control of the municipality in 1991. By 2000, at least 20,000 residents were taking part in the participatory processes, which covered the full range of municipal budgets from road-building to health care. Review meetings in municipal districts took place at least twice a month, attended by around 50 people on average. However, Porto Alegre’s budget experiment has accounted for only a modest proportion of the municipal budget: officials still hold most of the purse-strings.

_Sources_ : Baiocchi (2003); Paul (undated); Teivanien (2002).

There have been problems elsewhere too: an optimistic report of an attempted replication of Porto Alegre in El Salvador admits that participatory budgeting had fallen into disuse in 60% of the locations where it had been attempted; and emerging evidence from Africa is also disappointing (Bland, 2011; Booth, 2011; Gaventa and McGee, 2010). Moreover, ‘If one considers the legislature to be an important organ of democratic institutionality, it may seem problematic that the local legislature tends to have its powers diminished by the participatory budget planning’ (Teivanien, 2002: 629).

The difficulties with accountability that bottom-up initiatives inadvertently create (‘unintended consequences’ again!) echo criticisms which we have mostly forgotten in development circles that followed the wave of participation experiments in countries like Libya, Tanzania and Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s, not to mention industrialized countries like the UK and the US (Pagano and Rowthorn, 1996; Richardson, 1983; Wolfe, 1970).

Finally, it is important to draw a distinction here between public administration functions. The ‘voice’ approach is most promising for functions such as service provision, regulation and revenue collection where there is a clear interface with citizens, and therefore a citizen constituency for reform. However, it is less promising for overall policy formulation and ‘back office’ functions such as human resource management which are less visible to citizens. Kessy and McCourt (2010) found that school meetings in Tanzania were better attended than any other participatory forum: citizens care a great deal more about their children's education than about abstruse questions of governance. (This may be why one UK party leader was mocked in the 1997 general election when he put the creation of an independent central bank at the center of his party’s program. His technocratic proposal duly failed to galvanize voters.) For the back-office functions, top-down management reform is probably the only way to proceed.

So there are questions of appropriateness with the bottom-up reforms, just as there have been with the top-down ones. It is ironic that advocates of bottom-up approaches to reform have been slower than their top-down counterparts to recognize the problems we have just discussed, even though their favored initiatives have been concentrated in middle-income countries, especially in Latin America, and implemented in idiosyncratic ways.

That indifference to context, mixed with the powerful support of international development agencies, has prompted a concern in an article which is sympathetic to the reforms that the voice-based reforms might be ‘ground, pasteurized and converted into new appendages of conditionality’. Santos (1998: 507) was prescient: ‘process conditionality’ in the form of a requirement for governments to consult public society has become integral to the design of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), the lending vehicle that replaced structural adjustment loans, with initiatives like Porto Alegre and Bengaluru held up as models (World Bank, 2004a). Despite criticisms that what was being promoted was not so much ownership as ‘donorship’ (Cramer _et al._ , 2006; Dijkstra, 2002), the model has spread to other development agencies like DFID and UNDP.

# **7. Moving Beyond Failure: Evidence and Explanations**

I turn now to the evidence of failure which I touched on at the start of the paper. Since I will rely on World Bank project evaluation reports, we should recognize that World Bank projects are a skewed 14