total of pb processes
​

17

local government
​

15

regional, state
​and national governments

0

other type of institution

2

large cities

1

capital cities

1

Legislation regarding the regulation of Participatory Budgeting experiences
_

The PB in Romania is approved using local council decisions and can be requested by any citizen or local council member. It must be approved by local council between the day when the national budget is approved by the parliament and the day when the local budget is approved. It must not be more than 15 days.

Outstanding innovation
​_

In Romania all the projects that need public money in one year must be approved at the start of that year. We have the 3x15 days rule for this. In the first 15 days since the national budget was approved in the parliament, the local councils need to decide how they will spend the money per domain. In the next 15 days, the citizens and council can propose what projects are going to be supported in that year and in the last 15 days the final project list will be decided and approved. The Participatory
Budgeting (the process, not the projects that will use it) must be proposed in the second phase (the second 15 days) in order to finish all the paperwork in this time frame. The entire project is general available and any Romanian citizen can use it, update it according to his/her town info and propose it for approval. I worked on a general available local council decision regarding PB so the time to implement it is minimized, meaning the time frame to propose the process to city hall council.

Principal tendencies detected
​​_

​The participatory budget in Romania is at the beginning and there is a “unwritten law” that indicates PB projects must be in one of the domains: parks and playgrounds, safety, urban design, smart-city, culture/social/youth. There is no general report about which domain is more used or not, but while reviewing the projects in the current PB implementation, it is noticed that the smart-city area has the biggest number of projects.

Other information
​​_

​The Participatory Budgeting in Romania is at its early stage, there is no specific legislation regulating these initiatives.
Each local council can decide if it will be implemented and the methodology. There are more than 100 requests made to the Council in order to implement PB processes, but most of them are rejected. There is also a map that shows PB
initiatives in the country: https://w w w.mapcustomizer.com/map/romania-bugetare-participativa.
The ones in green are already implemented, the ones in light blue are approved, but it will start within the next fiscal year, due to Romanian public budget regulations.

C O M M U N I T Y

capital

Bucharest

population

19 473 940

language

Romanian

currency

Romanian Leu
(RON)

P O S I T I O N   O N   I N D E X E S

DEMOCRACY

66
FLAWED DEMOCRACY

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

52
VERY HIGH

CORRUPTION PERCEPTION

61/180

WORLD HAPPINESS

48/156