As part of its international advocacy, the International Budget Partnership has engaged with other public finance and development stakeholders on targeted campaigns that promote open, participatory, and accountable public finance management. These campaigns sought to influence processes and disseminate new research.
Global Civil Society Movement for Budget Transparency, Accountability, and Participation
In 2011, nearly 100 civil society groups from as many countries and 12 international organizations, including the International Budget Partnership, Greenpeace, and the ONE Campaign, launched the Global Civil Society Movement for Budget Transparency, Accountability, and Participation. The movement was a global effort to make public budgets transparent, participatory, and accountable that centered on building an integrated and vibrant movement of organizations that worked at the local, national, and international level to promote government budgeting that is open and accountable to the public. Our civil society partners continue to contribute to our international advocacy initiatives in the following ways:
Advancing Norms & Standards for Open Budgeting
- Civil society contributed to the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT) public participation principles, including translating them in national languages, and peer learning and exchanges.
- In line with the GIFT principles, civil society helped shape the Open Budget Survey indicators (Section 5 of the Open Budget Survey Questionnaire & Guidelines, available for download here).
Strengthening Budget Oversight
- Civil society has interacted with SAIs and the international organization INTOSAI, including contributing to their guidance materials and participating in an INTOSAI working group and international meetings. As these organizations open up (latest UN/INTOSAI recommendations here), we collaborate and share our calls for greater audit accountability and effectiveness.
Budgeting for Sustainable Development
- We look forward to continue working with actors at all levels to advance open budgeting, monitoring and accountability for the sustainable development agenda.
Ask Your Government! Initiative
The International Budget Partnership’s Ask Your Government! Initiative began in January 2010, when 100 civil society organizations launched an ambitious effort to document public access to budget information in 80 countries. The core question behind the effort was simple: What happens when citizens ask their government for specific budget information relating to key international development commitments to which the government is a signatory?
The answer is that most of the time, governments do not respond with sufficient information — or at all. In fact, when governments were asked six questions by their citizens about how much money they spend on development priorities, only one of the 80 countries provided substantive answers to all six questions. Learn more about the initiative here.