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This featured dialogue on 'Using Budgets for Monitoring' took place from February 24 to March 2, 2010. It's not too late to add new comments!
New Tactics is pleased to host this featured dialogue on 'Using Budgets for Monitoring' from February 24 to March 2, 2010. This online dialogue will be a space for practitioners using - and training others to use - government budgets to monitor the implementation of human rights commitments. The goal of this dialogue is to create a stronger network on practitioners using budgets for monitoring, to share important resources and information, and also to introduce this technique to our online community. Join the dialogue by adding your comments below.
"Preventing human rights abuse depends on government action, and government action requires government spending. Human rights groups, therefore, cannot fully ascertain how well a government is fulfilling its obligations unless they learn how to carefully monitor government budgets and spending." - Liam Mahony, editor of 'Using Government Budgets as a Monitoring Tool'
Our featured resource practitioners leading this discussion include:
- Warren Krafchik and Helena Hofbauer of the International Budget Partnership
- Denny John, a consultant in the health sector for NGOs such as Action Aid, PATH, UNDP and local NGOs in India
- Alfred Wreh, Head of Secretariat of the Liberia Civil Society Budget Watch Network
- Mario Claasen and Petronella Murowe of IDASA in South Africa
- Edewede (Dede) Kadiri, Senior Programme Officer with Dev't Initiatives Network (DIN), Nigeria
- Kipp and Philip of INFONET in Kenya
- Aoife Nolan Budget Analysis and the Advancement of Economic and Social Rights in Northern Ireland Project, Queen's Universy Belfast
- Humphrey Otieno of the Nairobi Peoples Settlement Network in Kenya
Main themes
Please add your comments beneath these main themes by replying to their corresponding comments in the dialogue:
- What tools can be used to monitor rights thru budget analysis?
- How do you use your evidence to change policy and budget allocation?
- How have you been able to empower, educate & mobilize the public to use budgets for human rights monitoring?
- Challenges, successes, and opportunities
Photo found on Flickr under Creative Commons, by ~jjjohn~
Summary
In this dialogue, participants discussed the tactics of using budgets for monitoring government compliance with human rights. Budgets are a powerful tool to monitor civil and political, as well as economic, social and cultural rights, because it is through budgets that governments act on the values present in their rhetoric. Civil society can hold governments accountable by challenging the relative amounts of money allocated to different fields, or the way in which allocated money is used.
What types of budgets?
Expenditure - traditionally, budget monitoring has focused on monitoring government spending, and the way in which resources are allocated for different purposes.
- accountability in spending - one of the participants aptly captured the importance of monitoring, "the budget gives us a clear perspective on what is done and what is omitted." By monitoring budgets, civil society agents can monitor government compliance with human rights, particularly economic, social, and cultural rights, as well as civil and political rights.
- budget allocation - the LASDAP project in Kenya is a process whereby the community participates in identifying priorities for the local government and evaluates their performance.
Revenue - participants in the dialogue pointed out that it is increasingly more important to pay attention to the revenue the government receives. Where does the government get its money from and what are the consequences of that for human rights?
Revenue includes:
- taxation
- foreign aid - often runs off-budget, thus fails to be transparent
- off-budget items - similarly to foreign aid, other items are often not reflected in the revenue portion of budget reports
Access to Information
In order to use budgets for monitoring purposes, civil society needs to be able to access budget information. Access remains to be possibly the greatest obstacle to efficient budget analysis. The reluctance as well as lack of logistical capacity of governments to transparently share information with civil society allows for lesser compliance with human rights performance.
- Memorandums of Understanding (MOU) - memorandums of understanding are agreements between civil society and a government regarding the access of information. Since MOUs cannot be legally enforced, their compliance is challenging. This example from Nigeria displays the challenges caused by the government's reluctance to be transparent.
- Open Budget Initiative - illustrates how governments can increase their access to information.
- Freedom of Information Laws - many countries have adopted laws that oblige the government to share information publicly. However, when the government transfers some of its rights-related obligations to private agents, Freedom of Information Laws do not apply. If a country has not adopted FOI laws, members of civil society can organize and advocate for such laws.
The 6 Questions Campaign is an excellent example of a transnational lobbying effort for budget transparency. In this campaign, 85 countries will be assessed based on their answers to 6 questions regarding their commitment to Millenium Development Goals, aid transparency, and government spending on environmental institutions.
Engaging the Community
Communities should have a say in what government budgets are being allocated toward. There is a range of tactics that can be used to empower community in budget-related decision-making
- working with local officials - creating a relationship between community and local officials to decide on pro-community budgeting
- gender budget analysis - comparing the impact of government spending on men and women, making sure that the government includes women in their budgeting process - an example from Nigeria can be found here.
- training communities in "budget literacy" - community organizations can train civil society about the internal workings of the budget and thus increase their ability to critique the governing bodies.
- community score cards - score cards are an innovative way of gathering community input on the budget process. Read about examples from Ghana and Lagos, Nigeria.
Challenges
- becoming an actor in budgetary planning - the best-case scenario is for civil society to have a direct role in the budgetary process. This requires intensive strategic planning and developing relationships with the governing bodies at the local, national, and international level.
- evaluations - it is necessary to evaluate the impact of monitoring efforts. However, this can be difficult for the same reasons as access to governmental information, for a governing body may be reluctant to share changes in their budgeting allocation process.
- identifying those responsible - governing structures are complex and extensive, it continues to be difficult to point to a specific office or person that can be held accountable for governmental decisions.
- ensuring government transparency at all levels - although national governments at times may make moves to be completely transparent, local and regional governments have different rules and are often in charge of ESC-rights-related service provision, read more about the challenges to regional transparency in Canada.
Resources:
- A Rights-Based Approach to Budget Analysis
- Citizen Reporting Learning Toolkit
- Gender Responsive Budgeting
- Publish What You Fund - foreign aid transparency
- Reading the Books: Governments' Budgets and the Right to Education
- Report of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on Implementation of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
What tools can be used to monitor rights thru budget analysis?
Please consider the following questions to discuss beneath this theme:
Training fo budget analysis
I had attended a training session conducted by CBGA on budget analysis in 2007 which helped me get the nuances of both national, state and municipal budgets. The sessions were split into two training programmes; one on national budget process, and second on state and municipal budgets. I think the split was quite useful since the budgeting process is quite different at all the 3 levels.
But, once the training was done the most difficult part is to have access to budgetary documents of the government. In India only the national budgets are put on website but not the state and municipal budgets. So, I had to spend some time to get in touch with NGOs who had created a database (CEHAT is one such NGO in Mumbai) and have library resources of such budgets.
As part of my advocacy work related to maternal and child health I has done a report on "Public Expenditures, Budgets and Childen under Six" for FORCES I had used the budget analysis reports of the Planning Commission of India at http://indiabudget.nic.in/
denny john
Accessing the gov't budgetary documents
Thanks for adding these initial comments, Denny! You mention that a challenge that your group faced in India was the difficulty in accessing the necessary budgetary documents. I imagine that others participating in this dialogue have faced similar challenges! I would be grateful to hear about how you and others have been able to acquire these budgetary documents.
Denny, you were able to utilize the resources of another organization that has access to these documents - CEHAT. I am sure that there are many other organizations like this that publish these public documents. Please share any other groups that publish government public records and budgetary documents!
Kristin Antin, New Tactics Online Community Builder
Accessing the government's budgetary documents
Samarthan is one such organisation based in Mumbai which comes out with a "Budget at a Glance" document of the State budgets each year. However, this is done in the local language i.e. Marathi. At New Delhi there is Center for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA) which also comes out with such "Budget at a Glance" documents and maintains data of Central budgets. DISHA in Gujarat is also known to maintain state level budget documents of Gujarat state. All of these organisations are mentioned in the International Budget Partnership website.
denny john
Access to budget information--the Open Budget initiative
Access to budget information is by far one of the most persistent challenges that civil society groups all around the world face in order to do human rights and broader budget work. Governments have proven to be extremely resilient in resisting greater access to information. While we might believe that this is due to the lack of capacity of some governments in producing budget information, the Open Budget Initiative (OBI) illustrates that governments could improve their record quite drastically just by making information that they produce for donors, for instance, publicly available. However, it is also common that we are not fully aware of the information that is already available. The country surveys of the OBI offer detailed information about what documents are available and where they can be found.
Experiences on accessing budget documents
Denny, thank you for this comment. Apart from the fact that it is the first comment and inevitably the first read, I can relate very closely with your difficulty in accessing budget documents. Nigeria only recently emerged from a militarised background and the new democratic government has yet to familiarise itself with precepts of good governance like openness and transparency. Through the implementation of our Gender Budget Project from 2006-2008, Development Initiatives Network’s budget work has been largely hampered by a lack of access to budget information needed for a comprehensive analysis. There is also no legal entitlement to public information. In fact access to public information is not only limited but out rightly criminalised through a still existing secrecy law!
