Celina Su, "Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

New Books Network
Episode: "Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Date: December 17, 2025
Host: Jen Hoyer
Guest: Celina Su

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Episode Overview

In this engaging conversation, Jen Hoyer interviews Celina Su about her new book, Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities. The episode unpacks how government budgets—often perceived as dry, technical documents—are in fact deeply moral, reflecting the true priorities and values of a society. Drawing from her own life and grassroots organizing experience, Su outlines a vision for democratizing public budgets and explores concepts such as the “right to the city budget,” participatory budgeting, ecosystems of participation, and non-reformist reforms. The conversation is filled with real-life examples, critical reflections, and actionable ideas for community empowerment.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Author’s Background and Book’s Motivation

• Celina Su introduces herself (02:54), sharing her long residency in Brooklyn and how growing up as an immigrant shaped her sensitivities around public space, racial/class inequalities, and civic participation.
  • “Moving to the US during middle school was a formative one for me...racial inequalities and inequalities and how they are implicated in public space and the built environment…have been lifelong preoccupations.” (03:05)

2. Budgets as Moral Documents

• Budgets are not just technical tools, but "moral documents" (04:26). Su highlights that budgets encode the political choices of a community—who receives resources, whose needs are prioritized, and whose are neglected.
  • "Budgets are moral documents. The fact that they're so intimidating to read…becomes a real political problem." (06:35) - Celina Su
• Su critiques the opacity and inaccessibility of budget documents, noting it should not be each resident’s job to become a public finance expert just to hold government accountable.

3. The Right to the City Budget

• Concept Explained (08:34): The “right to the city” extends to the right to shape city budgets.
  • “We, the folks who help to live in this...help to create the city...have a right to live here. And the budget part comes in when I think about the affordability crisis...So a Right to the City budget...involves giving everyday residents the right to help to shape the city budget.” (09:13)
• Su connects this to practical needs, like housing and affordability, and emphasizes that budgets should be inclusive and participatory.

4. Participatory Budgeting: Theory and Practice

• Origins in Brazil (12:04): Su recounts how participatory budgeting (PB) first took hold in Porto Alegre, leading to dramatic improvements like increased schools and utilities, and even reductions in infant mortality.
  • “They managed to get themselves out of this awful vicious cycle...to a different virtuous one where they trusted government because they knew where the money was going…” (13:36)
• Changes in Different Contexts: While PB began as a project for redistribution and social justice, in many places it has become more technical—focused on transparency rather than transformation.

5. Ecosystems of Participation and Ecologies of Citizenship

• PB’s Limits and Ecosystemic Approach (17:25): Su argues that PB cannot “democratize democracy on its own.” It is most effective when embedded in a broader “ecosystem” or “ecology” of participatory practices.
  • “We saw some of the strengths and weaknesses of PB...it reached a wide swath of folks...But...you saw people fighting for crumbs...When you have PB in a larger administrative state that otherwise remains the same, there’s very little room for true transformation.” (18:07)
• Spillover Effects: PB participation leads community members to become active in other forms of civic engagement, and innovation often happens at the intersection of these involvement opportunities.
  • “The spillover effects or ripple effects...of PB were in fact much more impactful and interesting to me than the actual PB projects in some ways.” (21:58)

6. “Non-Reformist Reforms” in Budget Justice

• Defining the Concept (23:13): Su discusses the idea of non-reformist reforms, which are changes that move toward substantive transformation without reinforcing the status quo, contrasted with reforms that may be co-opted or reversed easily.
  • “Non-reformist reforms are changes that may seem somewhat incremental but are not things that we have to undo later.” (24:08)
• Evaluative Framework: She offers a matrix for mapping out projects along axes of equity/justice orientation and degree of radicalism, with real examples like creating all-gender school bathrooms and community agreements for domestic workers.
  • “The fact that it’s participatory doesn’t mean that it’s liberatory.” (25:57)
  • “Some of the more imaginative, interesting projects… were in a quadrant of the matrix where it was more radical in that it wasn’t something that the city would currently fund…” (27:17)

