by Grant Cronin

A middling, yet bustling and beautiful, port city on the south-west coast of Brazil may not be the first place you would consider looking for ideas to rejuvenate Britain’s creaking democracy, yet since 1989 Porto Alegre has been at the centre of an democratic experiment that handed a large portion of public municipal budgets directly to citizens to spend as they saw fit. The handing over monetary power to citizens in Porto Alegre and other cities in Brazil has been a promising success seeing poverty, infant mortality, and homelessness all fall along with a stark increase of participation in democratic processes.

Many would argue that Britain is in the midst of a boon of political interest with Brexit and the 2017 General Election enjoying slightly-better-than-average turnouts. Yet how do we translate this ineffable, and sometimes loose, mainstream interest into meaningful and direct participation? In Britain, where to…