The Journey of Participatory Budgeting: A systematic literature review and future research directions

Purpose The present systematic literature review aims at analysing the body of knowledge on an innovative budgeting practice, the so-called Participatory Budgeting (PB). PB has stimulated a growing debate over the years in light of its potential ability to address current challenges, as the call for strengthening transparency, accountability, democracy and performance, consistently with recent public sector reform movements (New Public Governance). Design A systematic literature review is carried out to produce valid and reliable research findings through a replicable, scientific and transparent process. This review identifies and analyses a dataset of English- written papers focused on PB in the public sector and published from 1989 to 2017 in academic journals (accounting, public sector and regional studies) and by international organizations (IMF, WB, OECD). Findings The findings of this review shed new light on PB by (a) analysing this body of knowledge (research source and type, setting, method, theoretical framework and content) and (b) building a research agenda for developing PB by clarifying overlooked and overstated areas of research. Particularly, the findings underline academics and practitioners’ research findings and contributions to the topic. Originality/Value The value of this research lies on the accuracy of the methodology adopted to analyse PB, on its attempt to review comprehensively this body of knowledge and, especially, on the new light shed on findings and contributions to the topic of academics and practitioners and on the way to connect these perspectives in order to improve PB development.