7. Current and Future Work

• Ongoing Organizing (30:18): Su describes her continued involvement in the People's Plan, a local coalition fighting austerity and working toward a more just budget process in New York City and beyond. She reflects on facilitating cross-city conversations and links with international grassroots movements.
  • “They focus on fighting austerity cuts in the Adams administration…But they also want to change the budget process and make it so that it’s not so hard and we don’t have every single budget cycle turning into a crisis.” (32:04)
• Poetry as Inquiry: Transitioning to a more personal note, Su shares that she is exploring poetry—not just as a means of expression, but as a research method parallel to academic writing.
  • “I end up writing poetry about the same things I write my books and my journal articles as...I feel like I end up with very different insights...when I try to write them out through poems.” (34:01)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Budgets are moral documents…they don’t have to be presented in such forbidding, intimidating ways.” (07:40) – Celina Su
• “A Right to the City budget involves giving everyday residents the right to help to shape the city budget.” (10:44) – Celina Su
• “Participatory budgeting can’t democratize democracy on its own…When you have a process like PB in a larger administrative state that otherwise remains the same, there’s very little room for true transformation.” (18:07) – Celina Su
• “The fact that it’s participatory doesn’t mean that it’s liberatory.” (25:57) – Celina Su
• “Maybe I would like to try to start to use poetry as research method, because I think it’d be very different from surveys and interviews and budget hearings.” (35:09) – Celina Su

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Key Timestamps

• 02:54 – Author background, personal context
• 04:26 – Budgets as moral documents
• 08:34 – Right to the city/Right to the city budget
• 12:04 – Participatory budgeting: origins, outcomes, adaptation
• 17:25 – Limits of PB, need for participatory ecosystems
• 23:13 – Non-reformist reforms and evaluative criteria
• 30:18 – Ongoing work, cross-city coalitions, poetry and research

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Episode Tone and Character

The conversation is accessible, sincere, and deeply rooted in Celina Su’s direct experiences as both a scholar and community organizer. Her tone balances hope for transformative change with a critical appreciation for the complexities and limits of democratic reforms. She grounds theory in everyday community realities, often highlighting that democratizing public institutions is as much about building long-term relationships and collective power as it is about changing technical rules or budget lines.

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For listeners seeking to understand the intersection of city budgeting, social justice, and grassroots activism, this episode offers both practical frameworks and inspiring stories that complicate and humanize the world of public finance.

Transcript

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[Jen Hoyer]

Welcome to New Books Network. My name is Jen Hoyer and today I'm speaking with Selena Su, author of Budget on Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities published by Princeton University Press in September 2025. Budget Justice Challenges everything you thought you knew about dull and daunting government budgets, providing a bold vision that empowers communities to solve our city's most pressing problems. And I'm really delighted to be speaking with author Selena Hsu. Selena, welcome to New Books Network.

[Selena Hsu]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Jen Hoyer]

And before we start talking about the book, Budget justice really felt to me like it's rooted in your own life experience and in the place that you live. So maybe before we start talking about the book, I thought it would be really helpful if you could introduce yourself so listeners have a bit of context for the place and perspective you're bringing to this.

[Selena Hsu]

Sure. So let me think. So in terms of a sense of place, I live in Brooklyn, New York, and New York City has been where I have lived for a while, at least a couple of decades. And in terms of life experience, I'll say that moving to the US during middle school was a formative one for me. That is not one that I talk about at length by any means in the book, but it's one that I start with to just both, for readers, get a sense that perhaps racial inequalities and inequalities and how they are implicated in public space and in the built environment and just what I see in the neighborhood around me have been lifelong preoccupations. And also to just investigate for myself a tiny bit where my own ideas of politics, and especially racial and class politics and political action, just whether I'm likely to whoa or. Or go attend a protest or do something else, where these ideas came from. And that in turn, helped me to articulate some of the driving questions for the book.

