To what extent Villeurbanne's participatory budgeting is participatory ?

With 400 French cities who implemented participatory budgeting in 2022, this wording is now more and more acknowledged, and the process is often cited as a reliable example in order to bring participation in public matters. However, we rarely question its level of participatory ambition, or its ability to achieve a true redistribution of power and diverse mobilization of participants. With the aim of assessing the extent to which a participatory budgeting is participatory, it is interesting to go into the details of the process steps, as it enables us to step further than the common principle guiding the implementation of French PBs: allocating a portion of the municipal budget to realize the ideas proposed and elected by the inhabitants. To do so, this research will analyze the case of Villeurbanne’s participatory budgeting, a city of 153 000 inhabitants, which already organized 3 sessions of participatory budgeting with a total budget of 2.6 millions of euros and 9250 voters. Because this case is situated at a middle ground in the French municipalities, in terms of size and budget for the PB, it can provide some answers to issues faced by other PBs, whatever their size.