Values, Principles and Standards

Values Principles and Standards now published!

Purpose

We produced the values, principles and standards in response to practitioners asking for more guidelines around PB.  The values, principles and standards provide the standard to which PB projects should achieve to ensure a good PB project.  The purpose of the values, principles and standards is to help projects get the most benefits from their PB such as community empowerment, social cohesion, transparency of decision, etc. 

We do suggest that projects use these values, principles and standards when implementing PB but we are also aware that too often people can become so concerned with meeting every aspect that it becomes very 'processy' and the point of PB is missed.  So we leave it up to projects to decide how they will use the values, principles and standards - their aim is to support and provide guidance, not to become a tick-box exercise.

Development of the values, principles and standards

We started developing values, prinicples and standards in January 2008 with the help of practitioners and those involved in some of the projects.

In May we produced a draft document which went out to anyone that was interested, for feedback and improvements.

We received some responses to the draft and have included them in the final version, where possible.  

The final version was launched at our first national conference for participatory budgeting on 15th September 2008.

To an extent, the document is 'living' - in that it will evolve over time as PB practices continue to evolve.  To support the ongoing development we are going to work with about 4 projects - 2 existing, 2 new projects to see how the values, principles and standards have been useful and embedded in their PB processes and how we can improve them to be more helpful in the future.

To download the final version please click here