Make budgets public! The first global assembly for Budget Transparency, Accountability and Participation

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International Budget Partnership, Greenpeace, the ONE Campaign, Oxfam Novib, ActionAid, Global Witness, Publish What You Pay, the Revenue Watch Institute, Transparency International and nearly 100 civil society organizations from 100 countries and are heading for  Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to launch a global campaign to make government budgets transparent, participatory, and accountable. Click here to see who will all be there.

The global Civil Society Movement for Budget Transparency, Accountability, and Participation wants government finance systems that make all budget information easily accessible, provide meaningful opportunities for citizens to participate in budget decisions and oversight.

The demands of the Civil Society Movement for Budget Transparency, Accountability, and Participation (BTAP) are contained in a Declaration of Principles that will be signed at the meeting.

The core demands of the Declaration is that all governments at the national and subnational levels should:

  1.  Recognize, legislate, enact and operationalize the right to information generally and to public budget information specifically;
  2. Actively engage citizens and all other stakeholders in setting public budget priorities– including para-statal and para-fiscal funds– as early and inclusively as possible,
  3. Produce, and publicly discuss, in a timely fashion, at least eight key budget documents: pre-budget statement, executive’s budget proposal, enacted budget, citizens budget, in-year report, mid-year review, end-year report, audit report;
  4. Comprehensively report on all public financial flows and institutions, including those that are managed outside of the formal budget process;
  5. Include all resources used for the implementation of public, fiscal and economic policies, regardless of their origin, in their public budget documents and processes;
  6. Ensure that legislatures and auditors are independent of government and have sufficient resources to increase their capacity and thus fulfill their oversight mandates effectively.
  7. Publish and disseminate budget information in easy and accessible formats through all possible means, including digital open data formats through the internet, public libraries, information centers, etc.

Make a scene when everyone is watching: The NCDHR’s Campaign 789 and the 2010 Commonwealth Games

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This is the third in our 7 part series on citizen impact on government budgets. Click here to read part 2.

Civil society organizations can sometimes struggle for years without apparent impact on government policies and budgets.  Such sustained campaigns do, however, prepare CSOs to act decisively when new opportunities come knocking.

The success of the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights’ (NCDHR) Campaign 789 was built on the CSO’s diligent budget monitoring and persistent efforts to get government to honor its promises to the Dalit community. When  international attention was focused on India and the Commonwealth Games (CWG) 2010 – and, more specifically, corruption linked to the games – the NCDHR and its partners were ready to push ahead for greater accountability from the government and/or fairer allocation of resources.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Budget monitoring by Indian CSO Improves NREGA implementation

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This is the second in our 7 part series on citizen impact on government budgets. Click here to read part 1.

Large government poverty reduction initiatives – even those which are set up with the best of intentions – often fall prey to inefficiency and corruption. Civil society organizations (CSOs) can play an important role in monitoring such programs to make sure that the intended recipients, and not bureaucrats, are reaping the benefits. The work of Samarthan, a CSO that operates in Madhya Pradesh in India, shows that budget monitoring can be a useful tool for helping governments implement such ambitious schemes and for ensuring that citizens actually benefit from them.

India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which was passed in 2005,  guarantees the country’s rural poor the right to work by providing each poor family that needs work with 100 days of unskilled labor each year. Samarthan has been monitoring the implementation of NREGA since it was launched. It facilitated social audits of the program in many districts, conducted two studies on the status of NREGA implementation, and planned systematic interventions in ten villages in the state. The objectives of the Samarthan campaign were to improve the uptake and implementation of the program.

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What the Open Government Partnership could do

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This post was written for the OGP by Warren Krafchik, Director of the IBP.

I am extremely excited about the Open Government Partnership (OGP) and its potential impact on the quality of life of citizens around the world.  We know that there are sufficient public resources available globally to eradicate extreme poverty and inequality.  The problem is the distribution and management of these resources.   Open government practices offer great promise for improving our management of public resources and, therefore, our potential impact on poverty and inequality.

An opportunity for civil society around the world

On Tuesday, 20 September, eight governments will each commit to an action plan to enhance open government in their respective countries.  Approximately 37 other governments will signal their intention to submit similar action plans at a follow-up meeting in Brazil in March 2012.  The launch of the OGP presents a major opportunity for civil society organizations to influence the content and process of these governments’ commitments.  In each partner country, civil society organizations interested in any aspect of open government – including fiscal and extractive revenue transparency and service delivery –should start a conversation with their governments to suggest ambitious and meaningful commitments in these and other areas.   Civil society will also have an important opportunity to influence the consultation process that the government will use to arrive at these commitments and monitor their implementation. Continue reading →

Making government walk the talk: Budget Monitoring and Litigation for Early Education in Buenos Aires

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Citizens often feel powerless in the face of government incompetence or indifference. Many feel that short of voting in a new government – that may turn out to be equally inept – there is little that they can to do effect change. However, a civil society organization in Argentina has demonstrated that a litigation-based strategy driven by budget monitoring can be used to enforce socio-economic rights when governments fail to meet their obligations.

The Civil Association for Equality and Justice (Asociacion Civil por la Igualdad y la Justicia, or ACIJ) examined the budget for evidence to hold the government of the city of Buenos Aires accountable for its failure to provide all of the city’s children with the constitutionally-guaranteed right to early education.

“While the work of other CSOs in the field of education had been devoted to doing research and putting forward policy proposals, ACIJ took a leading role in advancing the right to education through strategic litigation, as well as in using budget analysis findings to advance litigation strategies,” Fernando Basch writes in a recent case study of ACIJ’s class action.

Since 2002, almost 8000 children in Buenos Aires have been denied the right to early education because of a shortage in the number of school vacancies. When communicating with the government about this shortage proved futile, ACIJ, made up mostly of attorneys, decided to turn to litigation. Continue reading →