Publication: Global Stock-Take of Social Accountability Initiatives for Budget Transparency and Monitoring : Key Challenges and Lessons Learned
Loading...
Published
2013-09
ISSN
Date
2014-01-29
Author(s)
Editor(s)
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.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“World Bank. 2013. Global Stock-Take of Social Accountability Initiatives for Budget Transparency and Monitoring : Key Challenges and Lessons Learned. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/16661 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Procurement Monitoring and Social Accountability(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009)The devolution of procurement responsibilities to local levels of government is increasingly occurring across South Asia. This trend is significant because increasingly localized decision-making better enables communities to hold government authorities accountable for the effectiveness of public spending, which can lead to various improved development outcomes, such as improvements in quality of service delivery; greater empowerment and understanding by end-users services supplied through public procurement processes; and improved oversight and accountability of service delivery agencies. The objective of this report is to set out an overview of the strategic approach developed by World Bank Institute (WBI) as a component of the Norwegian governance trust fund (NTF) program `procurement and service delivery: establishing effective collaboration between government and beneficiaries on monitoring procurement outcomes`. WBI received funds under the NTF to facilitate the development of context and audience-specific knowledge products by recognized practitioners and civil society organizations in South Asia as part of a broader effort to create a practical curriculum on social accountability in procurement.Publication Increasing Accountability through Budget Transparency at the Subnational Level in Cameroon(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-06)Improving governance is a major development challenge for Cameroon and for many other developing countries, and making public financial management more transparent is a central part of it. While budgets are public documents, accessible to citizens in principle, in practice, budget information is difficult to come by as a result of political, administrative, capacity, and logistical constraints as well as cost barriers at all tiers of government, including the national, regional, and municipal level and at service-delivery points like schools and health centers. In two of Cameroon s 10 regions, a World Bank-supported initiative has piloted a citizen-centered approach for disseminating simplified budget information of 151 schools, 58 health centers, and 28 municipalities and the two regional administrations. Budgets were made public and awareness was raised through various activities, including public community meetings at which the budgets of institutions were read aloud, poster campaigns, art competitions, theater performances, student budget clubs, and the use of media such as community radios and Facebook. Results of the initiative include increased tax revenues for one local council, changes in the willingness of parents to contribute to the financing of schools, and greater trust between mayors and constituents.Publication Cameroon Budget Transparency Initiative : Lessons Learned and Recommendations for Local Councils(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-06)From 2011 to 2013, the World Bank-financed Budget Transparency Initiative1 has conducted a number of activities in the North-West and Adamawa Regions to make local council budgets more transparent and accessible to citizens. The pilot project developed and tested a number of tools and activities to increase the budget transparency of local councils and, in the process, to learn lessons about their efficacy. Based on the lessons learned dur¬ing the implementation of the pilot, this brief summarizes recommendations that are relevant to policy makers interested in scaling up efforts at increasing budget transparency at the local level.Publication Enhancing Transparency and Accountability through Citizen Feedback : Lessons from the E-ISR+ Pilot(Washington, DC, 2013-01-14)The External Implementation Status and Results Plus (E-ISR+) system is a feedback, transparency, and accountability tool for the World Bank. E-ISR+ is intended to disclose current project information to external stakeholders, to obtain feedback from non-state players on project progress and results, and to systematically reflect external feedback in implementation reporting. In doing so, it incorporates concepts from social accountability, third-party monitoring, and participatory monitoring and evaluation to emphasize increased transparency, accountability, and stakeholder involvement in World Bank projects. The main sections of the ISR became accessible to the public, reflecting the Bank s new access to information policies and an effort to open up more information about Bank operations to the external public. Moreover, reflecting the overall trend toward more open development, the ISR process tests a new pilot effort in several African countries. E-ISR+ is designed to contribute to an improved environment for accountability generally within the host country and particularly where civil society monitoring strengthens the ability to hold government and other institutions answerable for their expected roles in a project. An improved environment for transparency and accountability is a long-term goal; it is also dependent on variable factors.Publication Vietnam Fiscal Transparency Review : Analysis and Stakeholder Feedback on State Budget Information in the Public Domain(Hanoi, 2014-05-21)Vietnam has come far in improving fiscal transparency. Building on these gains could help strengthen macroeconomic management, improve market perceptions of risk, and increase accountability for service delivery. Fiscal transparency is an important element of the Government's policy dialogue with development partners, particularly in the context of ongoing budgetary support. External reviews of PFM and fiscal transparency in Vietnam have noted important progress though highlighted considerable scope for improvement. This report aims to complement ongoing PFM reviews, including the Government's Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) assessment, to help identify relatively low cost measures to strengthen fiscal transparency. It draws on existing diagnostic approaches to carry out a technical review on the public availability of fiscal information (section B), and the coverage, comprehensiveness and presentation of fiscal reports (sections C and D).
