The New Public Management movement regards citizens as customers and, accordingly, focuses on the quality of services provided by public-sector organizations. Since this approach negatively affected democratic values, there has been a shift of the focus from consumer satisfaction and quality of services to quality of governance. The latter implies the improvement of the relationship between government and citizens as active members of the community. Over the last twenty years, participatory budgeting (PB) has become a popular form of co-production intended to improve the quality of local governance. The aim of the article is to provide a comparative analysis of the use and role of PB in Croatia, Poland and Slovakia and to identify the models of PB used in selected countries. In order to compare the case studies of municipalities in selected countries, a qualitative analysis has been used and the classification of PB models applied. Most analyzed local units use the “Porto Alegre adapted for Europe” model, but the “Consultation on public finances”, “Representation of Organized Interest” and “Proximity participation” models are also represented. The main findings are that PB indeed enables better allocation of public sources according to citizens’ needs (various public services were delivered following the trend of social innovation and co-creation), but the problem lies in the low amount assigned for PB from public budgets and the relatively low interest of citizens to participate in the PB processes. PB might also bring certain risks linked with its implementation, e.g. misuse of the idea for political reasons or additional costs of projects delivered in the PB process.

The new approaches to the delivery of local public services include co-creation. In this paper, we focus on two local public service delivery actors: local governments and civil society. Our objective is to identify different types of co-creation in social innovations and the relevant drivers and barriers that account for the success or failure of co-creation processes at the local government level in Slovakia, focusing on the fields of welfare and the environment. The main findings of our analysis are that co-created innovations are mostly initiated by non-governmental actors, and that most local governments have neutral or even negative attitudes to co-created innovations. We provide a positive case study, in which the local government was open to co-creation, and public services were provided in an alternative way. Our study uses a qualitative approach and is based on original survey data from our own research, conducted mainly within the ‘Learning from Innovation in Public Sector Environments’ (LIPSE) research project.

Information and communications technology (ICT) has enabled the creation of tools to organize, transmit, store and act on information in digital form in new ways (Atkinson - McKay, 2007). Combined with the reforms of government and public administration in the spirit of New Public Management, many innovations are driven by ICT in the public sector. In this paper we focus on several ICT driven innovations from the perspective of e-procurement in the conditions in Slovakia. E-procurement carries out a number of stages of the procurement process, including search, sourcing, negotiation, ordering, receipt and post-purchase review. Thus it contributes to a more transparent and competitive environment in which government has to operate. We confront these theoretical presumptions in the analysis of selected cases of e-procurement use in Slovakia.

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to identify and test selected economic and organisational factors influencing the sustainability of participatory budgeting (PB) in Slovakia.Design/methodology/approach: The data were collected from websites and publicly available documents from all local governments with urban municipality status in Slovakia, for a total of 155 municipalities, 59 of which have established a participatory budget. The main method applied was correlation analysis.Findings: The findings indicate: (1) a weak inverse correlation between debt level and the continuous existence of PB in municipalities; (2) a moderate direct correlation between the duration of PB in a municipality and integration of PB in its programme budgeting; (3) a moderate direct correlation between the duration of PB in a municipality and the political experience of the mayor.Research limitations/implications: The findings are derived from a quantitative analysis of cases localised in a single country, and therefore interpretation requires an awareness of the context of local democracy in Slovakia. In this regard, any generalisation beyond the context under study needs to be considered with caution.Originality/value: This research fills a gap in the role of PB in the context of sustainability, especially in the context of a post-communist country like Slovakia. It applies a quantitative approach to the analysis of PB, which is relatively rare in this field of study (qualitative case studies are predominant in PB research).

Ensuring the financial stability of non-profit organizations through financial decision in the structure of financial resources is influenced by many objective and subjective factors. However, a necessary presumption of financial stability is to reduce their dependence on one source of funding or in other words, the independence can be achieved by diversifying of the funding sources. And it is the diversification of financial sources and their acquisition through self-financing that we consider as an appropriate way to achieve financial balance and thus long-term existential security of non-profit organizations. This scientific paper presents the partial results of a research of the current state of self-financing and diversification of financial resources of private non-profit organizations in the Slovak Republic. We analysed the primary data by the relevant scientific methods and procedures (selected mathematical-statistical methods, analysed in SPSS – Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). With the analysis we acquired a knowledge which allows us to formulate several solutions and recommendations for theory and practice. By presenting these conclusions we fulfil a scientific goal of the paper, which is to present partial results of research of current state of funding of private non-profit organizations and interpret the obtained outputs in an economic and social context.