Paris participatory budget: a decade of resident-chosen investment and its open questions

The Paris participatory budget (Budget Participatif) is a program, run since 2014 by the City of Paris, in which residents propose capital investment ideas and then vote on which ones the city will build; anyone who lives in Paris and is at least 7 years old may take part, regardless of nationality.⁠^2,6 Over its first ten years the city reports €768 million allocated and 1,345 winning projects, with 34% of the money in lower-income neighborhoods.⁠² In 2025, 162,395 residents voted, which is about 7.7% of the city’s population, and researchers argue the process is shaped as much by city politics and administration as by residents.⁠^3,6,8,9

What happened

The Paris participatory budget grew from a single citywide vote into a yearly process with both Paris-wide and arrondissement (district) envelopes. The dated record below comes from official City of Paris sources and research verified for this page.

• Before 2014. Some local participatory budgets existed in Paris. Héloïse Nez studied one in the 20th arrondissement alongside Córdoba, Spain, and concluded that the social results of European participatory budgets were “plus mitigés” (translation: “more mixed”) than in Porto Alegre.⁠¹¹
• 2014. The first city edition: 40,745 people voted.⁠⁶ The open data on winning projects lists nine projects for that edition.⁠⁷
• 2015 to 2019. Votes rose from 66,870 (2015) to 143,489 (2019).⁠⁶
• 2020. Neither official dataset verified for this page lists a 2020 edition.⁠^6,7 The reason was not verified.
• 2021 to 2024. Votes ranged from 106,326 (2021) to 142,938 (2024).⁠⁶
• September 4 to 23, 2025. The 11th edition: 162,395 residents voted on 261 ideas, and 104 projects won, two of them Paris-wide.⁠³
• September 2026. France’s Cour des comptes, in a report on citizen participation, described Paris as having launched its first participatory budget in 2014 and spending “près de 35 € par habitant et par an, contre 6,5 € en moyenne en France” (translation: “nearly €35 per resident per year, compared with €6.5 on average in France”).⁠¹²

How it worked

The Paris participatory budget follows a yearly cycle of proposal, study and vote, followed by delivery by city departments.

Who can take part

“Tous les Parisiens peuvent voter, à partir de 7 ans et sans condition de nationalité” (translation: “All Parisians can vote, from age 7 and without any nationality requirement”).⁠⁴ To propose an idea or vote, “les seules conditions sont d’habiter Paris et d’avoir au moins 7 ans” (translation: “the only conditions are to live in Paris and be at least 7 years old”).⁠³

What qualifies

An idea must “relever de l’intérêt général” (serve the general interest), fall within the city’s powers, be “une dépense d’investissement” (a capital expenditure), and be submitted by a person or group living in Paris.⁠^5,2 Operating costs such as staff are therefore outside the program.

Stages

• Proposal. Residents submit ideas on the city platform; the city reports more than 21,000 ideas over ten years.⁠²
• Study. “Quand une idée est recevable, elle est étudiée par les services de la Ville” (translation: “When an idea is admissible, it is studied by the City’s departments”).⁠⁵
• Vote. “Le vote est la dernière étape du processus” (translation: “The vote is the last step of the process”).⁠⁵ Voting is online through France Connect, the national login service, which the city says ensures a person votes only once, or at physical ballot boxes.⁠⁴ The city’s pages give different ballot box counts for 2025: “Près de 400 urnes” (nearly 400) on the voting page.⁠⁴ and 505 on the results page⁠³
• Counting method. Since at least the 2025 edition, the vote uses majority judgment: voters grade each project with one of four ratings, and the best-rated project wins.⁠⁴
• Envelopes. “Chaque arrondissement ainsi que « Tout Paris » dispose d’une enveloppe budgétaire globale” (translation: “Each arrondissement as well as ‘All of Paris’ has an overall budget envelope”), and the number of winners depends on project costs.⁠⁴
• Delivery. City departments carry out the winning projects,⁠⁵ and the open data tracks each project through studies, procedures, works and delivery.⁠⁷

How much money

The City states that “Un quart des investissements de la Ville de Paris est construit et décidé avec les Parisiennes et les Parisiens” (translation: “A quarter of the City of Paris’s investments are built and decided with Parisians”).⁠¹ That claim covers more than the vote. Researcher Mathilde Vassor described the participatory budget itself as allocating “5 % du budget d’investissement de la Ville” (translation: “5% of the City’s investment budget”).⁠⁹ The two figures measure different things, and the official basis for each was not verified for this page.

Measured results

The City of Paris publishes vote counts and a project-tracking dataset, which allow a closer look than most participatory budgets.

Votes by edition

Source: City of Paris open data.⁠⁶

INSEE, the national statistics office, counts 2,103,778 residents of Paris in 2023.⁠⁸ By this page’s own arithmetic, the 2025 vote equals about 7.7% of that population. The comparison is approximate: the eligible group excludes children under 7, and the population figure is from 2023.