However, DIN tried to obtain publicly-held information by establishing a public-private collaboration with the key budget institution in Lagos State, Nigeria, the Ministry of Economic Planning and Budget (MEPB). This was done through the conclusion of an MoU. Through the MoU, DIN hoped to gain access to documentation needed for effective budget analysis. We also hoped to gain the support of all 57 municipalities in Lagos State. Despite the MOU, there have been persistent refusals to release documents or participate in project surveys.
Agreements to access budget information...
Dede:
I have found MOUs to access budget information tricky, at best. Many times, they mean that government keeps you within a controllable distance, where they know what you are doing and decide up to which point they will let you do it. There are many examples of groups like yours, that after reaching an MOU continue not getting the information they need. In some countries, they might be getting the information but then have no "permission" to release publicly any analyisis based on it. However, there are instances where this is the first building block for future effective budget work. As such, not giving up, and continuing to try to get the information, is crucial. Sometimes this is more a game of "who gets tired first"--you, by requesting information once and again, or the government, by denying or ignoring your requests, once and again.
A big chunk of budget work is the struggle for transparency and access to timely, useful and quality information. And while we believe that access to information is a right that has to be granted, we often disregard the fact that governments are not monolyths. Getting or not access to information is based on decisions made by persons, some of which will believe that people should have no interest in this information, and others who understand that the information is public, and that the money belongs to the public. THere are always little doors that open, and if we keep pushing, there is a good chance that we will be there to walk through these doors when they open.
Access to gov't information: the dilemma demonstration example
This is a very interesting thread on the challenges around accessing information and the tactics that are being used to overcome these barriers. In another thread, Nancy highlights a campaign in India that mobilized the public to be interested, invested and active in the use of government budgets and the access to information. They used the slogan "Right to know Right to live!" Dede in Nigeria, on the other hand, has been able to utilize Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) to create a relationship with the government to have access to certain information. I propose the we have a featured dialogue on how human rights organizations access information!
New Tactics has a great example from Canada of a group of concerned citizens that were able to put the Canadian government between a rock and hard place to force them to share documents on negotiations on the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA):
When the government refused to make public the draft documents, hundreds of its citizens showed up at the Ottawa headquarters of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade holding "Search and Rescue Warrants" for the release of these draft documents. When the government responded by arresting one hundred citizens for requesting their right to information, the media and general public demanded to know what the government was trying to hide. Behind the success of the campaign was a strategy that included a number of common tactics, including petitions, letter writing, etc., but with the added twists of an unequivocal ultimatum, civil disobedience training on the premises of the Canadian parliament and the drama of the Search and Seizure Operation, a type of nonviolent direct action. Operation SalAMI’s dilemma demonstration tactic, as part of a broader nonviolent campaigning strategy, pressured the government to act according to its professed values and at the requests of its citizens.
This example is explained in our Tactical Notebooks titled 'The Dilemma Demonstration.' This challenge of accessing gov't information impacts so many different human rights campaigns. Thank you for the idea to put together a dialogue on this!
Kristin Antin, New Tactics Online Community Builder
More on accessing budget information...
The challenges for accessing budget information and the tactics used to face these challenges are varied, and constantly developing. Freedom of Information Laws, which where almost unthinkable in most parts of the world 15 years ago, are growing and extending its reach through all the continents. But FOI laws and regulations entail their own complexities, especially in terms of knowing exactly what to request from whom. There are many tools developed by FOI activists that can be applied to budget work, including strategic litigation.
Informal tools, outside the legal framework, have been used for many years by budget groups. One of the most obvious one is for civil society to collaborate with Congress/Parliament and Supreme Audit Institutions. Generally speaking, these institutions and bodies of representatives have far more access to budget information than what is granted to the normal citizen in a country without FOIA. Most of the time, they don't have sufficient human and technical capacities to actually deal with all the information they can access, so as to play their oversight role. Civil society has worked in many countries with Congress and Auditing Institutions to simplify their information or even to look into certain pieces of information in detail. There is a natural link between these actors, which can bring about fruitful collaboration and strategic alliances.
HakiElimu, a Tanzanian Right to Education group, has worked for several years now on simplifying audit reports and findings, so as to bring out some of the information that is crucial to oversight and accountability processes.
FOI and Accessing Budget Information
In our economic and social rights-based budget work in the UK/Northern Ireland, we (and others) have sought to make use of the domestic Freedom of Information legislation, which provides a general right of access to information held by 'public authorities' in the UK subject to certain exemptions. We have, however, come across a number of key obstacles in doing so.
One major challenge is posed by the fact that, in some cases, the state has sought to give effect to economic and social rights through privatised ESR-related service providers such as housing associations (i.e., non-public authorities). Such bodies are not covered by the FOI Act and are thus effectively immune from having to provide budget-related information through a FOI application. Furthermore, while the relevant government websites state that ‘In the majority of cases there will not be a charge’, the devil is arguably in the detail, with the website also stating that ‘there may be cases where a request for information is so complex that it would exceed the cost threshold’. In practice, in some cases, this has resulted in activists being faced with the prospect of having to pay astronomical charges if they wish to access rights-related budgetary information. Given the costs involved, such applications have had to be discontinued.
Of course, an inability to access information can also serve as an advocacy point. Where government claims that it does not have information that is necessary to ensure the effective implementation and/or monitoring of ESR, then it is in contravention of its human rights obligations and can be challenged as such. If it refuses to provide information on a rights-based issue on the basis of an exemption(s) under FOI legislation, then much can be made of that also - particularly where specific exemptions seem unlikely to be compliant with rights-based, transparent and accountable policy-making and budgetary processes.
Some perspectives on FOI and budgets
While the freedom of information legislation has been fiercely resisted in Nigerian government (it has been thrown out of the legislative house 3 times!), this delay gives us an opportunity to refine our strategy and refine the proposed Bill. For instance, requests for accessing public information under the proposed bill must be made in writing. While it is understood that this format is necessary for record keeping, no provision is made for persons with little or no formal education or persons with sight impairment.
Furthermore, to avoid undermining the benefits of the expectant FOI Act, we (civil society) have a responsibility to build capacities to test the law and demand for information, where needed. Poor and irregular requests may have a dire effect on any FOI legislation in Nigeria. Capacity building can also can have a long term consequence of strengthening efforts in human rights and budget advocacy as well as improve demands for transparency and accountability in Nigeria.
The costs of accessing information
Mexico has one of the paramount FOI laws, which has many charcateristics that make it "easy" to request information. THere are two of these that I would like to single out, in terms of Aoife's comment. First, you should not pay excessively for information. There have been several cases in which government institutions have sought ways to charge exessively for information, in order to deter requests, and civil society keeps fighting it. As such, establishing from the beginning clear rules in this regard is important.
Also, if the government is using private providers, it is still paying them with public money. This is a challenge that we need to keep pushing ahead. It reminds me of the Provida case in Mexico, where government gave huge amounts of money to a conservative, pro-life organization, and a coalition of 6 organization was able to request the full acounts and expose huge corruption. Public funds remain public funds even if they are spent by private service providers, and accountability should not be limited by that.
The costs of accessing information cont.
Just to follow on from Helena's comment with regard to governmental efforts to 'delegate' or 'contract out' its human rights-related service delivery functions to so-called private bodies: I would absolutely agree that a key ground for advocacy in the context of growing 'privatisation' of HR-related services is to highlight, as Helena does, that where such bodies receive public funds, there must be accountability for public funds. Furthermore, where private bodies are carrying out what have traditionally been regarded as 'state functions' with regard to human rights delivery, states must ensure that such bodies do not interfere with such rights (for instance, through inappropriate use of public funds). Should the state fail to do so, it can be challenged for failing to give effect to its obligation to protect human rights. In addition, where states delegate or contract out their human rights-related obligations, the duty to fulfil may also be relevant as the state ultimately remains responsible for ensuring the realisation of HR. Therefore, where public funds are being transferred to private bodies (or so-called 'private bodies') for HR-related service delivery, the state must ensure that those public funds are used appropriately and accounted for.
The Economic Governance
The Economic Governance Project-Right to Education , Right to Know will this year try to send in requests to access information from government ministries.This will be piloted at country level with some capacity assistance from the Open Democracy Advice Centre in South Africa.The organisation has carried out preliminary research on the legal frameworks supporting the Right to Information and Basic Education namely in Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Swaziland,Tanzania , Uganda and Zambia.The numbers of requests sent yielded few responses - an indication that access to information still remains a challenge.We intend to continue to pilot the requests so that we can strenthen our advocacy strategies.The fact that some of the civil service staff get to sign the Official secrecy Act, makes it evn difficult to access information even if the countries have regulations that call on governments to avail informetion to society as a whole.This instrument defeats the purpose of government transparency and inhibits the opportunities for communities to hold states accountable.
