Children’s participation in decision-making: when schools and local governments work together in participatory budgeting

Children’s Participatory Budgeting (PB) processes are carried out by a growing number of municipalities around the world. The relevance of the impact of these processes will be shaped by methodological principles, selected design features and, more importantly, by the stance of local authorities and other stakeholders on democratic inclusion and the role of children. A specific and very important feature to engage children in decision-making is the establishment of alliances between local governments and schools to carry out these PB processes, as schools offer a territory-based and universal organization of children in each municipality. This chapter makes an effort to illustrate the influence of evolving cultural conceptions of democracy and children as political agents on participatory processes with youth. Second, we systematize a set of characteristics that can shape the agreements between local authorities and schools, related to the aforementioned cultural conceptions and other circumstances.