Cash or work: What do people want?

The debate about how best to assist the poor is not going away.  Read some of our previous posts on this in issue in Tanzania , Sierra Leone and Kenya .

Are cash transfers more effective than government services in adressing poverty? If you do settle on cash transfers, should they cover a large part of the population in the form of a basic income grant? Or should such transfers be targeted at specifically vulnerable groups? And what conditions should be attached to such transfers  apart from a means test (every doesn’t even agree that means tests are a good ideas)? Should cash transfers be conditional on some ‘good behaviour’ such as sending your children to school (such as in Oportunidades in Mexico) or are such conditions unnecessary red tape separating cash from people that really need it? These and other similar questions continue to spice efforts to assist the poor and vulnerable.

The NREGA scheme in India is very much at the forefront of these debates. In a recent article Sowmya Kidambi and Aruna Roy of the MKSS argued that the complexities of conditional cash transfers make them more vulnerable to corruption than unconditional entitlements such as the NREGA. They also argue that there are important ideological difference between what they call a ‘cash dole’ and a scheme such as the NREGA that is based on the right to work. Read their article here.

 

What should donors do about Budget Transparency & Accountability?

Why should donor agencies care about budget transparency? And what can they do to increase it in the countries they support?

In a new IBP Brief Paolo de Renzio and Vivek Ramkumar describe how a lack of transparency in aid-recipient countries reduces the potential effectiveness of that aid to reduce poverty and lead to sustainable economic growth because of leakages, corruption, and mismanagement.

In aid-dependent countries, improved transparency of aid flows is also key for enhancing domestic accountability around the budget process. In this Brief, the authors also provide general recommendations to the international donor community and International Financial Institutions (IFI) on how they can support better budget transparency practices in countries to which they provide assistance. Read the Brief here.

Do you agree? What else should donors do?

 

What makes governments change?

In an interview about the current controversy about parliamentarians’ expenses, a British journalist declared that it was just the shame and embarrasment generated by media coverage that motivated the government to deal with the unfolding scandal.

How to move governments is one of the key questions that citizens and civil society organisations (CSOs) ask themselves. And we don’t always have good answers to this question. Failed and successful advocacy campaigns must have a 100 to 1 ratio.

Of course the answer to this million dollar question depends on the country, the government and a large number of other factors. A strong leader of a one party state will not be moved by the same pressure as a democratic head of state that has a strong and independent media. And we can’t expect to move a party with a strong mandate in the same way as a tenuous coalition government.

It also depends who in government you are trying to move. A senior bureaucrat may be interested in research while the political head is more likely to be interested in public perception. We also know that not all public perception weighs the same amount to politicians.  A politician in a state that is aid dependent (Mali, Tanzania or Burkina Faso) may be more concerned about the perception of donors than the same donor in a state that gathers most of its revenue from natural resources (Chad or Angola).

Again a state that is heavily dependent on imports and exports would worry more about international investor and media opinion than in states whose economies are more inward looking.

Sometimes change is driven by ref orm minded burocrats. The IBP’s OBI has even found that competition between states sometimes moves governments to bring about reforms!

So from all of these possibilities and variables, what would you say is the most likely strategy to move your own government? Do you have any examples of how this works? Which successful advocacy campaigns have you been involved in and how did you get government to do what you wanted?

You can answer to this blog, or answer on Twitter,  Facebook or email us directly.

 

Why is your government not more transparent?

Here is a question to YOU: Why isn’t your government more transparent with regard to its budget? Let us have your thoughts here on the blog,  in the Facebook group, on Twitter or at openbudgets@gmail.com

The Open Budget Initiative recently reported on the budget transparency of 85 countries. You will find a completed questionnaire on budget transparency in your country here If you don’t want to read the whole thing, read a summary of your country’s transparency performance on the same page. If you are interested in where your country ranked compared to the other 84, click here.

I hope your country is one of the 86 surveyed in this round. If not, answer the question anyway , based on your own experience.

 

Transparency and Accountability: What you thought

We received some fascinating responses to the question about the link between transparency and accountability. Most people thought that more  transparency could lead to greater  accountability, but that this was by no means an automatic process. A number of political/contextual factors play a role in whether this happens or not.  

Here are some of your responses:

Tiago Peixoto (Participatory Budgeting Facebook group http://groups.to/pb/) quoted an extract from a paper by Daniel Kaufmann http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=258978

“A logical extension of furthering local community participation is to devolve entirely some functions of government service provision – e.g. decentralization. By making officials accountable to local citizens who are in a better position to evaluate the level and quality of services delivered, a decentralized system allows reliable information concerning performance to be generated and utilized for enforcement. Reciprocally, local citizens are better informed about supply conditions, budgets and expenditures for local services, thus reducing the information asymmetry between clients and officials that is largely responsible for corruption.” 

He also argues that  well implemented Participatory Budgeting practices generally have transparency as a byproduct of the participative process. He gives section B, “Indirect Effects on Participatory Budgeting” of the following paper as an example: www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu-projects/21st_Century/resources/papers/documents/souza.pdf

Ana Quiros  (of CISAS in Nicarague www.cisas.org.ni) argued that it may be easier to find a correlation the other way around. Their work in Nicaragua to shows that with less participation comes less transparency.

Alicia Mandaville of the Millenium Challenge Corporation (www.mcc.gov) asked about a 3rd link to reductions in incidents of corruption. Her office (MCC) is trying to sort through ways of estimating the return on investments in governance and accountability mechanisms.

Geir Sundet (Accountability Tanzania Project) referred us to a piece that he wrote for Twaweza, the Hivos hosted initiative in East Africa:

” The potential of public information campaigns and citizens agency have been recognized for some time and considerable resources have been channeled into attempting to replicate earlier successes, particularly in the last 5 years. Still, there has not been the dramatic duplication in success stories that one might have expected. Note, for example, that 4 of the 5 cases cited in this brief note, had already started ten years ago.

Why has it been so hard to replicate these well designed and effective interventions? Any deep-going analysis of this question but a few observations will be provided:

• There has been a tendency to underestimate the complexity underlying the above successes. Simply providing information or facilitating report card exercises is not likely to have much of an impact unless it is informed by the local institutional and political context. Simply placing information on a notice board, for example, is not likely to have much of an impact if the information is not understandable to the intended audience (see, for example, Mushi et al 2005).
• There has been a tendency to focus on starting new initiatives, “pushing money out the door” at the expense of follow up and careful reporting and assessments of experiences. Two results of this has been uncritical reporting of success and poor learning.
• Success seems to be more likely to be forthcoming when bottom up demands for change or action are formally or informally linked up with top-down enforcement from official authorities—in creating an overall ecosystem of change. Particularly Supreme Audit Institutions have proved to be good, strategic allies of citizen groups (see for example cases cited by Ramkumar and Krafchik 2007).” www.hivos.nl/dut/content/download/12903/81965/file/Background_Information_on_Twaweza%5B1%5D.pdf

Dedi Haryadi  (Forum for Popular Participation in Indonesia) wrote about research that they did that found no empirical facts that participation lead to more transparency in the local budget processes and allocation. Three factors were responsible for this: 1) “participation” failed to create strong public demand for transparency, 2) the way CSOs  advocate for participation is too technocratic and not political enough in nature, and 3) participation failed to overcome persistent information assymetry in the budget process.

ANY FURTHER THOUGHTS & CONTRIBUTIONS WOULD BE VERY WELCOME!