Petronella
This thread shows clearly
This thread shows clearly that access to buget information is a major challenge and will remain so for some time. The IBP's Open Budget Index also shows that even where countries hacve freedom of information legislatution, accesss to budget information often remains a change. In an effort to test access to budget information in practice, IBP, together with several international organizations and partner in approximately 85 countries have recently launched a 6 QUESTIONS CAMPAIGN. Country-based civil scoiety institutions around the world are making 6 requests for budget information from thier governments over the next 6 months. The questions all link budgets to important development sectors - 2 questions focus on budgets and maternal mortality-related MDGs; 2 focus on government spending on environmental regulatory institutions and subsidies; and 2 questions focus on the transparency and predictability of aid flows. The international institutions involved include Family Care International, the World Resources Institute, the Institute for Sustainable Development, Oxfam America, and Publish What You Fund. The overall results and those for the different sectors will be released after August 2010. For more information, contact Libby Haight at IBP (Haight [at] cbpp [dot] org ). Warren
The 6 QUESTIONS CAMPAIGN
Warren,
The 6 QUESTIONS CAMPAIGN that you are launching in 85 countries is a great idea - thank you for sharing this. The three issue areas you've chosen provide a great opportunity to take the pulse on these budget expenditures and incomes.
Please come back to the dialogue to share with us the overall results when they've been released in August 2010!
Nancy Pearson, New Tactics in Human Rights Program Manager
more on 6QC
The release of the 6QC findings will be fine tuned with the MDG summit in New York, in September, and preliminary findings will be presented at diverse fora building up towards September. We also hope to build an aggressive (alternative) media campaign, and develop diverse products in diverse formats. While it is a relatively small effort in terms of testing access to budget information (because it only consists of 6 questions) it is a hugely ambitious project to offer a snapshot of what happens when we want our governments to reply to a set of simple questions.
Benefits of 6 Questions Campaign
Helena,
I want to really applaud your efforts to gain this information which can provide tremendous benefits. As you say, the effort will provide a snapshot - of 85 countries - regarding 6 questions. It would be great to also learn from your collaborative process on this effort. That, too, could provide tremendous lessons as people then take your initial findings to move forward the areas you've designated to examine, namely:
It's very exciting and we'll be looking forward to hearing about the media campaign and products you are sharing!
Nancy Pearson, New Tactics in Human Rights Program Manager
LASDAP Watch Group
LASDAP is an acronyname for Local Authority Service Delivery Action Plan, it is aconcept use in Kenya whereby the citizen particiapte in identification and prioritization of projects to be implimented by the City Council through the local Authority but this is the easy part the challenging part is the implimentaion, monitoring and evaluation for compliance wuth what has been agreed. Now this is where the tact of watch group comes in, they monitor each and evry project as it were proposed
Through traing the communities on basic skills on project evaluation and quantitevi analysis, at the end of the project an accountability forum will be organized and pictures of all projects implimented will be presented, the concerned persons will be asked to make thre case, asked questions.
Community Organizer
LASDAP watch groups: what works and what doesn't?
Thanks for sharing this information on the Local Authority Service Delivery Action Plan in Kenya, Humphrey. You mention that the most difficult part of this work is monitoring and evaluating the implementation of the projects that have been agreed upon. Do you have any information on what has worked well for the 'watch groups' and what hasn't? I would be interested in learning more about the work of these 'watch groups'!
Thanks!
Kristin Antin, New Tactics Online Community Builder
The power of using budgets for monitoring
What I really love about this tactic (using budgets to monitor government human rights performance) is that it can be used to monitor so many rights - right to education, rights of the child, rights of women, rights of minorities, etc. In our previous dialogue on Documenting Human Rights Violations, a point that was raised was the difficulty of documenting violations of economic, social and cultural rights (ESC rights). Using budgets to monitor ESC rights is a great approach to documenting these types of human rights violations!
What I also find so empowering about this tactic is that you are using the language of the government (money money money) to hold them accountability for their actions or non-actions and make recommendations for change. These budgets are created by governments - representatives that are elected by citizens. It's important that these citizens continue to hold their government accountable for where they are and are not spending resources. As the video says, 'It's Our Money. Where's it Gone?'
What inspired you to start using budgets to monitor human rights in your community or country?
Kristin Antin, New Tactics Online Community Builder
Budget monitoring for law enforecment and justice functions
Hi Kirsten
I see your point that budget monitoring is a useful tool for ESCR compliance. However, I believe the tool is of great value for monitoring other State obligations as well. For example: what chunk of the resources are spent on security and justice, and within that field: how are resources exactly allocated? This issue has many implications: how much money goes to the military, as compared to police; to police equipment; to more affluent areas at the cost of the less privileged etc. All too often in particular police agencies are confronted with very small budgets, adding to the challenge to carry out their work fair and professionally.
I am interested in hearing of experiences of colleagues who have used the budget monitoring tool in the sphere of security and justice.
Thanks
Anneke Osse
Budgets, the military and law enforcement
Hi Anneke!
Indeed, the budget is a great tool to track anything related with human rights, be it economic, social or cultural rights, or civil and political rights. As long as some government action is required, the budget gives us a realistic perspective of what is done or what is omitted. CIIDH, a Guatemalan Human Rights organization, started looking at the budget of the military and security issues and then got deeper into the budget-ESCR connection, by examining the compliance of the government with the Guatemala Peace Accords through the budget.
Cheers
And revenues?
Most discussions on budget monitoring tend to focus on government expenditures. This is natural. Expenditures are easier to relate to citizen's lives. But the budget consists of two sides - expenditures AND revenues. Taxation has very serious - often negative - implications for the poor. The global trend is towards indirect taxation (such as broad value-added taxes) that are regressive - they consume a bigger proportion of the income of poor people than better-off people - and we know that women and children are over-represented in the poor. (Maybe the only place they are overrepresented!) So, the tax system has implications for the ahievement of rights. Working on tax analysis and advocacy is unrepresented in civil society budget work - we should invest further in this work. Here is a guide to how to do this, complete with examples from pioneering organizations in the field. http://www.internationalbudget.org/GuideTaxWork.pdf
Other revenues
I should have added that there are other forms of revenues, such as foreign aid. Adapting tools to monitor foreign aid also requires more attention. Much of foreign aid flows into the country off-budget - it is not recorded in official budget documents. This is a poor practice as it makes it hard for government to manage, but it is often used by donors because they lack trust in government budgeting processes. When aid flows through the budget, it can be monitored as part of the government expenditures - you cannopt separate it out. When it is off-budget, organizations can use many of the tools that already exist for tracking budget expenditures. See my post from yesterday on monitoring budget implementation. Warren
Leveraging Foreign Aid Revenue for Human Rights Protection
Warren,
Thank you so much for raising this area of revenue as an important place for examination. I would be very interested to know if you have recent examples of how organizations have been able to leverage foreign aid or monitoring foreign aid to further human rights efforts.
I want to share an example from 1999 when the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS) in Argentina leveraged the World Bank Inspection Panel to reinstitute funding for an important food security program. After unsuccessfully campaigning against the threatened budget cut, the Garden Program’s beneficiaries and staff went to CELS for help. The Garden Program, although not funded by the World Bank, was included in a list of social programs that was to be protected during the implementation of a World Bank Structural Adjustment Loan (SAL).
CELS’ lawyers concluded that the most effective way to guarantee the protection of the right to food of the Garden Program’s beneficiaries would be a presentation in front of the World Bank denouncing a failure by the Argentine Government to honor its commitments under the SAL agreement. CELS succeeded in leveraging the World Bank Inspection Panel to put pressure on the Bank Management in Argentina; the Bank Management put pressure on the Minister of Economy and he released the money to continue the funding of the Garden Program - an important anti-poverty and food security program for the poor.
This example, shared in our Tactics Database, certainly raises many questions of strategy and tactics that organizations would need to answer for themselves - CELS raises a number of these difficult questions and concerns they had to face. But the example does show how critical the knowledge of budget analysis and understanding how the revenue and expenditure process operates in your country can be. It provides a powerful tool for protecting and advancing human rights.
I look forward to hearing from others about examples you know about and can share with us. What other ways have foreign revenues been used? How can communities get involved in the process?
Nancy Pearson, New Tactics in Human Rights Program Manager
More on off-budget resources...
Sometimes it is not foreign aid, but a whole big category of national generated revenue that runs off-budget. IN Brazil, for instance, the national development bank, BNDES, which has more money in any given year than the World Bank, runs off-budget with very little oversight. IBASE and other Brazilian organizations have integrated the BNDES platform, a coalition which is demanding transparency and accountability from one of the key actors in Brazilian development.
The BNDES platform has been working hard on integrating a map (similar to the one mentioned below) where the amount of BNDES investments can be tracked and related to the communities that are affected and even the human rights record of certain areas. This tool, when fully operational, will allow people to understand what kind of money is going into big investments in their regions, and document human rights violations associated to the process, by sending in SMS, uploading testimonies and pictures, and adding documents. Up to last year, it was impossible even to know what BNDES was spending during the year.
In November, the BNDES platform had its first meeting of communities affected by the investments of the bank, bringing together people from all over Brazil and other Latin American countries. It was an important way to give communities a voice and demand respect for their human rights, transparency and accountability from a huge development institution.
