The Effects of Participatory Budgeting on Local Government Service Delivery: Evidence From Sumedang

This paper examines the effects of participatory budgeting on local government service delivery in the district of Sumedang, West Java, using synthetic control methods. I use four indicators to measure the local government’s service delivery performance: household access to safe sanitation and water, and the net junior and senior secondary school enrolment rates. The findings indicate that participatory budgeting improved the net junior secondary enrolment rate for the overall population compared to the counterfactual, but not that it improved the access of the poor to any of the areas investigated. I argue that this is due to the dominance of local elites in agenda setting, a lack of strategies to target poverty and the low levels of participation of the poor in participatory budgeting processes.