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Practicing Mutual Aid Relations through CSIDNet’s First Participatory Budgeting Process

In our first post, we shared why CSIDNet uses a working group model and how our members collectively selected the first five working groups. This post picks up where that story left off, at the moment where values meet reality: how a network chooses to share limited resources. This work also sits within a broader digital justice context. Many international development approaches continue to frame participation as consultation, while decision-making remains concentrated elsewhere. In practice, this often reproduces patterns where those most affected are positioned as recipients rather than agents. CSIDNet was designed with a different starting point: to distribute decision-making authority as a core function, not an add-on.

In 2025, we made a deliberate choice. Instead of allocating funds through a competitive grant-making process, the network invited our newly selected working groups to decide together how to distribute a shared pool of funding. Beyond a budgeting exercise, this was an experiment in practicing mutual aid as a network value, and in building a community that prioritizes shared strength over individual gain.

Why participatory budgeting, and why now

Traditional funding structures tend to reward competition, even among groups that share goals. They ask: What do I need to win? Participatory budgeting asks a different question: What do we need in order to move forward together?

For CSIDNet, this is a key distinction. Our working groups are not independent projects competing for visibility or resources. They are interdependent parts of a larger ecosystem working at the intersection of climate, health, and open tools. If we want that ecosystem to function as a community rather than a collection of transactions, our financial decisions need to reflect that. This also means ensuring every working group can participate on equal footing. We treated budgeting as a collective, learnable skill to keep the focus on shared needs rather than proposal-writing tactics that too often gatekeep in traditional funding calls. We see this shift as not only procedural. It responds to a wider pattern in global research and development ecosystems, where agency is named but not structurally supported. Moving toward shared budgeting is one way of testing what it means to take that commitment seriously in practice.

The first funding round

Following an open call for proposals in July 2025, CSIDNet received 12 working group applications. After eligibility review and a full membership vote, five working groups were endorsed to move forward. These groups were invited to participate in a facilitated, consensus-driven participatory budgeting process to allocate a total pooled fund of USD 50,000 provided by supporter organization, Wellcome Trust.

Each working group selected one to two representatives to take part in a six-week process supported by external participatory budgeting facilitator, Ryan Rising. Together, participants worked through budget design, shared learning about participatory budgeting principles, identification of overlapping needs, and collective decision-making. We observed that as the weeks progressed, what emerged from that process was not a negotiation between competing interests, but a shared problem-solving space.

It is worth noting that this way of working was not immediate or perfect. For many participants, this was a shift from more familiar, entrenched funding dynamics. Building comfort with shared responsibility required reflection, unlearning, and time to adjust to a different set of expectations around agency and decision-making.

From scarcity to shared responsibility

The combined budgets originally proposed by the five working groups totaled USD 67,915, leaving a gap of nearly USD 18,000. In a competitive funding model, this would have meant winners and losers, or partial funding without coordination. Instead, the working groups approached the shortfall collectively. They identified resources that could be shared across groups, reduced or deferred costs where possible, and made voluntary adjustments to ensure that every working group could meet its core needs. The process resulted in a unanimous consensus on the final allocation of funds.

Final budget distribution:

No group received everything they initially asked for. Every group received what they needed to move forward.

What the process made possible

The value of this participatory budgeting process went far beyond allocating funds. By working through budgets together, participants surfaced shared assumptions about compensation, honoraria, and operational costs. They learned what tools and infrastructure already existed within the network. They refined their scopes, clarified interdependencies, and identified opportunities for ongoing collaboration. We also saw that taking up agency is not always straightforward. Having space to decide does not automatically translate into confidence to do so. What helped was seeing others step into that space. As participants began to engage more actively, it created a shared permission structure for others to do the same.

Maybe most importantly, the process shifted how participants relate to one another. Rather than protecting individual interests, working group representatives showed care for the viability of the whole. This is what mutual aid looks like in practice: not generosity as charity, but responsibility to one another as peers.

What we learned

One lesson stood out clearly from this first experiment: you cannot start with numbers. Building relationships comes first. Taking time to understand one another’s contexts, constraints, and ambitions made it possible to have honest conversations about money later.

Participants also experienced firsthand that democratic, consensus-based decision-making is slower than top-down allocation, but stronger. It requires time, facilitation, and a willingness to develop budgeting and finance management skills, capacities that most research training doesn’t provide. The outcome carried legitimacy because all participants had shaped it.

Looking ahead

This was the first time CSIDNet pooled resources and decided together how to use them. It will not be the last. Participatory budgeting is now part of how we practice governance, collaboration, and accountability within the network, and we are already carrying these lessons into this year’s budgeting work.

In a landscape that often rewards competition and fragmentation, this process showed what becomes possible when a community chooses cooperation instead cooperation is an outcome we designed for, and was only possible after a year of consolidating committees and other governance structures, documentation that keeps decisions transparent, and the trust that comes from our first year working together. By deciding together how to work within real constraints, our members showed that mutual aid is not an aspiration, but a practical way of sustaining shared work, even amid austerity and funding pressure.

In future posts, we will share how these lessons will shape the 2026 working group cycle and the next phase of CSIDNet’s collective budgeting decisions.

The Working Groups

The five working groups supported through this process reflect the breadth and interconnectedness of CSIDNet’s work. Find out more about how to connect, contribute, and collaborate in the Working Group page. 

Community Engagement WG

The Community Engagement Working Group is developing a toolkit to support researchers in meaningfully engaging affected communities across the entire research value chain from design to communicating findings. 

CSID Atlas WG

The CSID Atlas Working Group is building a shared, global picture of climate-sensitive infectious diseases (CSIDs). 

CSID Models, Data, and Methods Repository WG

The CSID Models, Data, and Methods Repository is building a shared catalog of tools, models, and metadata to support interoperability across research and policy. 

Ethical Framework WG

Ethical Framework for CSID Research is establishing guidelines that integrate scientific rigor with social justice, including indigenous knowledge systems and digital ethics.

Early Warning Systems WG

The CSIDNet Working Group on Early Warning Systems in Low- and Middle-Income Countries establishes a co-design space for tools that connect climate, health and environmental data.