A participatory budget model under uncertainty

•We propose a model for participatory budgeting under uncertainty.•We adapt group decision making schemes to the presence of stochastic elements.•We extend participatory budgeting to economic contexts under uncertainty.•We illustrate our approach with a simple example.

Participatory budgets are becoming increasingly popular in many municipalities all over the world. The underlying idea is to allow citizens to participate in the allocation of a fraction of the municipal budget. There are many variants of such processes. However, in most cases they assume a fixed budget based upon a maximum amount of money to be spent. This approach seems lacking, especially in times of crisis when public funding suffers high volatility and widespread cuts. In this paper, we propose a model for participatory budgeting under uncertainty based on stochastic programming.