Every year, governments collect and spend billions of taxpayer funds to pay for services such as education and healthcare. Citizens have a right to know how their governments are collecting and where they are spending their money. 

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, this can ensure that government spending reflects the people’s interests and needs.

Fiscal openness has been one of the mainstays of the open government movement. Moving forward, improving public participation and accountability – areas with the most potential for results – will be the new frontier.

OGP works with partners to promote innovation in open budgets, scale commitments on citizen participation and make fiscal openness the global norm. 

• Increase citizen participation throughout the budget cycle to open up decision-making. Ghana’s government and civil society organizations collaborated to create a participatory budget that more directly reflected citizens’ wants and needs.

• Apply open and participatory budgeting to specific sectors such as health, education and the environment. Madrid implemented participatory budgeting allowing the public to decide the allocation of 100 million Euros in their choice of projects.

• Advance gender and inclusion through gender-responsive budget reviews. Côte d’Ivoire engaged women’s groups in participatory budgeting to help set priorities and fund public services that better respond to their needs.

• Global Movement for Budget Transparency, Accountability, and Participation (BTAP)
• International Monetary Fund
• Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
• Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency
• Collaborative Africa Budget Reform Initiative
• Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability Program
• International Budget Partnership