Amid political repression and a deepening affordability crisis, Budget Justice challenges everything you thought you knew about “dull” and daunting government budgets. It shows how the latter confuse and mislead the public by design, not accident. Arguing that they are moral documents that demand grassroots participation to truly work for everyone, the book reveals how everyday citizens can shape policy to tackle everything from rising housing and food costs to unabated police violence, underfunded schools, and climate change–driven floods and wildfires.
Drawing on her years of engagement with democratic governance in New York City and around the globe, Celina Su proposes a new kind of democracy—in which city residents make collective decisions about public needs through processes like participatory budgeting, and in which they work across racial divides and segregated spaces as neighbors rather than as consumers or members of voting blocs. Su presents a series of “interludes” that vividly illustrate how budget justice plays out on the ground, including in-depth interviews with activists from Porto Alegre, Brazil, Barcelona, Spain, and Jackson, Mississippi, and shares her own personal reflections on how changing social identities inform one’s activism.
Essential reading to empower citizens, Budget Justice explains why public budgets reflect a crisis not so much in accounting as in democracy, and enables everyone, especially those from historically marginalized communities, to imagine and enact people’s budgets and policies—from universal preschool to affordable housing—that will enable their communities to thrive.
Celina Su is the Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies and professor of political science at the City University of New York, a former Senior Democracy Scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and the recipient of a Berlin Prize in public policy. She is a coauthor of Our Schools Suck: Students Talk Back to a Segregated Nation on the Failures of Urban Education and the author of the poetry collection Landia. Su’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Boston Review, The New Republic, and n+1. Since 2015, Su has served as chair or cochair of the URBAN Research Network, a coalition of scholars and activists committed to community-based research and social change.
“Celina Su’s Budget Justice is a prophetic and powerful call to reimagine how our society allocates its resources—and to whom. It is a blueprint for a moral revival in public policy. Su reminds us that budgets are not neutral—they are moral documents that reveal our deepest priorities. In this age of poverty amidst plenty, Su challenges us to engage in participatory budgeting and demand that our institutions serve the people rather than militarize our communities. Read this book, study it together, and then take it to the streets.”—Rev. Liz Theoharis, Poor People’s Campaign cochair and coauthor of You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take
“In an era of austerity and deepening inequality, Budget Justice is a powerful and urgent guide for communities fighting for equity in housing, education, city planning, and more—through direct engagement with city budgets. In this critical and galvanizing work, Celina Su reveals how the antidote to economic despair lies in collective power.”—Darrick Hamilton, founding director, Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy, The New School
“Under overwhelming conditions of state violence, Budget Justice is a useful tool for anyone trying to discern what possibilities for material relief—and transformative change—can be won by engaging city budgets.”—Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid
“Budget Justice is an elegant, erudite, and intimate book. In its pages, public budgets are moral and dramatic, cruel and community building: budgets are not just austerities that are thrust upon us. They are also futures we can dream up.”—Alissa Quart, author of Bootstrapped