Tracking foreign aid
Thanks for the CELS example. It is inspiring. Unfortunately, there are too few of these. There is some work in tracking IFI loans for specific projects but this is an area where we should be investing much more. There is a welcome spotlight on the transparency of foreign aid, with the formation of Publish What You Fund and the International Aid Transparency Initiative. Both of these initiatives are defining ways to pressure donors to be more transparent. Hopefully, in the not to distant future we will have much greater information on how donors - esepcially bilateral donors - are spending funds in recipient countries. There is a chance however that donors will gravitate towards a system that is not compatible with recipient country budget systems. This will mean that while we have more info on aid, it will be very hard to reconcile it with spending by the recipient government. It is therfore very important that greater aid transparency is achieved in ways that are compatible with recipient country budget systems, timetables, and formats. There is some research now emerging on how to do this.....not an easy task given that donors provide aid to multiple countries with multiple systems and formats. See the Publish What You Fund website for more on this.
Warren
Monitoring (and mapping) US Military Assistance in Colombia
Hi Anneke, Helena and others,
I thought this was an interesting example of how government spending, such as military assistance and other government aid, could also be monitored. It's also an interesting example of how data collected from this kind of monitoring could be one of several layers of data related to each other. It would be interesting to hear any other examples of how budgetary data has been layered on to geo-maps or other kinds of data.
Thanks!
Kristin Antin, New Tactics Online Community Builder
Foreign aid and military spending
This is a great example, Kristin. I think that using foreign aid to fund military spending in ways that are hard to track is an old tactic that is still very much in use. A partner of our in Nicaragua, CISAS (www.cisas.org.ni) has recently completed some fascinating work to track Venezualan aid to Nicaragua that is used to fund the miltary. We often make the case for general budget support - providing aid through a countries budget as the way to ensure that it is more transparent. In the case of the U.S. though, aid is provided on-budget to Egypt, Israel, Pakistan which allows these countries great flexibility in how they use the aid - including for military purposes. So, recommendations for how to ensure that foreign aid does not go to military spending - or is identifiable as such - requires careful thought. Unfortunately, there are very, very few organizations that have developed capacity to work systematically on tracking military spending. This is an area where CSOs need to invest urgently. Some capacity exists within SIPRI www.Sipri.org , UNDP, and Georgetown University, if anyone is looking to establish a partnership. Warren
Adapting Social Audit (with budgeting tactic) to your context
I want to thank Kristin for posting this It's Our Money. Where's It Gone? video. It provides a great and inspiring example of how communities in Kenya have adapted the experience of MKSS in India "Right to Know, Right to Live" campaign to address a specific law providing for the allocation of public funds for poverty reduction.
I want to highlight the tactical steps that were exchanged between India and Kenya that has resulted in community empowerment and advances in both countries:
Learning how to use and monitor budgets is a powerful tool to empower communities. The video put forth the following questions to guide the process that I found useful:
Are there other questions that would be helpful and useful for guiding the process and putting budgets to work?
Nancy Pearson, New Tactics in Human Rights Program Manager
What is a budget from a human rights perspective?
Hello all,
I came across a valuable resource called: A Rights-Based Approach towards Budget Analysis. In this document, the author not only outlines the various ways in which budget analysis can be used to improve ESC rights, but offers detailed guidelines and steps how to do so.
It also includes a human rights approach to defining what a budget is:
"From a human rights framework, a national budget can be defined as a process through
which financial resources are allocated in compliance with state obligations to respect,
protect and fulfill human rights. The status of human rights and compliance with state
obligations become the key determinants of the choices made relative to financial
resource allocation. A state’s human rights obligations should guide the ultimate purpose
of government: to use all tools at its disposal to ensure the guarantee and enjoyment of all
human rights by all individuals."
I was inspired by Anneke's point about this tactic being applicable beyond the sphere of Economic, Social, and Cultural rights (e.g. security, justice) and I wonder if there are ways that resources targetting ESC rights practitioners could be adapted to a larger set of themes?
Tools used to monitor budget Analysis integrating Human Rights
Dear All: I recently had an opprtunity of facilitating a workshop for Liberians to truly understands what the budget process is all about; I also attended a workshop showing how to integrate Human Rights Based Approcah to Budget Monitoring and Analysis to hold government accountable, showing the roles of duty bearers and rights Holders.Key questions must be answered to Monitor budegets: How are the resources Managed? Are they: Available; Accessible; Affordable; Acceptable Good quality Other tools include: The PETS(Public Expenditure Tracking Survey) and QSDS(Quantity Supply and Delivery Survey). Budget Monitoring tools may also include:
But these key tools to analysis must ensure: Ratios Averages Trends and Account for inflation We could also integrate Human rights Impact Assessment, this must answer the following to ensure perfect monitoring of the budgets. these include:
Kristin could you provide information on how I can share related documents through attachment.
Creating community scorecards to hold duty bearers accountable
Hi Alfred,
Thanks for posting these tips on budget monitoring and your idea for integrating Human Rights Impact Assessment into this work. If you would like me to add any documents to your comment, please send those to me.
One thing that you mentioned in your comment was number 5 on your list of budget monitoring tools - 'Community Scorecards.' I would love to hear more about this! Here at New Tactics, we have been looking for examples of ways that people have created scorecards and other ranking/rating systems to hold governments, corporations, and other duty-bearers accountable for their performance. We have documented some of these examples in a dialogue and we have a great example from our tactics database titled Using technology to share information on environmental hazards - this group created www.scorecard.org. I think what is powerful about this tactic is the incentive it gives to those being held accountable to not be at the bottom of the list - or to not be the one to get an 'F' on their scorecard!
I would be interested in hearing about how budget-monitoring practitioners have used 'Community scorecards.' Was it effective?
Kristin Antin, New Tactics Online Community Builder
Community Score Cards: Success in Ghana
CSC is a community based monitoring tool with a strong focus on empowerment and accountability as it includes an interface meeting between service providers and the community that allows for immediate feed back on quality and adequacy of services provided in the community((Social Development Notes, SD Note 100/ March 2005).
Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE), launched in 1996, the objective was to “…ensure that all school-aged children were enrolled in school by 2005…”. Northern Ghana Network for Development, NGND, is an umbrella organization of of NGOs having operations at the local level in the Northern region of Ghana
Alfred
Scorecards for measuring transparency
Hi Kristin,
Our score card was used to measure the government’s transparency and openness in Lagos State, Nigeria. We adapted IBP’s Open Budget Scorecard, which was primarily used with national budgets, for administration at the sub-national level. We used this document to measure public availability of government budget documents; the presentation of budget information in a manner that is suitable for policy analysis; and the extent to which public and legislative involvement in budget debates is encouraged. Some of the results can be found on DIN’s Gender Budget Website.
Great examples & resources on using budget "scorecards"
Thanks to everyone for who has been sharing these great examples of how you've put to use Budget Scorecards. It's exciting to see these examples and how the sharing between organizations and countries has made it possible to adapt these ideas in concrete and effective ways.
Denny shared the example of the Peoples Report Cards in India People's Report Cards and Alfred shared about the Community Score Cards: Success in Ghana and now Dede has shared about the experience in Nigeria with Scorecards for measuring transparency.
For a more in-depth look at Citizen Report Cards, the resource shared in this dialogue was really helpful, Improving Local Governance and Service Delivery: Citizen Report Card Learning Toolkit, created by PAC, the Asian Development Bank, and the Asian Development Bank Institute. I read the case examples - one coming from PAC - as well as others that I thought would also be worth sharing here for additional examples and ideas for how the budget scorecard can be effective.
These examples are found in the Successful Civil Society Initiatives to Measure Budget Impact, Score Cards - from Part IV found in Our Money, Our Responsibility: A Citizen's Guide to Monitoring Government Expenditures
From India: As a result of a group of residents undertaking a citizen report card exercise in 1993 to measure citizen satisfaction of services being provided by the Bangalore Development Authority, they formed the Public Affairs Centre (PAC). In additional surveys the report card exercise continued to raise awareness of the poor performance of service providers and to compel them to take corrective action. PAC has over ten years of sustained advocacy and media publicity regarding the report card results. This along with other advocacy efforts have played a major role in pressuring city agencies to improve their service delivery.
From Tanzania: The Hakikazi Catalyst adapted the citizen report card methodology from PAC in India to the Tanzania context and developed the PIMA card. Between 2003 and 2007, Hakikazi completed two budget monitoring exercises using the PIMA card process. The main objective was to determine how the government’s poverty reduction strategies have been funded and implemented at the local level and whether they are actually improving the welfare of poor communities. They have had some success in identifying problems in village development expenditures - namely the misuse of funds - as a result investigations have been launched.
I'm sure there are also other great examples. The more we can share and learn about, it will continue to create more possibilities of adapting these excellent budget monitoring techniques. I hope others will continue to share their experiences.
I'm wondering what the challenges are in terms of addessing the issue of corruption and the misuse of funds. This seems to be a clear pattern as people monitor how the money is distributed and where the money goes. Are there any further thoughts about this that the participants can share?
