Global Austerity and Local Democracy: The Case of Participatory Budgeting in Guelph, ON.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the role of participatory budgeting in policy-making at the municipal level, through a case study of the longest experiment with participatory budgeting in Canada, the Neighbourhood Support Coalition (NSC) in Guelph, ON. While existing scholarship tends to view participatory budgeting largely as oppositional to neoliberalism, I argue that participatory budgeting in Guelph is better understood as an adaptation of community groups to a neoliberal political context, rather than a direct challenge to neoliberal policies. When participatory budgeting began to be perceived as contravening neoliberal rationalities of autonomy, self-sufficiency, and marketization, the grassroots democratic elements of the practice were ultimately sacrificed in favour of a process that fit better with these logics. This work builds on previous research on participatory budgeting in Guelph by both bringing participatory budgeting in explicit dialogue with neoliberalism, and temporally extending the narrative of Guelph’s experience with participatory budgeting beyond 2009.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".