[Jen Hoyer]

Thank you. So then, turning to your new book, a basic premise that you set out in Budget justice is that budgets are moral documents. So can you explain what that means and what the implications of that are for how we as citizens should read and interact with budget documents and budget processes?

[Selena Hsu]

Sure. I'll just say that I did not think that I was going to end up writing a book with the word budget in the title. And I didn't think I would end up spending so much time thinking about especially public budgets and city budgets until the 2020 uprisings when I saw this phrase budget justice on a lot of placards during the protests even. And that was super striking to me because it sounded like a sort of wonky term. And I started to think about what it meant. And that's where I also came upon the framing of how budgets are moral documents. And when I tried to research it, I couldn't find exactly who said it first. I think it's sometimes misattributed to Martin Luther King, Jr. But I found it to be a really helpful framing for thinking about how public budgets especially have implicit logics of how governments should work and how they operate and what values we as a public in a city prioritize, and where the public hospital is, for instance. So who gets to live and who gets to die, basically, or who doesn't get treatment immediately or as quickly, and what sorts of social problems we're willing to tolerate for the time being, because it's an unfortunate side effect of what's going on, what levels of poverty we're will to tolerate right now, and which ones must be addressed immediately. These are moral issues. And, and the implications for this for me were pretty profound because I realized that when I think of budgets as moral documents, the fact that they're so intimidating to read and illegible and opaque becomes a real political problem. That it's not that it's my job to become a public finance expert, you know, and I had to actually restrain myself from diving into the peer reviewed public finance literature while I was writing this book because I'm like. And I had to remind myself I'm trying to take to be in the shoes of an average, informed, engaged citizen. And I use the word citizen with a small C. That is, regardless of what passport someone holds or doesn't hold, it's not my job to try to be an expert. And if I, with someone with some experience in public policy analyses, including quantitative ones, still feel overwhelmed, then there's something that's not right about how these public budget reports are being distributed. It's not the job of every single city resident to master them. So in terms of how we should read and interact with budget documents, to me, the framing of budgets as moral documents reminds us of the political choices embedded in them that they don't. Yes, they can be technical documents, but they don't have to be portrayed to be presented in such foreboding, intimidating ways or forbidding. Sorry, forbidding, intimidating ways.

[Jen Hoyer]

Yeah. And then another concept that you put forward in the first part of the book was that of the right to the city budget. And that I know draws on a longer lineage of thinking around the idea of the right to the city. What does this concept mean? Or why have you used it in the context of budgeting? And what do you think we should be aiming for and asking for in a right to the city budget?

[Selena Hsu]

So the longer lineage of thinking around the right to the city has been interpreted in different ways. So I'm thinking of it as the fact that we, the folks who help to live in this who live in the city and thus help to create the city, as opposed to folks who purely have investments in the city through their bank accounts or corporations who do. So we're the ones who cook, who teach, who answer phones in an office, whatever, who. It's not literally construction jobs. We're the ones who help the city function every day that we have a right to live here. And that. And the budget part comes in when, when I think about the affordability crisis and how so many of the folks who live and who previously lived and work in the city can't afford to live here and, and have felt like they have to go into debt or move away. So a Right to the City emphasizes how cities should be inclusive, accessible, and that we should also have the right to help to shape the rules by which it's governed. And so some previous case studies on the right to the City emphasize reappropriations of public space by folks. For instance, like something like where sometimes groups of folks on an annual quote unquote parking day take parking spots and turn them into mini parking spot sized parks. So, and that's re appropriating the city to serve the local public's needs. And what, because they felt like that would be a better use for a Right to the City budget? It involves giving everyday residents the right to help to shape the city budget. So both getting a budget that gives them a right to remain here and a right to shape the city budget.

[Jen Hoyer]

Totally, yeah. And I just felt like those ideas were really like humanizing. I don't know if that's the right word, budgets, but just reminding us that like, budgets are for us, they should be for us. They aren't always made for us, they're often not made for us, but they really should be. And I guess then talking about how we can be more connected to budget, the second section of the book dives into the process of participatory budgeting, which I know you've been really involved with. So could you talk more about what this has looked like, I guess, as an ideal and in practice and maybe give some examples of what kinds of impacts and outcomes it's had?