Nancy Pearson, New Tactics in Human Rights Program Manager
Documents on public expenditures in India
The government research institutes such as National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) conduct research on public finance and public expenditures and regularly come out with working papers and reports on public finance in India.
denny john
How to use your evidence to change policy & budget allocation?
Please consider the following questions to discuss beneath this theme:
Working with District Officials for pro-community budgeting
I think apart from looking at advocacy change through workshops, publications and dialogue there is need to actively partner with the government in improving the systems that ensure proper budgetary process. As Faculty of Institute of Public Health, Bengaluru, I was part of a training programme on District Health Management. This programme was aimed at training the entire Distric Health Team (District Health Officer, Medical Officer, Statistician, etc) through a 1-year experiential training programe aimed at providing inputs for planning, monitoring and evaluating the District Health Team's activities in Tumkur District, Karnataka State. The training was conducted using a module pattern of education with subjects such as epidemiology, financial management, community participation etc.
In the financial management module where I was involved we aimed at preparing a training course module for providing inputs on preparing district health plans with financial allocations, community participation in preparing district health plans etc. This programme is currently in the training input stage and will go on for a year.
denny john
Gender Budget Analysis: An example from Tanzania
A good example of how budgets can be used to change government policy as well as influence the allocation of resources is the newly emerging concept of Gender-sensitive Budget Analysis. The objective of promoting Gender-sensitive Budgets is to help achieve gender equality through altering the process of resource allocations and improving accountability. This has tremendous potential on various levels. Some national governments have implemented gender-sensitive budgets, but this tactic can be implemented by community groups as well as small-scale governing institutions. A budget (of any kind) reflects the institution's implicit values - who is money given to? who makes the decisions? By focusing on ways that we can respond to a budget's structure, we can change the pattern of values that an institution puts forward. In doing so, budgetary analysis is not only a tool to reinforce a concrete structural change (i.e. allocating money where it has not been before), but also being a source of education and new knowledge for the institution, and having the potential to alter their values.
The Tanzania Gender Networking Programme present a good example of how gender-sensitive can be implemented through a carefully planned process:
TGNP's initiative was very successful as many ministries and related government agencies incorporated their feedback into their budgetting procedures and guidelines!
If people are interested in knowing more about how gender-budget analysis works at the different levels of impact and what some of the challenges in implementation are, here is a through guide and research summary: How to do a gender-sensitive budget analysis: Contemporary research and practice.
Do any of you in the dialogue have experiences with Gender-Sensitive Budget analysis?
Gender Budget Analysis in Nigeria
Development Initiatives Network (DIN) has some experiences on gender budget analysis (GBA). DIN implemented the Gender Budget Transparency and Accountability Project (GBTAP) from 2006 to 2008 in Lagos, Nigeria, with the support of the EU. DIN chose gender budget analysis over mainstream budget analysis as a means of tracking the extent to which government fulfils its commitment to women’s rights especially economic and social rights and gender quality.
GBTAP used specific tools for analysing the impacts of government spending on men compared to women. To do this, it employed two main tools: the Gender-aware Policy Appraisal and Gender-disaggregated Beneficiary Assessments. While the former is a qualitative tracking of spending on government policies on gender equality, the latter applies a quantitative technique by using basic budget tools to ascertain whether or not government policies, plans, programmes and projects reflect beneficiaries’ needs and priorities.
In addition to the tools applied, GBTAP’s designated website provides a practical steps for conducting a gender budget analysis through its gender budget manual. The manual recommends that gender budget analysis would
I would like to know of other institutions or organisations that have applied these tools successfully, what challenges they faced and how they overcame these challenges.
Additional resources on gender budget analysis and other issues
Some other useful resources on gender budget analysis include material on the UNIFEM Gender Responsive Budgeting website, which contains a range of different examples of gender budget work within the 'resources' section, as well as 'suggested readings'. Material on the site includes key resources on gender budget analysis authored by experts, including Debbie Budlender and Diane Elson.
More generally, the role of budget analysis has been the subject of two outputs by influential human rights advocates at the international and the European levels. In June 2009, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights released its Report of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on Implementation of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (UN Doc. E/2009/90). Budget analysis is the subject of paras 44-54. In addition, in his August 2009 Viewpoint on 'State budgets reveal whether the government is committed to human rights', the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights discusses rights-based budget analysis, with a particular focus on gender budgeting in Europe.
Dealing with the absence of sex-disagregated data
Budgets are generally described as gender-neutral. This is because they do not usually state or show which gender allocated sums will benefit. An outcome of this trend is that it is difficult to determine from the face of the budget document, which gender benefits most from the budget unless one takes a detailed analysis of sex-disaggregated information at every stage of the budget process.
DIN’s gender budget project in Lagos, Nigeria, noted the absence of sex-disaggregated data at government ministries, departments and agencies. To brideg this gap, DIN built the capacities of 48 key budget and planning officers in Lagos State to (i) include sex-disaggregated data in budget processes; (ii) conduct gender budget analysis; (iii) write a gender budget statements. Debbi Budlender’s paper titled Gender-responsive Call Circulars and Gender Budget Statements was helpful in developing the training content for government officers.
Using Budget Analysis Outputs in Litigation/Legal Challenges
As a lawyer, I have been particularly interested in the employment of budget work in supporting rights-based legal challenges to policy and budget allocation. In her post, Helena refers to the work of Fundar with Sonora Ciudadana. Another useful example is the case recently brought by ACIJ (www.acij.org.ar) on the right to education. Here, ACIJ used budgetary data demonstrating high levels of local government underspend on infrastructure to argue successfully that the state had violated the right to education of thousands of children who had been excluded from schools due to a shortage of school places (i.e., a lack school facilities). While serious questions can - and have been -asked about the capacity of litigation and/or court rulings to bring about systemic social change, it is significant to note that budget work is being used more and more to support litigation which has clear implications for future budgetary allocations and expenditure.
How do you empower, educate, and mobilize the public?
Please consider the following questions to discuss beneath this theme:
Gaining Access to Information - "Right to Know" campaign example
Access to Information - "Right to Know" campaign example
I would like to highlight one of the points that Denny John made his comment Training for budget analysis:
But, once the training was done the most difficult part is to have access to budgetary documents of the government. In India only the national budgets are put on website but not the state and municipal budgets. So, I had to spend some time to get in touch with NGOs who had created a database (CEHAT is one such NGO in Mumbai) and have library resources of such budgets.
It would be helpful to know if this is a common barrier that other people are facing as well. Gaining access to the budget information is critical for effective monitoring of budgets.
India has been a leader on a wide variety of fronts. Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) - has been working to gain and ensure the public's access to information. They have lead a very successful "Right to Know" campaign in Rural India. This innovated campaign - directly linked to mobilizing the public to be interested, invested and active in how government funds have been used in rural communities. They used such slogan's as "Our money, our account", "the right to know, the right to live", "this government belongs to you and me, its no one's personal property!"
You can read more about how they accessed a wide range of information including budget information in the New Tactics Tactical Notebook (full collection): Right to know, right to live - Building a campaign for the right to information and accountability
How have other organizations connected both the access to the budget information and ways they have mobilized their different audiences (general public, parliamentarians/legislators) to use the information?
Nancy Pearson, New Tactics in Human Rights Program Manager
I have had an opportunity to
I have had an opportunity to train communities and children .The aim was to develop local level capacities to question budgets in relation to their rights-particularly the right to education.The challenge with educating communities is on how the budget can be simplified/demystified for the man on the street .In most cases, we asked questions on issues that affect access to quality basic education and then moved onto what the children woukd like to have in the schools in relation to budgets.Number crunhing can e difficult for children and communities,.
Petronella
Training communities and children on how to use budgets
Hi Petronella and others,
There have been a number of comments already added to this dialogue that highlight the importance of empowering communities with the tools to monitor budgets - budget analysis, etc. Humphrey commented that he sees great opportunities in training CBO (Community Based Organizations) to do this work. Warren commented that depending on the approach to monitoring budgets, there is potential to involved large numbers of citizens. Warren writes, "Those methods that are geared to monitor budget implementation - as opposed to monitoring policies - have the most significant potential for this. This is an important opportunity to break the exclusive nature of budgets and budget analysis skills and draws on te power of communities to use thier connections to service delivery."
Petronella, is your work training communities and children on monitoring budgets focused on methods geared to monitor budget implementation, as opposed to monitoring policies?
I was very encouraged to read that you are working to train children - this makes me think that even I might be able to learn how do budget analysis! Can you (or anyone in this dialogue) please share more information about how you teach children and communities to carry out budget analysis? How do I do budget analysis?
Thanks!
Kristin Antin, New Tactics Online Community Builder
In my previous job, i worked
In my previous job, i worked closely with the Children's parliament and junoir councillors in speaking on behalf of other children on sissues that affected them at local level -i.e budget allocations for children living in difficult situations.The younger children 6-14 would talk about the basic needs and the absence of these at family and school level whilst those between 16-18 would get to understand the budgetary implications and how these affected the realisation of their rights.Children had an opporunity to listen to the budget presentaion in Parliament and raised questions to the house.
