This PB Scotland event took place on Monday, 16 February 2026, bringing together 58 participants for presentations and in‑depth discussions on participatory budgeting (PB) at scale. Attendees heard from:

Joe Dixon, Scottish Government
Nicky McCrimmon, Dundee City Council – Neighbourhood Capital Fund
Alison Stuart (NESCAN Hub and Dan Shaw (AVA), Just Transitions North East multiyear investment programme

The speakers showcased how large‑scale PB processes can drive significant community‑led investment and empower residents to shape the priorities that matter most to them. They discussed how large scale PB works in practice, where budgets come from and the lessons learned from their different approaches.

Scottish Government - Joe Dixon highlighted that the Scottish Government has supported PB since 2015, enabling thousands of people to influence local spending decisions. Key points included:

The Community Choices Fund (2016–2018), which helped expand PB activity across Scotland.
The establishment of the National PB Strategic Group to guide long‑term development.
Ongoing support through the National PB Support Programme, delivered by the Scottish Community Development Centre (SCDC) and COSLA.
This programme raises awareness, builds capacity, and provides access to CONSUL digital PB software.
The continued commitment to the 1% mainstream PB agreement between the Scottish Government and COSLA.
A freely available PB and Grant‑Making course, developed with sector partners and Fife College, to support PB activists and practitioners.

Joe also outlined the work of the Government’s Community Empowerment Team, which has partnered with local organisations to deliver the Just Transition PB Fund. This fund has invested £5.4 million over 4 years in capital and resource monies to support communities in the North East of Scotland to take action on climate change through participatory budgeting processes.

Joe also mentioned how democratic participation is evolving with things like the Citizens assembly in Dunfermline which will have funding allocated around identified priorities – this has been led by the Electoral Reform Society and Fife Council.

Dundee's Neighbourhood Capital Fund (NCF) - Nicky McCrimmon told us about a large scale Participatory Budgeting exercise carried out last year in Dundee (2025). Dundee City Council asked communities to decide on how to spend £650,000 of capital funding in Dundee's most deprived communities. A three-step process of idea generation, community prioritising and public vote were carried out by communities with support from Community Learning & Development Workers in Dundee. In order to comply with UNCRC there was a specific focus on targeting young people to take part in all elements of the process. Nicky advised that 7000 people voted in the process and 45% of these were young people.

Just Transition Participatory Budgeting Fund - Alison Stuart (NESCAN Hub) and Dan Shaw (AVA) told us about the Just Transitions initiative which is in its 4th year and has distributed a total of £5.4m of capital funding to communities across Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire and Moray to undertake just transition projects. The Fund is run by a partnership of 5 local organisations - each of the local 3 third sector interfaces - ACVO, AVA and tsiMoray, NESCAN Hub and Money for Moray. It is the biggest green PB exercise in Scotland both in relation to fund size and geographic spread and faces the challenge of a 1 year funding cycle.

While the principles that shape and determine the fund are set by the Just Transition Fund, the partnership co-designs the detail of the fund criteria and applicant requirements. Each partner in the partnership has a different role to play, from administering the fund, providing support to communities to enable communities to understand the just transition principles and create suitable capital projects with social, environmental and biodiversity aspects at their heart, to publicity.

Some examples of supported Projects include:

Ruthrieston Community Centre – solar and insulation project £44,984
NERVS Blood Bikes – Electric car - £38,785
Midmar Mens Shed – Air source heat pump £14,111

Breakout discussions

The breakout session focused on what is happening around Scottland and the opportunities and challenges for PB.

Opportunities

There is an opportunity to bring PB into Place Plans. In Aberdeenshire there were pockets of PB in tenancy project + com learning with young people.
SEPA has been involved in a “river routes” project with some elements of PB over the past couple of years. Focused on place based work.
Edinburgh City Council has a long history of PB. Mostly on smaller scale – local area. They are looking at using the Visitor Levy – Possibly millions over the next few years. This will be high profile – and on a large scale. An advantage of this work is that they are not taking budgets off anyone. That makes it easier. But scale and way pf setting it up is a challenge.
Northern Ireland said they have been doing small grants since 2017 – started to do it as a way to pool budget. Last year they spent £100k on small grants. They want to mainstream it and come away from small grants.
PB provides an opportunity to build the capacity (skills/knowledge/confidence) of community activists.
The Gorbals area of Glasgow has held in person voting events and has over 500 votes
Leith Decides has held another of its very successful events
Ward capital funding may be an opportunity to introduce PB at a local level.
In Castlemilk a small amount of money from an independent funder for PB has enabled a local partnership led by Casiltoun Housing Association to lever in additional monies for PB
There are good examples of how PB has been an effective tool in involving young people in local decision making processes
Opportunities for the wider public sector, not just local authorities and the third sector, to undertake PB
Pride in Place funding might be an opportunity but we don’t know enough about the fund yet
PB can be an opportunity to bring organisations together to work in partnership

Challenges

One challenge raised was that of equality-proofing PB, with gender being the example used. Should we collect info on gender? Gender aspect to using space. How is the PB process gender proofed? – others in the group said we need to be able to collect the information that’s relevant, so this needs to be taken into account when thinking about equality.

Local authorities don’t have the ability to use PB as an approach as they are struggling to maintain services at the level they’re at.
It is important to understand barriers and that they’d been involved in PB which provided creche facilities
Doing PB is time consuming and you need time and resources to explain the PB concept to colleagues and communities if new to the process.
Needs to be buy in from top – com eng across council – unless buy in from top. 1% target – no penalty. Hard to get buy-in across different services.
How can PB address large scale projects in the community - for example reinstating a river walk way in the Gorbals which may cost millions. This might be a case for integrating PB into local place planning.
PB can be a very time consuming process and when money is allocated to be distributed via a PB process there is often little or no money or resource allocated to support the process
Loss of dedicated PB posts means a loss of knowledge and nobody to co-ordinate or support upskilling of other staff members
Group members felt that the current challenges were for mid-range PB processes. Large scale PB processes and small scale were resourced or more manageable but it was the mid-sized projects that teams were expected to undertake without additional support that were the most challenging.