From the Open Budgets Blog
Civil Society Efforts to Bring the Public’s Voice into Budget Proposals Pays Off in India
In a welcome move, India’s finance ministry has announced that pre-budget consultations will be held far earlier this year than in previous years. Subrat Das of India’s Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability and IBP’s Ravi Duggal explain why this is a win for India’s People’s Budget Initiative.
Read more »
Raising Awareness of Public Finance: the Power of Keeping It Simple
In 2009 CPI Foundation, a civil society organization in Bosnia and Herzegovina, conducted a survey to understand how much people knew about public finance. They found an alarming 95 percent of respondents had little or no knowledge of how the government was spending public money. To raise awareness, CPI Foundation installed a digital counter on a busy street in the heart of Sarajevo that tallies government spending. CPI’s Emina Gljiva explains how they used the counter to draw the attention of the media and reach out to citizens with little knowledge of public finance.
Read more »
Global Budget Transparency, Visualized
According to the Open Budget Survey 2015, the 4.5 million people living in New Zealand have access to the most extensive amount of budget information in the world. Yet the vast majority of the world’s population live in countries that fail to publish enough information to understand how the government is managing public finances. So what’s the global state of budget transparency and how did the world’s big population centers do in the latest survey?
Read more »
Participation Is the Next Transparency Frontier for the Open Government Partnership
In this piece for the Open Government Partnership (OGP) blog, IBP’s Warren Krafchik and GIFT’s Juan Pablo Guerrero draw on the latest Open Budget Survey results to comment on the state of budget transparency and participation in OGP member countries.
Read more »
New IBP Publications
Parliament and National Treasury: How Are They Playing Their Roles in Kenya’s New Budget Process?
In the last few years Kenya has instituted changes that have dramatically altered the roles that parliament and the treasury should be playing in the budget process. To understand how each institution is adapting to its new role, this Budget Brief by IBP’s Jason Lakin and John Kinuthia looks at how they interacted during the formulation and approval of the country’s 2015/16 budget. Read more »
Further Reading From the Field
- ONE, an international advocacy organization, recently released Follow the Money – an interactive map that allows users to explore stories from around the world about how open data are being used to track public money, improve services, and transform lives. You can also submit case studies to be added to the map.
- Despite a decade of sustained economic growth in the Americas, fiscal policy has not fulfilled its potential to tackle poverty, reduce inequality, and uphold human rights. A new report by the Center for Economic and Social Rights, Fiscal Policy and Human Rights in the Americas, examines the issues for the 156th Session of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
- Most transnational multistakeholder initiatives (MSIs) use voluntary standards to encourage socially and environmentally responsible behavior. But some MSIs, such as the Open Government Partnership (OGP) and the Global Initiative on Fiscal Transparency (GIFT), focus on information disclosure and participation in governance. The Transparency and Accountability Initiative’s new report, Assessing the Evidence: The Effectiveness and Impact of Public Governance-Oriented Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives, examines the state of public governance-oriented MSI effectiveness and impact.
- The Participatory Budgeting Network’s Introductory Guide to Participatory Budgeting in the UK covers all the basic information one needs to understand how participatory budgeting contributes toward the democratic community engagement work of local authorities and public bodies.
Job Announcements
IBP Senior Program Officer, Capacity Building
The Senior Program Officer will contribute to the IBP Capacity Building Team’s expertise in strategic thinking on building civil society organization capacity to do analysis of and advocacy on public finance and fiscal justice issues. Candidates should offer strong capabilities in program conceptualization, design, and implementation, as well as extensive knowledge of and capabilities in applying adult learning approaches and methodologies.
Learn More »
IBP Program Officer for Latin America, Open Budget Initiative
The Program Officer will coordinate and monitor the implementation of IBP’s biennial Open Budget Survey and conduct priority research on budget transparency for a subset of countries.
Learn More »
IBP Program Officer for South Africa, Catalyst
The Program Officer will support the South Africa Country Coordinator and be jointly responsible for implementing IBP’s South Africa Strategy in the Cape Town office.