Questions such as, what is missing in your school- textbooks, teachers, etc were used to identify their needs.A 5 day workshop was then planned and the children got to see the real budget documents and the basic analysis -figures was done in relation to a particular sector in this instance, it was education and socila protection.The following texts were used as basic reading materials to get the children to understand how they can participate in the process-Working for Child rights from a budget perspective (2007) – detailing experiences form different countries and Children and young people in action – participating in budget work (2005) – which is specific to Latin American experience.Number crunching remains a challenge for the children but if they do grasp the concept, they get t speak on the ridiculous fee increases as well as the absence of social parks, teachers, resource books and playrounds in their c schools and ommunities.
Yes, basically the training seeks to gear children and communities to monitor budgets through Citizen Scorecards than policies.On the other hand, the SADC Budget Network which Idasa 's Economic Governance Project coordinates seeks to develop partner capacities to monitor budgets for policy advocacy. The RTE, RTK project also seeks to develop /enhace capacities in budget work- monitoring policy implications as well as the budget trends at national level for policy related advocacy.Women , particularly the poor are also left out in the budget process and need to be effectively capacitated to monitor budgets so that their voices can be heard in school governace as well as at national level.
Petronella
Working with youth to educate them on budgets & monitoring
This is amazing, Petronella! What a great initiative. I have heard of organizations working with youth to train and educate them on rights and democracy (such as a tactic in our database from the Palestinian Territory - Developing youth parliaments to teach youth about the democratic process) but I haven't heard of anyone training youth on monitoring budgets! How wonderful to already begin building a toolkit for future advocates / activists to hold their government accountable!
Has this organization developed any cirriculum resources to share?
Have others participating in this dialogue worked with youth to educate and train them on budget analysis?
Thanks for sharing this great tactic, Petronella!
Kristin Antin, New Tactics Online Community Builder
INESC´s ground breaking work with schools...
During the last five years, INESC has developed a methodology of promoting access to human rights and incorporating them concretely into public polices and the allocation of public resources. In one of their projects, INESC aimed at introducing human rights and public budgets into school curricula. The six participating schools were selected based on their levels of social exclusion, teenage violence, drug abuse, and drug dealing within school facilities as well as low academic performance.
The main goal of the project was to ensure that children and teenagers would be empowered to engage meaningfully with the budgets and policies that were affecting them. INESC organized workshops based on the principles of popular and art education, in which participation was vital to developing new knowledge, awareness, and the sensibility needed for social transformation. Through this playful approach, combining art and communication, participants were introduced to deeper concepts and discussions on human rights, budget formulation, budget monitoring, and democratic participation.
In addition to the school programs, INESC encouraged the scholars participating to attend other political spaces where public budget debates were taking place, such as city councils and the federal legislature. They were also encouraged to join children and teenage advocacy networks, enabling them to exercise the knowledge gained in the course of the project. A key success of the project was when, in 2009, those participating in the project met with law makers and public managers on the Federal District education budget. The children and teenagers, after conducting budget analysis, proposed a budget amendment for approximately one million US dollars. The amendment was passed, and funds were allocated to build sports courts and renovate schools. Through the use of solid evidence complemented by advocacy from the children themselves, law makers and public managers took their input seriously when finalizing the Federal District education budget.
A video of the students explaining the INESC's project
This is amazing! Thanks, Helena for sharing this. On the INESC website I found this video put together by the students themselves explaining the budget analysis project:
This video, titled 'Active youth - youngsters learning to fight for their rights' explains the INESC project with youth. One student says: "We have the right to quality education but we are not getting it." They learn about their rights, but they also learn tools to fight for their rights! They also study human rights from a public budget perspective.
The students also have interaction with their community and other communities - and even communities from other countries! Seven schools and more than 300 students in Brazil have been reached by this project. They are being invited by other schools to share what they have learned.
One student explains: "When teenagers understand their rights in general, they understand other rights, budgets, the ECA, the Statute of the Child and Adolescent. It is easier for them to demand what they should be receiving." The students were even contacted from four African countries! The teacher explains: "This is an educational process that can easily be taken to other schools or other areas. The kids have already spread their knowledge into other areas for the benefit of the school."
Let's put this in every school!
Kristin Antin, New Tactics Online Community Builder
Budgeting - local and central government issues
I would like to share here a comment made by a participant in our "Building Human Rights Cities" dialogue where the issue of budgeting was also raised as a challenging area for public participation. The comment by Raymond highlights the great potential for citizen participation in the budget process at the local level of city government while still drawing attention to the need for both local and national level action, cooperation and accountability. I'm interested to hear people's reactions to these points raised by Raymond.
Budgeting - Local and central government issues
Submitted by atuguba
Dear all,
Briefly, the local government in Ghana is to control 7.5% of all national revenue. This is to be distributed to all the 136 districts in the country. Given that about 50% of our revenue is used to service debts, foreign and domestic, this percentage is a huge proportion of what remains for government.
Local engagement with the budget in the cities is crucial. But even more crucial are the following in our experience in the cities:
In our experience, action at the local level is great, but with weak national institutions, action at the national level is crucial.
Raymond
Nancy Pearson, New Tactics in Human Rights Program Manager
Tools to use budgets
Thanks to Warren Krafchik for highlighting some great resources in his comment - Tools to use budgets to monitor human rights I found the document he cited, Dignity Counts: A guide to using budget analysis to advance human rights created by Fundar – Centro de Análisis e Investigación, International Budget Project, and International Human Rights Internship Program (2004) especially helpful in providing the human rights framework for how to use budgets.
For example the resources shares:
In any country, no matter how rich or poor, there are insufficient resources available to meet all existing needs; this is a central assumption of budget analysis.
The power that budgets provide organizations with was shared in this way:
An ability to engage in the budget process can help human rights organizations in several ways, including:
This resource document (pages 21 and 22) provided two excellent examples to help organizations analyze and develop their human rights rational regarding:
the Aspect of right --- the government's Obligation to Respect the right --- the government's Obligation to protect the right --- the government's Obligation to fulfill the right. And then identifying concrete aspects regarding the government's Obligation of conduct and its Obligation of result.
I especially like this catchy - "budget-friendly" slogan: Human rights + budget analysis = POWER!
I'm looking forward to learning about more of these great tools that have been developed by organizations using budgets to advance human rights!
Nancy Pearson, New Tactics in Human Rights Program Manager
Need to include public finance at university level courses
I have felt that the tertiary education in areas such as public health, community medicine, social work and development studies do not teach public finance as part of the course curriculum. Most of the public finance and budget analysis is taught to economics graduates and so people from other streams of development studies are left out and manage to get themselves trained only when they start working in a policy research organisation. Since the last few years some of the newspapers such as Economic Times have initiated budget analysis for MBA students with finance and quantitative backgrounds however these initiatives tend to focus only on interest areas of the corporate sector. There is need for some competition supported by organisations such as New Tactics to get the students of development sector-related areas to conduct budget analysis, say for sectors such as education, health, social services etc.
denny john
Developing capacity and understanding of the budget process
Dear Denny,
You raise a critical point - truly every field of study would greatly benefit from building a basic capacity and understanding of the budget process. As a social worker, I can attest that this area of education has been sorely neglected in my own field. Wouldn't it be wonderful if this information was actually taught at the high school level as part of civic and citizen participation!
Knowledge of the stages of the budget process is particularly important for knowing WHEN to take action. For example, if a group is interested to change policy, the best time to advocate for policy change in the budget is during budget formulation. This is the time when information is being collated and prioritized into the budget document. I found the information provided in the tactical notebook, Using Government Budgets as a Monitoring Tool, very helpful for thinking about the budget process but also made me think of different actions - tactical possibilities - to participate in each stage of the process.
The budgeting process includes the following steps (see page 15 in the tactical notebook):
Do people agree with the kinds of tactics I'm suggesting here for these phases? What other tactics have you been able to use or have learned about from others that have been effective in these different phases of the budget process?
Nancy Pearson, New Tactics in Human Rights Program Manager
Using video & humor to get your message out
Hello budget practitioners,
We are now in the middle of our 'Tactics that Tickle' dialogue and I wanted to share a great example of how video and humor can be used to educate and mobilize your audience.
The Aids and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa (ARASA) presents this video begging the question: where is the money for health? We face an epidemic of extravagance, a crisis of priorities with 2 million avoidable deaths from HIV and TB in Sub-Saharan Africa every year. This is a tragedy of deadly inaction.
Enjoy!
