Public Project Portfolio Optimization under a Participatory Paradigm

A new democracy paradigm is emerging through participatory budgeting exercises, which can be defined as a public space in which the government and the society agree on how to adapt the priorities of the citizenship to the public policy agenda. Although these priorities have been identified and they...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Eduardo Fernandez, Rafael Olmedo
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Hindawi Limited 2013-01-01
Series:Applied Computational Intelligence and Soft Computing
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/891781
Description
Summary:A new democracy paradigm is emerging through participatory budgeting exercises, which can be defined as a public space in which the government and the society agree on how to adapt the priorities of the citizenship to the public policy agenda. Although these priorities have been identified and they are likely to be reflected in a ranking of public policy actions, there is still a challenge of solving a portfolio problem of public projects that should implement the agreed agenda. This work proposes two procedures for optimizing the portfolio of public actions with the information stemming from the citizen participatory exercise. The selection of the method depends on the information about preferences collected from the participatory group. When the information is sufficient, the method behaves as an instrument of legitimate democracy. The proposal performs very well in solving two real-size examples.
ISSN:1687-9724
1687-9732