[OpenSpending] Fwd: Open Budgets Blog

Mon Jul 23 08:02:12 UTC 2012

Interesting blog post from the International Budget Partnership... 

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From: Open Budgets Blog <info at internationalbudget.org>
Date: Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 2:13 AM
Subject: Open Budgets Blog
To: lucy.chambers at okfn.org

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Citizen budget monitoring: Under cover agents for sustainable budgets<http://openbudgetsblog.org/2012/07/12/citizen-budget-monitoring-under-cover-agents-for-sustainable-budgets/> 

Posted: 12 Jul 2012 08:11 AM PDT

*This is the fourth part in our series on citizen impact on government 
budgets. Click here<http://openbudgetsblog.org/2011/10/11/make-a-scene-when-everyone-is-watching-the-national-campaign-for-dalit-human-rights%E2%80%99-campaign-789-and-the-2010-commonwealth-games/>
 <http://openbudgetsblog.org/2011/10/04/budget-monitoring-by-indian-cso-improves-nrega-implementation/>to 
read part 3.*

**A popular stereotype of civil society campaigns is that they are run by 
fiscally irresponsible activists who demand that governments spend large 
amounts of money that they don’t have, to introduce new social programs 
that will realize socio-economic rights, fund the Millennium Development 
Goals, or Make Poverty History.

Resistance to these campaigns is often based on the belief that civil 
society organizations (CSOs) will ‘bust the budget’ by pushing for 
unaffordable and unsustainable programs. While it is true that, in some 
cases, CSOs attempt to get governments to implement new programs, more 
often they are often simply trying to get governments to honor programs or 
policies that the government has already committed to.

By way of illustration, out of seven recent International Budget Partnership<http://internationalbudget.org/ibp_publication_categories/learning-program-case-studies/> case 
studies of CSO campaigns, six of the cases were examples of CSOs simply 
trying to get governments to implement programs or budgets that they had 
already committed to. In the one case where this did not apply – the 
Treatment Action Campaign’s (TAC) efforts to get the South African 
government to roll out an HIV/AIDS strategy – TAC was able to prove that 
the programs it was pushing for would actually save the government money in 
the medium to long term.

In the six remaining cases, the agenda had already been set by the 
government concerned. In India, for example, the government already had a 
poverty alleviation program in place (NREGA), but due to corruption and 
inefficiency it was not as effective as it should have been. An 
organization called Samarthan helped the government to better implement 
NREGA by making people more aware of what their rights were under the 
program and by using budget tracking to demonstrate where the weaknesses in 
the system were.

In Argentina, the Civil Association for Equality and Justice (ACIJ), took 
the government of Buenos Aires to court when it failed to provide 
constitutionally mandated early education for all the children in the city. 
By proving that the government had been consistently underspending the 
budget allocated to the construction and maintenance of school facilities, 
ACIJ was able to demonstrate that, despite the ability to do so, the 
government was not honoring its obligations. In another example, a 
coalition of CSOs in South Africa persuaded the government to adjust the 
Child Support Grant for inflation after they demonstrated that the grant 
had, decreased  in real terms since it was first introduced.

In each of the abovementioned examples, the people who needed it most were 
being let down by their governments, and the interventions by the CSOs 
simply ensured that the governments met their obligations. Furthermore, the 
fact that many of these CSOs used sophisticated budget monitoring 
techniques to demonstrate the discrepancies between what the government 
promised and what it was actually doing, demonstrates that CSOs are not the 
budget-illiterate organizations that many perceive them to be.

Some may argue that CSO campaigns amplify fiscally irresponsible 
commitments already made by governments and that real government priorities 
are determined by the trade-offs built into the budget process. But in most 
of the campaigns that these case studies considered, the cause of the 
problem was under and misspending, not a lack of resources.  CSO budget 
monitoring often reveal such inefficiency and shows how available resources 
can be applied towards the realization of policy commitments. Ironically, 
instead of unsustainable budget binges, CSOs and community members often 
contribute to more accountable and responsible spending. Those concerned 
with sustainable public spending should embrace these campaigns.

*This post was written by Rebekah Kendal and Albert van Zyl. Click here<http://internationalbudget.org/ibp_publication_categories/learning-program-case-studies/> to 
read more case studies of how citizen budget monitoring has improved 
government service delivery.*
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Lucy Chambers 
Community Coordinator, 
OpenSpending <http://openspending.org/> & Data Journalism<http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/data-driven-journalism>
Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org/> 
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