[Selena Hsu]

Sure. So in the example that a lot of people forward, as one of the ideal versions, we have the first citywide process of participatory budgeting coming from Puerto Alegre, Brazil in the late 1980s, early 1990s. And this is a process where everyday residents rather than elected officials, helped to allocate public funds. And there it was a very different context of working with community groups that had also helped to overthrow a military dictatorship. So figuring out how to bring that process to other places and give them the oomph that it had in Brazil is a huge challenge. But some of the incredible outcomes that it had was that it really helped to reallocate huge chunks of the city budget so that some neighborhoods had like double digit increases in the numbers of schools built and access to basic, basic utilities. And sure we can say like, oh, we, we are not worried about electricity here, but I would guess that we can think of analogous public goods that we would like more access to, whether it's public library hours or broadband access or whatever it is. And there it it was. And in Brazil, it's also sort of striking that cities that implemented PB had more civil society organizations, had I think 30% more taxes collected and had lower infant mortality. So the taxes collected means that they really managed to get themselves out of this awful vicious cycle where we don't trust government so we're less likely to pay be willing to pay higher taxes, so government doesn't have the resources to do a good job with public goods and services, so then we trust the government less, etc. They had to change that vicious cycle to a different virtuous one where they trusted government because they knew where the money was going towards and they saw the difference. And then they were willing to pay more because they was, they knew that the money was being put to good use and then they saw impacts like lower infant mortality in practice. We've seen it get interpreted in lots of different ways. And one main tension is that in a lot of places it's shifted from being a project about redistribution and social justice to one being about good governance and engaging folks just to make things more transparent. And I'm not saying that things being transparent is not a public goal, but it's definitely not as transformative a political project as the original one. In Brazil.

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[Jen Hoyer]

So then this book is in three parts and near the beginning of the third part of the book, you wrote that participatory budgeting can't democratize democracy on its own, and you call for ecosystems of participation and ecologies of citizenship to support practices like pp. I really loved that you used these words ecosystem and ecology, but could you explain what you mean when you refer to ecosystems and ecologies and and maybe just talk about what the context is that PD needs in order to survive and thrive?

[Selena Hsu]

Sure. Thank you so much for this question. So I'll draw a little bit on the New York case, which is the one that I know best. So New York started a process of participatory budgeting at the same time that Occupy Wall street happened. And I don't think this is a coincidence. This is when people really are questioning how the government is using its money bailing out banks rather than everyday folks during the supply mortgage crisis, for instance. And it came to New York City with a portion of city funds at the same time. And I was asked to be part of the citywide steering committee that helped to make the rules for participatory budgeting in New York. And we saw some of the strengths and weaknesses of PB in real life here, in that it definitely reached a wide swath of folks, not just the usual suspects of who usually participates. So when we surveyed folks who participated, one out of every four said that they weren't eligible to vote in regular elections, which means that people are not apathetic when they think that their participation might actually make a difference. They do. So that part was impressive. But the reason I say that PB can't democratize democracy on its own is that we also saw a lot of limits to the local PB process. People had a lot of interesting ideas that got whittled down because they weren't immediately deemed legible and feasible by local city agencies, for instance, and you saw people fighting for crumbs of the proverbial budget pie. When you have a process like PB in a larger administrative state that otherwise remains the same, there's very little room for true transformation. And to get the sorts of impacts we just talked about that happened in Brazil. So to me it was really interesting. So just as one example, there were a lot of tech requests through pb, surveillance camera requests through PB, which were very striking when we're also seeing street uprisings and protests against police brutality and a lot of requests. And these are all winning projects, and a lot of winning projects for school bathroom renovations in elementary school so that 7 year olds don't have to hold in their pee all day. These are not the world's most inspiring or galvanizing project ideas. And you saw people feel a little bit upset about this. So the reason I ended up paying a lot more attention to a quote unquote ecosystem of participation is I saw that empirically in my research a lot, maybe even most of the people who participated in PB also started to participate in other ways if they weren't folks who already participated in community stuff before. So and that's where some of the more interesting project ideas came from. So for instance, after the pandemic there were diaper networks that built off mutual aid networks that were activated during the COVID 19 pandemic. And they got to expand through the PB process with PB funds. So they were taking the logics of quote unquote invented spaces that people invented on their own and sneaking them in into invited spaces, which are spaces that are state initiated, that they were invited into. And the spillover effects or ripple effects or butterfly effects, whatever you call them of PB were in fact much more impactful and interesting to me than the actual TB projects in some ways. And then the reason I use the phrase ecologies of citizenship is because I thought about how the folks that I was in conversation with and did interviews with were doing really interesting things in engaging with each node of participation and engaging with each other in dynamic ways that were really in response to the strengths and weaknesses of the different sites of participation and to their neighbors needs. So if an ecosystem might be something like a desert or a tundra or a rainforest, an ecology is more about how the different living organisms relate to one another. And I realized that we can't be paying attention to no kings protests and PB and budget hearings as siloed political dynamics, we really have to look at them together to both get a more accurate sense of what's going on and also help to organize and get more meaningful change.

