Involving the public in decision-making about the allocation of public funding could have a positive impact on small-grant, community-focused arts projects that are seen to be of direct benefit to communities, to provide value for money, to be easy to understand and to appeal to voters’ emotions. However, it is difficult to predict how well less community-focused artforms would fare in a public vote, or how the arts sector as a whole would be affected if mainstream local authority budgets were opened up to a public vote. These are the main conclusions drawn in an Arts Council England (ACE) report investigating the potential impact of ‘participatory budgeting’ in the arts sector. This process is being advocated by the Government as a means to give communities more say. Local authorities are being expected to use participatory budgeting by 2012, and ACE sees this as having implications for its attempts to involve the public and stakeholders in decision-making, and for its work with local authorities. The report includes predictions about the future impact of participatory budgeting on the arts: it identifies the scale and type of arts projects that have been funded in this way to date, and the factors that have contributed to their successes and failures. Four possible future scenarios have been drawn up to identify potential challenges for ACE and the arts sector.
