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Global Stock-Take of Social Accountability Initiatives for Budget Transparency and Monitoring : Key Challenges and Lessons LearnedBudgets 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.
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Ethiopia : Decentralization, Delivery and AccountabilityOne of the fruits of this partnership was the preparation of an unusually rich set of background papers, under the umbrella of a process-driven Institutional and Governance Review (IGR); this Analytical and Advisory work was skillfully designed to support the design and implementation of PSCAP. Some of the papers focused on policy; others provided qualitative assessments of the realities on the ground; yet others benchmarked different facets of the governance environment, as a basis for monitoring going forward. A comprehensive synthesis of these IGR papers (referenced in Part A of the bibliography) is neither necessary not desirable; they stand on their own terms. (Also: see the powerpoint overview in Appendix 1 of Ethiopia's decentralization experience prepared by the World Bank team which led the process.). The objectives of this IGR summary are more modest, namely to; Provide (following staff turnover in the World Bank team) an entry point of access to some of the rich materials which have been prepared under the IGR umbrella; draw on the materials (plus other background material on Ethiopia) to provide a qualitative, on-the-ground sense of the extent to which the 2002 reforms have transformed the local governance realities; highlight some of the important base-line benchmarking exercises which were completed under the IGR umbrella, and which provide a key basis for monitoring progress going forward ; and point to some ways in which benchmarking can support the broader objective of strengthening the accountability for performance of Ethiopia's government, in the context of the political realities prevailing in 2006.
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Lesotho - Managing Government Finances for Growth and Poverty Reduction : Public Expenditure Management and Financial Accountability ReviewThis report on managing government
 finances for growth and poverty reduction in Lesotho is
 centered on three areas of analysis: (i) macroeconomic and
 fiscal performance and prospects; (ii) inter and
 intra-sectoral allocation of resources; and (iii) public
 expenditure and financial management. A Public Financial
 Management assessment report, prepared using the Public
 Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) framework is
 included as an Appendix to the main report. The study stress
 that despite the relatively good growth performance, Lesotho
 remains one of the poorest countries in the Southern Africa
 region. Because of this the Government now seeks to address
 in a more systematic manner the many challenges facing
 Lesotho including: 1) the slow pace of job creation in
 Lesotho, compounded by the continual decline in mining jobs
 for migrant workers in South Africa and a slowdown in GDP
 growth rate; 2) the increase in the incidence of poverty
 over the past twenty years; 3) a relatively large and
 inefficient public sector; 4) excessive reliance on revenues
 generated by the Southern Africa Customs Union ; and 5) the
 rapid spread of HIV/AIDS (current prevalence rate estimated
 at 24 percent), which, if unchecked, will negate all efforts
 to improve the economy and welfare of the Basotho people.