[Jen Hoyer]

Definitely. And then one more concept that I wanted to talk about that you bring in towards the end of your book is that of non reformist reforms. And you share some criteria for Identifying non reformist reforms in public budgets. What does the concept of non reformist reforms mean for budget justice? And how does this framing shape the goals that we should aim for in public budget conversations?

[Selena Hsu]

Thank you also for this question. All of your questions were so thoughtful. So I have to admit that I was partly inspired by the Wikipedia entry for non reformist reforms in thinking about this. Because I mean one of the driving questions I keep coming back to in my work is what to do in the meantime. Sure, we're talking about substantive change and we often talk about whether certain incremental reforms are not worth it because they're too co opting. I'm not one to go for litmus tests or purity tests, but certainly we want to have these conversations. And non reformist reforms are changes that may seem somewhat incremental but are not things that we have to undo later. So like for instance, you can imagine a not in my backyard NIMBY campaign against the prison that then gets the state to relocate the jail or the prison elsewhere. That would not be a non reform history form campaign. And for me it's really helpful to think what's realistic and what do we do in the meanwhile, what do we do in the meantime before we get some truly transformative changes. So on the Wikipedia entry you get some example lists by different thinkers and different grassroots organizations on what their criteria for non reformist reforms are. And most of these have to do with the issue of policing. And I find some of their questions to be to be super apt for budget justice issues as well. But some of them, some of the budget justice questions can be a little bit more fraught, I think, because for the welfare state, I think that a lot of residents, a lot of folks, relationships to the state is more fraught than and it's hard to tell when something is worth pursuing than it is vis a vis the police state. So I ended up coming up with a matrix to think through some of these questions and a set of six questions, two questions for each of the three parts of the book. And the questions help me to think through. For instance, is this participatory mechanism mobilizing or is it ultimately demobilizing? You know, like we want participatory budgeting to be more than a convoluted laptop surveillance camera fund, for instance. So the fact that it's participatory doesn't mean that it's liberatory. So, so I and I'm not one to decide on my own, that would be quite anti democratic. What's justice oriented and what isn't. But I can help to come up with the questions that are grounded in my conversations with so many activists and folks involved in these sorts of processes and struggles. And the matrix I came up with helped me to map out and think through some of some of the projects, for instance, that came through through participatory budgeting and also ones that come out of participatory, out of processes that are outside of participatory budgeting. And they are on the Y axis, whether something is equity justice oriented or not, and on the X axis, whether it is something that is very reformist or even just exactly what the government would currently fund versus something that feels really different and radical. And what I found is that some of the more imaginative, interesting projects, like what was the one that I was thinking of, oh, the Diaper Network, for instance, were in a quadrant of the matrix where it was more radical in that it wasn't something that the city would currently fund, but it did. And maybe over time it could become part of the status quo. A couple of other examples, one inventive one was led by a bunch of middle school youth who noted that there were so many school bathroom repairs being funded through PB and they used that very innocuous language of school bathroom repairs to also make theirs an all gender one. And it was another interesting project that gathered dozens of local families and domestic workers for them to come up with their own community agreement beyond what's, what's legally there for the rights of domestic workers for them to think through what would our community agreement look like for wages and conditions for nannies and house cleaners, for instance? And you could imagine these are sort of down payments or pilot projects or different sorts of different sorts of projects that are really not just trying to get more funds for something that is currently underfunded, but trying to change a little bit how their city operates. Yeah, yeah.