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Classroom Assessment to Support Foundational Literacy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-21)This document focuses primarily on how classroom assessment activities can measure students’ literacy skills as they progress along a learning trajectory towards reading fluently and with comprehension by the end of primary school grades. The document addresses considerations regarding the design and implementation of early grade reading classroom assessment, provides examples of assessment activities from a variety of countries and contexts, and discusses the importance of incorporating classroom assessment practices into teacher training and professional development opportunities for teachers. The structure of the document is as follows. The first section presents definitions and addresses basic questions on classroom assessment. Section 2 covers the intersection between assessment and early grade reading by discussing how learning assessment can measure early grade reading skills following the reading learning trajectory. Section 3 compares some of the most common early grade literacy assessment tools with respect to the early grade reading skills and developmental phases. Section 4 of the document addresses teacher training considerations in developing, scoring, and using early grade reading assessment. Additional issues in assessing reading skills in the classroom and using assessment results to improve teaching and learning are reviewed in section 5. Throughout the document, country cases are presented to demonstrate how assessment activities can be implemented in the classroom in different contexts.Publication World Development Report 2006(Washington, DC, 2005)This year’s Word Development Report (WDR), the twenty-eighth, looks at the role of equity in the development process. It defines equity in terms of two basic principles. The first is equal opportunities: that a person’s chances in life should be determined by his or her talents and efforts, rather than by pre-determined circumstances such as race, gender, social or family background. The second principle is the avoidance of extreme deprivation in outcomes, particularly in health, education and consumption levels. This principle thus includes the objective of poverty reduction. The report’s main message is that, in the long run, the pursuit of equity and the pursuit of economic prosperity are complementary. In addition to detailed chapters exploring these and related issues, the Report contains selected data from the World Development Indicators 2005‹an appendix of economic and social data for over 200 countries. This Report offers practical insights for policymakers, executives, scholars, and all those with an interest in economic development.Publication Lebanon Economic Monitor, Fall 2022(Washington, DC, 2022-11)The economy continues to contract, albeit at a somewhat slower pace. Public finances improved in 2021, but only because spending collapsed faster than revenue generation. Testament to the continued atrophy of Lebanon’s economy, the Lebanese Pound continues to depreciate sharply. The sharp deterioration in the currency continues to drive surging inflation, in triple digits since July 2020, impacting the poor and vulnerable the most. An unprecedented institutional vacuum will likely further delay any agreement on crisis resolution and much needed reforms; this includes prior actions as part of the April 2022 International Monetary Fund (IMF) staff-level agreement (SLA). Divergent views among key stakeholders on how to distribute the financial losses remains the main bottleneck for reaching an agreement on a comprehensive reform agenda. Lebanon needs to urgently adopt a domestic, equitable, and comprehensive solution that is predicated on: (i) addressing upfront the balance sheet impairments, (ii) restoring liquidity, and (iii) adhering to sound global practices of bail-in solutions based on a hierarchy of creditors (starting with banks’ shareholders) that protects small depositors.Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication Argentina Country Climate and Development Report(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11)The Argentina Country Climate and Development Report (CCDR) explores opportunities and identifies trade-offs for aligning Argentina’s growth and poverty reduction policies with its commitments on, and its ability to withstand, climate change. It assesses how the country can: reduce its vulnerability to climate shocks through targeted public and private investments and adequation of social protection. The report also shows how Argentina can seize the benefits of a global decarbonization path to sustain a more robust economic growth through further development of Argentina’s potential for renewable energy, energy efficiency actions, the lithium value chain, as well as climate-smart agriculture (and land use) options. Given Argentina’s context, this CCDR focuses on win-win policies and investments, which have large co-benefits or can contribute to raising the country’s growth while helping to adapt the economy, also considering how human capital actions can accompany a just transition.