Global Stock-Take of Social Accountability Initiatives for Budget Transparency and Monitoring : Key Challenges and Lessons Learned

Abstract

Budgets are key documents that lay out a government's economic priorities in terms of policies and programs. Budget transparency refers to the extent and ease with which citizens can access information about and provide feedback on government revenues, allocations, and expenditures. Budget monitoring entails using such information to analyze, critique, and track government finances in order to provide this feedback. Budget transparency is a prerequisite for public participation and accountability, which are instrumental for a democratic and legitimate budget process. Both budget transparency and monitoring efforts also help remove institutional bottlenecks that result in delayed budget allocations, thereby jeopardizing the delivery of vital services to people. Even though they have a far-reaching impact on the lives of people, opening up budgets beyond the exclusive domain of policy makers and administrators is a relatively recent phenomenon that has gained momentum in the last two decades. The stock taking exercise illustrates the range of mechanisms involved in Budget Transparency and Monitoring (BT&M) in different contexts and demonstrates significant promise of influencing governance processes and outcomes. Finally, there is a dearth of literature on initiatives that have not achieved their goals, which would allow lessons to be drawn from these failures. There are incentives to document successes rather than failures, but there is value in documenting failures because this allows for a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities that may be useful to consider when designing future BT&M interventions.