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Fiscal Openness

Fiscal openness encompasses a wide range of practices and interventions aimed at promoting transparency, participation, and accountability. It is the most popular policy area in OGP.

See the Guide to Open Government and the Coronavirus: Fiscal Openness »

Overview | Recommendations | Partners | Documents | Commitments | Recent Posts

Overview

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. 

Netherlands

Municipal Budget and Spending Data for Water in the Netherlands

Lessons from Reformers: Starting in 2015, Dutch local governments began providing financial data through a web portal at www.openspending.nl...

Recommendations

  • 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.

Partners

Resources

  1. A Guide to Open Government and the Coronavirus: Fiscal Openness

    The COVID-19 pandemic has weakened economies, increased public debt, and exacerbated existing inequalities. Governments across the world are in the…

    2020, Guidance Document, Web Page

  2. Fiscal Openness Fact Sheet

    Snapshot of global progress and member-level examples of fiscal openness work in OGP

    2019, Document, PDF

  3. 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 here. This post is the first in…

    2017, Perspective, Web Page

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

    , Outbound Link, Web Page

  5. Open Response + Open Recovery: Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Budgeting and Contracting

    As part of the Open Response + Open Recovery Digital Forum, OGP, Open Contracting Partnership, and International Budget Partnership hosted a…

    2020, , Web Page

Commitments