Why Bother with Budget Work?

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Cited in

DOI	http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2010.02316.x
Author	Jonathan B. Justice
Published date	01 January 2011
Date	01 January 2011

126 Public Administration Review • January | February 2011

of the six groups prof‌i led, the volume’s contributors

suggest that democracy building, more than realloca-

tion, constitutes the most fundamental goal and the

greatest potential long-term legacy of these and other

budget groups’ work.

 e book is framed as a work of evaluation research

targeted to specialists who are concerned with interna-

tional development ef‌f orts—aid donors, international

NGOs, development consultants, and activists within

countries working to develop and/or democratize. It

also will be of interest to researchers and practition-

ers who are interested in participatory budgeting,

comparative budget processes and politics, and the

remarkably wide range of roles, strategies, and tactics

employed by civil society organizations concerned

with government budgeting.

As Mark Robinson’s introduction recounts, civil

society budget groups and budget work emerged in

the 1990s in the context of a growing interest by

international aid donors and development organiza-

tions in fostering democracy and good governance

among emerging democracies and development aid

recipients.  e 1990s also saw the emergence of mod-

els of direct participatory budget formulation, such as

the famous case of Porto Alegre, Brazil (see Wampler

2000). Transparency, democratization, and of‌f‌i cial

accountability came to be seen as the most appropri-

ate means to reduce corruption and ensure greater ef-

f‌i ciency and responsiveness in the use of aid and other

economic resources. Like budget groups elsewhere,

the six groups evaluated in this study have pursued

Mark Robinson, ed., Budgeting for the Poor (New

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). xiii, 223 pp.

$85.00 (cloth), ISBN: 9780230224780.

The last decade has seen a growing number

of civil society organizations in developing

and transitional countries doing “applied

budget work”—a combination of technical analysis

and interest-group advocacy focused on government

budgets.  e goals of these budget groups and their

sponsors—which include international nongovern-

mental organizations (NGOs) and U.S.-based private

foundations—include reducing government cor-

ruption, improving national f‌i scal performance, and

improving the welfare of the poor and marginalized

by making budget processes, priorities, and imple-

mentation more responsive to their needs. In order to

do so, budget groups use a variety of strategies in their

ef‌f orts to increase f‌i scal transparency and accountabil-

ity as well as popular participation and voice in public

resource allocation.

Budgeting for the Poor, an unusually coherent edited

volume of case studies, of‌f ers evidence that by engag-

ing in budget work, civil society organizations are

fundamentally engaged in the work of democracy

building. It thus of‌f ers an implicit rejoinder to Aaron

Wildavsky’s famous pronouncement in these pages

that “any ef‌f ective change in budgetary relation-