Webinar on Open Budgets

World Bank Institute BOOST Program (BOOST is a World Bank designed data tool for building efficiency in public spending).

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of new promising trends of enhanced budget accountability and better development outcomes, including: an increasing push from donors and civil society organizations worldwide for better government transparency, an upsurge in citizen demand for enhanced accountability and better service delivery, and the rapid introduction and dissemination of new technologies which have facilitated considerable access and sharing of global knowledge.

Despite these early successes, however, experiences globally have also shown that that there are no guarantees that interventions linked to fiscal transparency will quickly translate to public use of the data and consequent gains in accountability. Therefore, today the main challenge is how to design interventions around budget data that aim for broader support of open budgets.  What is needed in particular are approaches that promote data availability, in parallel with building critical capacity for broader audiences to effectively use such data to improve budget performance.

A key question that will be addressed through this Webinar revolves precisely around what elements of such capacity building need to be accelerated to have maximum impact on the open budget agenda. Given the complexity and the dramatic variation in the political economy of countries and hence their public financial management (PFM) systems, it is argued that developing such capacity requires a different approach than providing traditional training focused on developing practitioner skills within the executive; And instead, that there is a need to maximize multi stakeholder interaction in learning around content which clarifies and underlines multiple stakeholder roles, and highlights the use of data analysis for better policies and improved accountability.