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Fiscal Openness

Fiscal openness encompasses a wide range of practices and interventions aimed at promoting transparency, participation and accountability in fiscal policies.

Overview

Every year, governments collect and spend billions of taxpayer funds on policies that impact citizens directly and substantially, such as in education and health care. Citizens have a right to know how their governments are collecting and spending their money. Fiscal openness across the budget and fiscal cycle – through transparency, public participation and legislative oversight – allows citizens to hold their government accountable and reduce waste. Over time, open budgeting can ensure that government spending reflects the people’s interests and needs.

Open budgets have been one of the mainstays of the open government movement. While much progress has been made in budget transparency through OGP action plans, improving public participation and accountability – areas with the most potential for results – remain challenges.

Recommendations – updated May 2019

  • Participation gets results: OGP members can consider moving beyond budget transparency and look for ways to increase citizen participation throughout the entire budget cycle. According to early IRM data, commitments that encouraged public participation in budgeting significantly opened up decision-making processes.
  • Sector-specific budgeting can improve public service delivery: OGP members can consider applying open and participatory budgeting to the health, education, and environmental sectors, etc.
  • Gender budgeting and inclusion: OGP members can use budgeting as an opportunity to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment by including gender-responsive budget reviews – budgeting that ensures that public resources are allocated in ways that promote gender-equitable spending and represent the interests of all citizens.

Partners

Resources

  1. Fiscal Openness Fact Sheet (May 2019)

    2019, Document, PDF

  2. What steps to increase fiscal transparency and participation should OGP countries take in their next Action Plans?

    This blog originally appeared on the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT) website.  This post is the first in a short…

    2017, Stories, Web Page

  3. The Impacts of Fiscal Openness: A Review of the Evidence

    n/a, Outbound Link, Web Page

Model Commitments

Initial Commitments

  • Allow public access to budget hearings in the legislature
  • Publish a Citizens’ Budget
  • Publish Executive’s Budget Proposal and Audit Reports
  • Publish the four core budget documents

Intermediate Commitments

  • Consult with the public on budget preparation
  • Enable effective oversight by legislatures and supreme audit institutions
  • Publish all budget reports as open data
  • Publish all eight key budget reports

Advanced Commitments

  • Enable citizen participation in budgeting
  • Publish information on resources received by service delivery units
  • Publish off budget financial information

Innovative Commitments

  • Fully implement the GIFT Principles on fiscal transparency

Recent Content

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Municipal Budget and Spending Data for Water in the Netherlands

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From Plan to Action: The Co-Creation Process in Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolis

To sustain the benefits of the OGP initiative under its local pilot program, the Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolitan Assembly (STMA) and its civil society partners prepared its second local action plan, comprised of potentially high impact open government commitments. This action plan…

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