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Legal and Institutional Frameworks Supporting Accountability in Budgeting and Service Delivery Performance
Chapter in a book
Malcolm Russell-Einhorn
October 2007 |
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The IRIS Center's Malcolm Russell-Einhorn has recently had an essay on "Legal and Regulatory Frameworks Supporting Accountability in Budgeting and Service Delivery Performance" published as a chapter in the World Bank's volume on Performance Accountability and Combating Corruption (Anwar Shah, ed., 2007), part of the Bank's Public Sector Governance and Accountability Series. The chapter highlights the critical need for such frameworks to address a number of procedural details -- often neglected -- that can help ensure more genuine and effective citizen participation in matters of budgeting and service delivery. These include mechanisms to ensure balanced representation of stakeholders in consultative processes; access of such stakeholdrers to agenda-setting; adequate provision of background information in easily intelligible formats; effective voice elicitation institutions (public hearings, citizen juries, etc.); appropriate deliberative bodies and processes (with citizen representatives directly involved or involved through advisory panels); reporting, feedback, and evaluation mechanisms to ensure that the fruits of consultation are kept in view and reported out to the public; and complaint and redress institutions (to challenge unlawful abridgement of the procedure).
Throughout, the chapter emphasizes the critical importance of having these mechanisms fully integrated into formal mainstream budgeting and service delivery decisionmaking processes, so that participatory forums are not marginalized and treated as mere window-dressing. At the same time, the chapter emphasizes the need to recognize the limits of such technocratic schemes; their fulfillment is heavily dependent on such key background factors as political dynamics; the underlying legal and administrative culture; sociocultural norms; and government and civil society capacity. Indeed, the chapter has three brief case studies drawn from Bolivia, the Philippines, and South Africa highlighting some of the difficulties in translating otherwise well-developed legal and institutional frameworks into successful outcomes in difficult (but often typical) local conditions in developing countries. |
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| Last updated on: 11/19/2007 |
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