past years for instance included evaluation, monitoring, and activating the target communities. In conjunction with the members of the network, the manual on providing feedback to the community by municipalities as well as the explanatory film on PB were developed.
Read MoreAntoine Bézard is a consultant at lesbudgetsparticipatifs.fr and an associated expert at the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, which publishes a national annual study about PBs in France.
As co-organizer and co-animator of the French Participatory Budgeting annual meetings, he has developed an important national network since 2016.
As a consultant, he works on studies for cities like Lyon, Rennes, and Grenoble. He also leads workshops and mobilization strategies.
As a speaker, he participates in roundtable discussions, and has spoken at hearings of the French National Assembly. He also teaches courses at the ENA, the national school for administration, in political science, administration, and urbanism subjects.
Read MoreLeonid Donos has been working to strengthen PB in Ukraine since 2015. As executive director of the Association for Communities Participatory Development he supports the implementation of PB processes in Ukrainian cities and communities. He also facilitates the exchange of experiences between countries within the framework of the International Forum for Participation Practitioners. As a board member of the international organization “Foundation for Freedom” he works on trust building and good government. He has a background in history, municipal management, urban planning and facilitation.
Since 2018, his main research topics have been participatory budgets and techniques for citizens’ participation in urban planning, participation for development of the social protection sphere, youth participation, participation of vulnerable and underrepresented groups. He has published several articles, essays and books on these topics. He collaborates actively in a number of projects with international organizations, such as the Council of Europe, Partnership for Local Economic Development and Democratic Governance Project (PLEDDG), and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH.
Read MoreJules Dumas Nguebou is an Associate Professor at the University of Yaounde 2, Chairman of the Executive Board of the Cameroonian NGO ASSOAL, Chairman of the Initiative Committee of the National Network of Inhabitants, and Coordinator of the Inter-African Alliance of Participatory Budgeting, a regional network that advocates for participatory budgeting in several African countries. He is also the main promoter of the School of Governance and the Citizen Centre and governance technologies platforms. The author of several books and articles on civil society and democratic participation, Jules has won many awards, including the RFINet Africa Prize 2005. Finally, he is a consultant in the fields of governance, civil society, and human rights, working with partners and institutions such as the European Union and the World Bank, among others.
Read MoreEllen is a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Rostock, Germany. She studied economics and international business and economics in Germany, Mexico and the United States, and obtained her doctoral degree in management accounting at University of the West of England in Bristol.
Read MoreJames is founder and CEO of the Institute of Public Finance, a nonprofit think tank that pursues the ideals of open public finance through training, research and capacity strengthening.
Read MoreBrittany Giroux Lane is the Director of Solutions at Results for America, helping policymakers at every level of government surface and spread successful interventions to urgent challenges within their communities. Previously, Brittany led the OGP Local Program at the Open Government Partnership, working on improving transparency, accountability, and civic participation in 20 local governments.
Read MoreKarla Valverde is a full-time professor in the Center for Political Studies at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She is an active member of various international academic associations. At the national level, she is a founding Member of the National College of Professionals in Political Science, Public Administration and Government, A.C.; of the Association for Accreditation and Certification in Social Sciences, A. C. (ACCECISO) where she is currently Chairwoman of the Steering Committee, and of the Mexican Council of Research in Political Science (COMICIP). In 2005 she received from UNAM Award for Young Academics in the Area of Social Sciences and since 2008, she is a member of the National System of Researchers (SNI). She is the author of the book ‘Institutional Construction of Social Development’ in Mexico. In addition, she is currently the Academic Coordinator at UNAM of the H2020 Project The Cohesive city: Addressing Stigmatization in Disadvantaged Urban Neighborhoods, which is an international cooperation project between the European Commission, various academic institutions and NGOs from 6 other countries.
Read MoreDaniel is the founder and director of the Participatory Governance Initiative at Arizona State University. He has conducted research on participatory budgeting since 1999, especially in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Costa Rica, Canada and the United States. He helped organize several international conferences on citizenship learning and participatory democracy. His publications include Learning citizenship by practicing democracy: International initiatives and perspectives, The tango of citizenship learning and participatory democracy, ’This is our school of citizenship’: informal learning in local democracy, Democratic innovations and local governance: an international perspective, ’I took a lot of stuff for granted’: Participatory budgeting and the Neighbourhood Support Coalition (with E. Pinnington), Who Learns What in Participatory Democracy? Participatory Budgeting in Rosario, Argentina (with J. Lerner), Participatory Budgeting in North America: The Case of Guelph, Canada (with E. Pinnington and J. Lerner), Citizenship education through participatory budgeting: the Case of Bioscience High School in Phoenix, Arizona (with M. Cohen and A. Wiek), Participatory budgeting, civic education, and political capital (with B. Goldfrank, and Conflicts and tensions in the practice of participatory democracy: The case of participatory budgeting.
Read MoreOsmany Porto de Oliveira is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp). He holds two PhDs in Political Science (University of Sorbonne Nouvelle - 2015 and University of São Paulo - 2013). He received his B.A in International Relations from the University of Bologna in Italy in 2006 and a M.A in Sociétés Contemporaines - Europe - Amériques, from the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle/IHEAL in France in 2008. His main books are International Policy Diffusion and Participatory Budgeting: Ambassadors of Participation, International Institutions and Transnational Networks, Palgrave McMillan (2017) and Le transfert d'un modèle de démocratie participative: Paradiplomatie entre Porto Alegre et Saint-Denis (2010), Éditions IHEAL/CREDA. He has conducted fieldwork about the diffusion of participatory budgeting in different countries: Brazil, Mozambique, Peru, Senegal, Kenya, United States, South Africa, Ecuador, France and Spain.
Read MoreCarolin is a professor for Social Science and Social Science Research Methods at the Berlin School of Economics and Law. She was previously Director of Research at Public Agenda, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and public engagement organization in New York City, where she led research and evaluation projects on participatory budgeting in the USA and Canada. She co-authored several research reports on the state of PB in the USA and Canada, including the 2014-15 and 2015-16 reviews and an interview study on public officials‘ experiences with PB (Why Let the People Decide? 2016). For this work, she and her team at Public Agenda collaborated with local evaluators across the US and Canada. They also led the North American PB Research Board’s efforts to develop the first edition of evaluation metrics for North American PB. Carolin currently studies PB’s impacts on budgeting decisions and the question of whether and how PB can affect a more equitable allocation of public funds. Carolin holds a PhD in Community Psychology from New York University and a Master’s degree in Social and Organizational Psychology from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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