| 英文摘要: | As international efforts towards adaptation shift from finding the cash to designing the processes through which it will be spent, Anna Petherick asks what we can learn from participatory budgeting. A few years ago, adaptation to climate change seemed like the forgotten cousin of mitigation. But 2014 began in the knowledge that a string of European countries had committed to almost doubling the size of The Adaptation Fund's coffers. As such, the Fund recently began a two-year initiative to build capacity in the regional and national organizations to which it has given a stamp of approval to receive and distribute the money to come. Cautious observers have raised concerns about how this pot of cash will filter down. The same goes for the considerable resources promised through another major international funding channel, the Green Climate Fund. Some of these observers have noted that although discussions about practicalities may be emerging, they remain “surprisingly rare”1. Among the chief worries are the dual problems of ensuring the money is directed at the most appropriate projects, and ensuring that once directed, those involved in the chain of approval, transfer and implementation do not skim off the top. In fact, dealing with climate change inherently involves countering double-dealing: the ranked list of countries predicted to be most affected by climate change correlates quite closely with that of the world's most corrupt nations2. Moreover, adaptation projects must engage with sectors that, for structural reasons, are particularly prone to corrupt practices, such as forestry and water resources management. Most experts agree that encouraging local communities' participation in adaptation projects, is, broadly speaking, the way forward. But is it possible to speak less broadly? One narrow branch of the political science literature speaks to several of the dilemmas that adaptation financing will encounter. Participatory budgeting is the practice of involving ordinary citizens in budget meetings with typically local government officials, and, in giving citizens a vote about how the money will be spent, recasting this relationship into one in which officials essentially follow decisions taken by a community. Through participatory budgeting, an area's budget gets widely disseminated, 'average Joes' come to appreciate the relative costs of alternative public goods from dams to toilets, and accountability is not only doled out with each electoral cycle, but made more diffuse and ongoing as whole communities become informed monitors of policy implementation. Participatory budgeting began in Brazil in 1989, following its period of authoritarianism, and was motivated by the idea of planting deeper democratic roots in society. Almost as a side effect, it has reduced corruption. “With US$100,000 of funding for a program,” explains Yves Cabannes, professor of development planning at University College London, “normally you'd be left with public goods worth US$60,000 because of corruption, whereas with participatory budgeting you get US$200,000 [worth of public goods], because the people who participate control the technical aspects [of budget planning] and really optimize the use of resources and the quality of the project.” In his own work, Cabannes has demonstrated that Brazilian municipalities with participatory budgeting use their public finances significantly more effectively than those without participatory budgeting. And he points to a working paper3 by scholars at the University of Sussex's Institute of Development Studies that details the reform of local administrations with participatory budgeting that were previously structured by clientelistic exchange. This is not to say that participatory budgeting offers a perfect model for adaptation financing, or even that it has been effective wherever it has been attempted. It has had three stages4: an initial experimentation period in cities dotted over Latin America, lasting until 1997, then a rapid spread across Brazil (until 2000), and, more recently, an expansion beyond Latin America that has been encouraged7 by the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (see Fig. 1). And, to be sure, throughout each stage the emphasis has been on short-term problem solving for the urban poor. Success has been highly variable.
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