Civic budget – a tool for social participation in the context of municipal financial management

The budget is a basic tool of financial management of the municipality. It should be treated as a source of knowledge about how much money local government has accumulated, what it wants to spend it on and in what size. In order to meet the expectations of the citizens, local government authorities have been using the method of participation in budget planning for some time, which was also legally sanctioned. The tools for such kind of participation are the civic budget and the village fund. The study aims to describe the essence of the civic budget as a decision making process through which citizens talk and negotiate the distribution of public resources. The methodology of civic budget and its types were presented and an example of civic budget implementation in a selected municipality was given.