Kristin Antin, New Tactics Online Community Builder
Challenges, successes, and opportunities
Please consider the following questions to discuss beneath this theme:
transparency international and budget monitoring
I was looking at the TI websie and it seems as if the African and Latin American chapters in particular have done some good work with monitoring in terms of health and education budgets in particular. They are focused on the issue of corruption and its link to poverty. Has anyone in this dialogue done any work of this nature with TI?
http://www.transparency.org/regional_pages/africa_middle_east/sub_saharan_africa/national_chapters
Susan Atwood, Instructor, University of Minnesota’s Leadership : Leadership for Global Citizenship.
transparency international and budget monitoring
Susan
Idasa's Economic Governance Programme and the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability in Africa (ANSA-Africa) has done some work. In Idasa we have done some review work on education budgets in particular. The IBP has recently released a good guide titled, "Reading the books: Governments' budgets and the right to education" that explores monitoring Goverment's commitment to the right to education. There are other work under the Commonwealth Education Fund, which was not from a rights-based perspective but still very informative. The ANSA-Africa network is now engaging with TI Headquarters and their country Chapters in Africa on a future collaboration on our work on broader service delivery monitoring through various tools like budget monitoring. The focus is not rights-based but particularly in addressing the issues of corruption, poverty and broader improvement of governance in service delivery. I will keep you posted on these developments.
Mario Claasen, Idasa, South Africa
Right to education budget work
Just following on from a number of posts addressing education budgets, the Right to Education Project website also contains valuable information on 'Budgets and Education Financing'. This can be located at:
http://www.right-to-education.org/node/9
Topics covered include:
Understanding budgets
Working at the local level
Linking national and local level work
Work at the national level
Understanding international constraints on the national budget
Peoples Report Cards
Some NGOs in India such as Janaagraha in Bangalore have worked on People's Report Cards which has made some contribution in accessing budgetary allocations and quality of services. This could be one of the ways to ensure monitoring of human rights through a budgetary allocation perspective.
Another rigorous methodology would be to look at Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys (PETS) since budgetary analysis tend to leave out the allocative expenditure aspect. Sri Lanka is a good example where even with a lower allocation of public budgets on health health indicators vis-a-vis per dollar is better than compared to developed countries such as USA. The fact is that "higher budget allocation" does not always mean "better health indicators". However, there is need of training for NGOs and CBOs to conduct this exercise.
The challenges that remain is to link budgetary allocations vis-a-vis community need, for e.g. burden of diseases. In India the allocation of budgets for states follows the Gadgil's formula and is based on population estimates. Drawback of such is that a state with worse-off health indicator (e.g. maternal health) will receive in some cases less budget since it has a smaller population compared to a state with a good health indicator but with a large population.
denny john
The Peoples Budget
As i was commenting during the dilogue its very clear from my perspective that NGOs and CBOs have very great oppotunities in realization of Human Rights through Advocacy on Budget, As an organization this is what we have been doing for the last three years, if we take a case of what most of the NGOs are doing to address poverty eradication, but dont execute, simpliy becouse the role is to facilitae, this means that the implimenters of whatever has been passed are the CBos becouse they are part of the community or grassroots being addressed and thats why from my belif is that the CBOs are also key players in Monitoring, The other aspect is that they can engege with there political representatives at diffrent level.
Since we started engeging in Budget Monitoring, we have now been recognized by the Ministry of Finance and during Budget thematic group formation we are included as a key actor in giving the grassrooot paspective in regard to the budget, in the other hand the grassroots receive feedbacks freequently on what the Trasury is planing and there priority area in that particular fiscal year.
The only challenge we have been facing is how to generalize the concept of People Budget in a nationawide
Community Organizer
Opportunities: Access to budget information
There is a lot of enthusiasm for the work of MKSS in India and now MUHURI in Kenya. As has been mentioned frequently above, access to budget information is the first and enduring challenge that organizations face in monitoring budgets. Access to information is even weaker at subnational levels of government - where we can learn about the links between budgets and people's lives. Community budget work shows us one powerful way to circumvent access to information concerns - collect your own information. This is a powerful tactic where governments are closed, but also in situations where government is not able to collect its own information. By working with citizens to collect infomation, organizations are able to augment government information and / or challenge existing government information. Social audits are one pwerful mechanism to do this, and there are others, such as service delivery scorecards, expenditure tracking, amongst others. Warren
The use of social audits to collect your own info
Thanks Warren for bringing up the use of community budget work as an opportunity to counter challenges around access to government budgetary information. For those that aren't familiar with 'social audits' (like me), I wanted to share a definition that I found on the Open Budget Index site:
Social audits - a participatory process in which CSOs and communities evaluate the use of public resources and identify how best to improve outcomes of public programs and policies. In addition to analyzing financial information, a social audit looks at the quality of community participation in decision making and how well the projects being assessed serve the needs of the local residents.
This definition came from a document on the impact of the MUHURI example in Kenya. What really stood out to me when I read this example was how MUHURI was able to engage the local MP to participate and even share documents because he was convinced that it would be beneficial to him and his own political campaign. I think he got a lot more than he expected, but it actually did end up helping his campaign because his constituency felt that he was open with them.
Regarding the collection of information, in this example the social audit team was able to start off with some government budgetary documents and from there the team carried out site visits and interviews.
Where would a group start with a social audit if there were no government budgetary documents to start from?
Thanks for the interesting dialogue everyone - I am learning so much about this tactic!
Kristin Antin, New Tactics Online Community Builder
Bio Series
I totaly agree with Warren since we started collecting information on our own in regard to Budget it has proven very efficiently that there is a miss much between what is done in the board rooms vis a vie going to the community and have a one to one dialoge on this the same matter, since then there has been more and more interst by the community to take part in this. Now what we have done as a tact is in collaboration with the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) we have been conducting quoterly Bio forums were commuity and academicians drawn from variuos sector will be invited to share there aspiration in regard with the projection and priorities of the Government in disbursing funds then through the facts then this are shared with the Ministry.
Its from this cahneel that we evetually get access to information from treasury and also get an oppotunity to meet the key parsonalities within the Ministry and share our thoughts.
Community Organizer
Opportunities and Challenges: Constituency Development Funds
The MUHURI video posted above is a wonderful example of how to use communities in monitoring government budgets. It is also an example of a very unfortunate, and growing practice amongst governments to devolve decision-making and allocation authority to members of parliament. In Kenya, parliamentarians are each given $1 million dollars to spend on thier consituencies. This means that they have the power to make allocations, control the spending process, and evaluate this process - a complete violation of the principle of separation fo powers. Unfortunately, similar schemes are operating or under discussion in at least 12 developing countries, including Uganda, and Tanzania. While the schemes differ somewhat between countries, what they have in common is this violation of the separation of powers. Members of parliament should focus on evaluating and monitoring spending. If there is a similar scheme operating or under discussion in your country, please contact the International Budget Partnership. We can share with you some of the forthcoming research and thinking in this area. Warren .
Strategy, strategy, strategy
Despite being excluded from budget processes for a very long time, civil society has rather quickly developed analytical skills accross a broad range of countries to add value to the budget process. Civil society interventions have proven that an independent voice speaking to the concerns of poor and marginlized communities brings a valuable perspective to budget discussions and can improve both processes and outcomes. This is a lot to achieve in ten years!
But, the challenge we face is now to push this boundary further. If the challenge over the past ten years was: Can civil society add value to budget processes. The question for the next period is: How can civil society engage effectively in changing budget processes, policies and outcomes. The challenge is to use our applied analytical skills to effect change in budget processes, institutions, and outcomes.
To meet this challenge, civil society organizations engaged in budget work will need to improve thier strategic planning. There is some wonderful work being done around the world, but to much budget work focuses on outputs - that is producing an analysis, a hearing, a report. To get beyond this, our organizations need to think about our desired outcomes first and then track back carefully to determine what activities and partnerships will help us to get to these outcomes. This is hard to do and the nature of our fundraising and the practices of many donors militate against this - but, somehow we have to rise above these constraints and focus on the big picture.
Monitoring and evaluation is part of this challenge. It is unlikely that our overall outcomes will be achieved quickly or exactly as we expected. In the vast majority of cases, we will need to evaluate our efforts and adjust our strategies to get there. This requires that organizations dedicate time and resources to carefully detailing thier strategies and continously evaluate and learn from these experiences - and adjust whenever necessary. Of course, this is relevant for any CSO, but sometimes the technicalities of budget work are all-consuming and become an end in themselves.