Money and projects

• The city reports €768 million over ten years, €263 million (34%) in quartiers populaires (working-class neighborhoods); 1,345 winning projects; and “plus de 3 400 chantiers terminés” (translation: “more than 3,400 completed work sites”).⁠² A related city page gives “près de 3 600 réalisations” (nearly 3,600 completed items).⁠⁵ These counts refer to work sites or operations, not projects.
• The open data on winning projects lists 1,447 projects through 2025: 69 Paris-wide projects with a combined budget of €212.8 million and 1,378 arrondissement projects with €637.3 million.⁠⁷ Excluding the 104 projects of 2025, the dataset holds 1,343 projects, close to the city’s figure of 1,345.

Delivery status

The project dataset records a status for each project.⁠⁷ Across all editions, 842 projects are labeled “FIN” (end), 223 “LIVRAISON” (delivery), 87 “TRAVAUX” (works), 45 “PROCEDURES”, 124 “ETUDES” (studies), 61 not started and 65 “ABANDONNÉ” (abandoned).⁠⁷ For older editions:

Source: City of Paris open data.⁠⁷ The official definitions of each status label could not be extracted from the dataset notice, so this page reports the labels as written. On these labels, about 4.5% of all winning projects (65 of 1,447) were abandoned, and several years after the 2019 vote a third of that edition’s projects were not yet labeled finished.

Paris compared with France

The Cour des comptes counted 432 participatory budgets in France in 2022, covering only 1.15% of communes but 12 million residents, and noted they are concentrated in large cities.⁠¹² Its per-resident comparison places Paris well above the national average.⁠¹²

Failures and criticisms

The Paris participatory budget draws criticism about participation, control, politics and evidence, and supporters have answers to some of it.

• Most residents do not vote. Even the record 2025 vote equals under a tenth of the population.⁠^6,8 Supporters point out that the number of voters roughly quadrupled from 2014 to 2025.⁠⁶
• The city controls the framing. Vassor argues that participation is “instrumentalisée” (instrumentalized) to legitimize the municipality, and that project texts entered through forms are edited and reused by the city, which controls how ideas are presented.⁠⁹ City departments also decide admissibility.⁠⁵
• Partisan roots. William Arhip-Paterson, in the peer-reviewed journal Participations, found that the Paris participatory budget “s’inscrit dans une offre politique partisane de gauche” (translation: “is part of a left-wing partisan political offer”), but that all arrondissement mayors, “même ceux de droite” (even those on the right), developed arrondissement budgets, with partisan influence showing in how intensively they did so.⁠¹⁰
• Capital-only scope. Because ideas must be investment spending,⁠^2,5 ongoing services are excluded, and a new facility can create operating costs outside the vote.
• Delivery lag and abandonment. The official status data show abandoned projects and multi-year delivery times.⁠⁷ Whether some winning projects would have been funded anyway is a recurring question; no source verified here measures it.
• Equity is contested. The city reports 34% of spending in quartiers populaires.⁠² Nez’s earlier work found European participatory budgets struggled to reduce segregation.⁠¹¹ Neither source compares who votes with who lives in each neighborhood.
• Thin independent evaluation. The Cour des comptes report notes that evaluation of citizen participation’s impact “reste à construire” (remains to be built) in its chapter headings.⁠¹² No independent evaluation of the Paris program’s outcomes was verified for this page.

What transferred and what did not

Paris took a model associated with Porto Alegre and scaled it to a large European capital; see /cases/porto-alegre-participatory-budgeting/. Within France, the Cour des comptes counted 400 communes, 21 départements, one region (Occitanie) and 10 universities with participatory budgets in 2022, but most communes have none.⁠¹² Inside Paris, the arrondissement envelopes extended the practice to mayors of different parties.⁠¹⁰ Paris also extended the vote to children and noncitizens,⁠⁴ a choice New York City made in a different form; see /cases/new-york-city-participatory-budgeting/. Madrid’s city platform, which combined budgeting with citizen proposals, is covered at /cases/madrid-decide/.

Lessons for My Vote Forward

The following points are interpretation and design proposals, not findings about My Vote Forward, which has not been tested.

• Track every outcome publicly. Paris’s open project dataset lets anyone count abandoned and unfinished projects.⁠⁷ Any framework should publish what happened to each result; see participation over time and published releases.
• Define status labels. Status counts mean little without definitions, and this page could not verify them.⁠⁷ Publish a data dictionary with every release.
• Use clear denominators. Report participation against the eligible population, not raw totals;⁠^6,8 see measurement.
• The voting rule shapes results. Paris uses majority judgment;⁠⁴ see tradeoffs and collective priorities.
• Who edits the proposal matters. Vassor’s critique of city framing⁠⁹ applies to any system where staff rewrite public input; see question design.

Unresolved questions

• What do the status labels “FIN” and “LIVRAISON” officially mean, and what share of projects are open to the public⁠⁷?
• What share of the city’s investment budget does the vote itself control each year, and how does that relate to the city’s “un quart” statement⁠^1,9?
• Why is there no 2020 edition in the official datasets⁠^6,7?
• Who votes, by age, neighborhood and income? No official demographic breakdown was verified for this page.
• Did a Chambre régionale des comptes review of the Paris program reach findings on delivery or cost? None was located in the Cour des comptes listing searched for this page.
• How do the school and collège participatory budgets work, and how is the quartiers populaires share set? Official rules were not verified for this page.