Does participation empower? The example of women involved in participatory budgeting in Medellin.

Contemporary democratic experiments are frequently conducted at the local level in order to best include citizens in the decision-making process while responding to emerging sociopolitical crises. This paradigm was implemented in Medellin, Colombia, to combat the omnipresent violence and ongoing marginalization of whole urban sectors due to the current political crisis, after social movements demanded innovative solutions that would not merely replicate the traditional way of doing politics. The result was widespread community participation, strengthened by methods of participatory democracy such as participatory planning and participatory budgeting. The purpose of this article is to explore the impact of these tools on individuals within the community. The focus is particularly on women, who experience multiple forms of exclusion, both as citizens of the urban governance and as individuals traditionally ascribed to the private, domestic sphere. I analyzed trajectories of women's lives and participation to answer the question of how participation in processes of participatory democracy at the local level may contribute to empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]