[Jen Hoyer]

I thought it was a really great evaluative framework for these kinds of projects and initiatives. And I guess before we wrap up, I would really love to just give you a chance to share what you're working on next. I don't know if you have new projects, continued work you're doing related to budget justice, or if there are totally different research projects and initiatives you want to share about.

[Selena Hsu]

It's one of those moments where I'm between things and trying to figure out what to do next. In what ways can I respond to this moment, and in what ways can my response to this moment really draw upon what I've spent a lot of time thinking about so that I am not just relying on knee jerk reactions and I can think about what's like really meaningful and hopefully do way do things in a way that really contributes to larger struggles. So I am continuing work with, with the local people's budget campaign called the People's Plan. And it is interesting that a lot of those folks too have said that, you know, Bannon's Flood the Zone strategy has worked with them. They do feel overwhelmed and that they want to think about budget justice in terms of governance too, and not just fighting austerity every year. So they focus on fighting austerity cuts in the Adams administration every year for the past few years. And they've done amazing work getting people from housing, child care, schools, libraries to not compete against one another and to work as a coalition. But they also want to change the budget process and make it so that it's not so hard and we don't have every single budget cycle turning into a crisis. And as part of that work, it was really lovely that they asked me to help to facilitate a conversation with people's budget campaigns in other cities. So I recently helped to organize and host one with folks from Nashville, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Birmingham, a few other places, and also with folks trying to create more participatory democratic institutions in Budapest and in Barcelona and Jackson to think about what to do after the election also. And so I'm also thinking about that like, is it possible to take this moment in New York? And I imagine that there are similar moments in Seattle where Katie Wilson was elected, et cetera, to think about how different ways of doing things from the Solidarity economy or other frameworks are possible. And we're only going to get to that by talking about policy making as well as policy platforms. And then I have this other part of my world, which you may or may not know. I can't remember that I also write poetry. And there are two projects that are in KOE and I may be developing with that one is already a project with the journalist and poet Alyssa Quartz, who co founded the Economic Hardship Reporting Project with Barbara Enrenreich. Were writing letter poems to sort of investigate a sort of. To sort of investigate the structures of feeling of this political moment and just unpack the messes in our heads where maybe I should only speak to myself for myself. The mess in my head of trying to surface the various implicit logics of what's going on in seemingly disparate but ultimately connected ways. And then that's somewhat related to my other poetry project which is much more in the beginning stages of trying to think of poetry as a mode of inquiry rather than mode of dissemination. Because as my project with Alyssa reflects, I end up writing poetry about the same things I write my books and my journal articles as. It's not like my poems are just about romantic relationships or something. So. But I. Even when they're also talking about these issues of what's going on politically or what's going on with my city, I. I feel like I end up with very different insights than I. When I try to write them out through. Through poems. So I'm trying to think about that in a more systematic way. I haven't figured it out yet, but maybe I would like to try to start to use poetry as research method because I think it'd be very different from surveys and interviews and budget hearings.

[Jen Hoyer]

Absolutely. That sounds really exciting. Well, thank you so, so much, Selena. Once again today I've been speaking with Selena Hsu, author of Budget on Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities published by Princeton University Press in September 2025. My name is Jen Hoyer and you're listening to new book.

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