One other related point. Good anlysis can generate the information needed for social change. But, it is relationships that lead to actual change. It is our organizations relationships with the executive, the legislature, the media - and above all else, with other civil society organizations that are paramount. Again, an achilles heal of budget work is that the analytical effort consumes all. All of that effort might be worthless, unless you have the relationships to make that analysis and information work for your cause. Again, this is true for any organization, but there is an additional hurdle in applied budget work - the subject matter is assumed to be boring! So, as you develop skills in analysis, make an equal amount of time available to learn skills in communicating about the importance and relevance budget issues - and use these skills to build the relationships you will need to use budget analysis to change people's lives. Warren
International opportunties
Most of the comments and discusions on this dialogue have focused quite rightly on working at the country level. This is clearly the priority and the ultimate aim of our efforts. Neverthless, there has been vitually no discussion of the international opportunities to promote and pressure for greater country level change. There is a great degree of agreement amongst all of us about the benefits to social change broadly - and human rights in particular - from open and participatory budget processes. Our views are shared by many large and powerful international NGOs and coalitions. We have yet to tap into large social movements, such as faith-based organizations and trade-unions - there is significant unexplored potential here. But, my sense is that the call for open budgeting is also increasingly shared by several international donor organizations - often for reasons concerned primarily with the accountability of aid funds. We know that parliamentarians around the world and auditors-general also share these concerns - closed budget processes make thier oversight functions impossible. This implies to me that there is an enormous opportunity right now to work together accross diverse institutions towards a set of transparency and particiaption aims tht can serve as preconditions for deeper work on achieving human rights. If you see some sense of optimism in this assessment, how might we exploit this advantage while it exists - what can we do with it to place even greater pressure on recalcitrant and closed governments? Warren
QUB Budget Analysis Project launches two documents
The QUB Budget Analysis Project is delighted to announce the launch of two documents:
The first of these documents identifies the human rights issues that are relevant to the development of an economic and social rights-based budget analysis methodology. It details the various analytical frameworks that have been employed by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and others to categorise ESR obligations, linking these to budgetary decisions and processes. As such, it constitutes a key resource for those who wish to analyse budget decision-making using the international economic and social rights framework.
The second document is a review of a selection of existing guidance and case studies on economic and social rights (ESR) budget analysis. While the initial purpose of the document was to inform the development of the QUB Budget Analysis project’s work, it also serves as an overview of previous work in the field for all those interested in ESR budget analysis. Amongst other things, the report authors seek to draw out lessons, based on the examples considered, for those seeking to carry out such budget analysis.
The documents are available at:
http://www.law.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofLaw/Research/HumanRightsCentre/ResearchProjects/BudgetAnalysis/Documents/
Kristin Antin, New Tactics Online Community Builder
Determining Who is Responsible for What in ESR Budget Decisions
A key issue that we have found in our work in Northern Ireland (and one that will certainly be familiar to people attempting to carry out work in a federal or other multi-level government context) is that, while we seek to provide research that can be used for advocacy directed at state bodies at the local/regional level, much of the decision-making with regard to ESR-related budgetary allocation is made at a national level. Not only is the funding of ESR services frequently defined/limited by the resources allocated to the NI political bodies from UK central government, but a number of key ESR-related policy areas and functions do not come within the exclusive authority of the NI political bodies (for instance, the definition of the social security regime). As a result, in formulating recommendations directed at regional state agencies/bodies, we have had to be careful to address the arguments of such bodies that the determination of the level of resources available to them falls outside their control and that their hands are tied by the constraints imposed upon them by Central Government. This has required us to consider carefully the question of the identification of duty-bearers and the issue of the employment of maximum available resources at different levels within a multi-level government system.
I would be interested in hearing how others have addressed these issues in their work.
Tools to use budgets to monitor huan rights
Civil society oranization around theworld have been working since the early 1990s to develop expertise and impact in monitoring budgets. There have always been a strong contingent of human rights organizations at the core of this community. One of the pioneering orgaizations in the field is Fundar in Mexico (www.Fundar.org.za). The following case study, produced by Fundar, the International Budget Partnership and the International Human Rights Internship Project profiles an example and methodology of using budgets to monitor the right to Health in Mexico http://www.iie.org/IHRIP/Dignity_Counts.pdf Recently, this same partnership of organizations, together with UNFAO, released a bookof four case studies and methods focussing on budgets and the Right to Food ( http://www.fao.org/righttofood/publi09/budget_guide_en.pdf )
Warren
Fundar's work in Mexico... and others
Thank you Warren, for mentioning the case of Fundar in Mexico. (Fellow dialoguers, please note that the web address is www.fundar.org.mx). Fundar has been working for over almost ten years now in evaluating the compliance of the government with a series of components of the Right to Health through budget analysis, using very diverse tools and methods. They have worked with partners at the subnational and local level to evaluate maternal health, tracked medicines and expenditures for HIV/AIDS, and analyzed the equitable access to health services for poor communities through the Popular Insurance Scheme, among others.
Last year, together with Sonora Ciudadana, they brought a case to the Supreme Court arguing discrimination in access to health care for public servants, due to pre-existing conditions. The argument of the state of Sonora was that there are not enough financial resources to take care of public servants who have a pre-existing condition, such as diabetes or hypertension. THe Supreme Court ruled against the state. Sonora Ciudadana plans to follow up by taking more cases to the Supreme Court, so as to achieve a general ruling, at the same time of organizing committees of people affected by this discriminatory clause to "follow the money".
Successes and challenges
I want to continue this thread about about stories of success and the challenges that were ovecome in the process. A couple of years ago, the IBP together with the Institute for DEvelopment Studies at Sussex University undertook 6 case studies of budget-focused groups that had been working for more than 6 years in the area. Some of these are human rights-based groups, such as Fundar in Mexico, and IBASE in Brazil. Others had missions related to democratization in South Africa (IDASA) or poverty in Uganda (Uganda Debt Network). But, I think many of the strategies for successful are applicable and adaptable accross a range of countries and organizations. So, I am posting here a link here to short and long versions of these case studies. http://www.internationalbudget.org/casestudies.htm The point I like to make about these examples is that budget monitoring can be undertaken successfully by a wide range of organizations in diverse countries - there are many tools, so groups can adapt them to thier organization and country context. At the end of the case study process, we wrote a number of synthesis papers. This one is written for practitioners in civil society and talks to internal and external strategies for success. By the way, all these papers are available in multiple languages. http://www.internationalbudget.org/PractitionersGuide.pdf
Warren
Involving citizens
Different approaches to monitoring budgets have different potential to involve large numbers of citizens. Those methods that are geared to monitor budget implementation - as opposed to monitoring policies - have the most significant potential for ths. This is an important opportunity to break the exclusive nature of budgets and budget analysis skills and draws on te power of communities to use thier connections to service delivery. The following guide produced by the International Budget Partnership provide 12 case studies of organizations and methods to monitor budget implementation, including expenditure tracking, monitoring procurement, citizen report cards and many others. http://www.internationalbudget.org/resources/expenditure/index.htm
Warren
Citizen's access to budget information through ICTs
Thank you Warren from raising the point on involving citizens and the need to go beyond simply monitoring to active engagement of citizens in determining budget priorities. In Kenya, Budget information has become an important tool for empowering citizens in enforcing accountability and creating change in Kenya. One of the positive aspects of the 2007 General elections in Kenya was the use of Constituency Development Fund as a means of measuring performance of Parliamentarians. To this end, over 70% of members of parliament lost their seats.
Several civil society organizations such as the National Tax Association have been actively involved in developing citizen’s report cards http://www.nta.or.ke/nta-reports (that includes images) as a means of providing citizens with evidence based engagement with leaders, especially in the resource allocation. Budget information has often not been accessible due to either lack of capacity of government to provide such information or due to the lack of access to information laws.
An NTA scorecard for one of the constituency in Kenya layered on Google maps by SODNET & Upande
The INFONET Program of SODNET leveraged on existing technology and developed a mesh-up of SMS, Google Maps and Open Street Maps to create a budget tracking and information tool (www.opengovernance.info) (See also www.informationactivism.org tactic number 9).
The tool currently enables citizen’s (Community Based Organizations and Non-Governmental Organizations) access budget information, especially on the Constituency Development Fund.
While SMS has its limitations, citizens have been able to have a basis of accessing budget information for engaging with local leaders. The success of the tool can be summarized as having been able to move individual citizen’s to act and raise questions to members of parliament and Constituency Development Funds committees.
Sample SMS response on education budget information
In one of the largest slums in Kenya the Kenya Community Development Agenda (KCODA) as one of these groups has been able to use to the Kibera Journal, a newspaper that they public to inform citizens on budgets. In the same area Pamoja FM, a community radio station further provides development content, especially during the local budget process. Such content is not a priority to mainstream media.
Open Street Maps (OSM) partnered with SODNET and KCODA to develop a MAP (www.mapkibera.org) of the slum area as a means of providing demand information to policy makers and service providers, including development partners and United Nations in rethinking their resource allocation strategies. The OSM methodology involves citizens in creating the maps and layering it with information that is of relevant to them. These tools are currently facilitate discussions among local administration, NGOs, Community Based Organizations, entrepreneurs in developing budget priorities for the area.
Location based information provided by SMS or Maps that are then disseminated through the web, community radio and print at the community level are tool that could creatively involve citizen’s in use of budget information as a monitoring tool.
In Asia, we are aware of the Philippines National Social Watch Coalition utilizes alternative budget report as a tool for empowering citizens, academia, civil society and leaders to engage in monitoring of the official budget. Please visit http://www.socialwatchphilippines.org/abi.htm for more information.
Philip Thigo, SODNET, Kenya
tks - you are right.
tks - you are right. Bringing development closer to the people through decentralization can improve community empowerment, service delivery, and accountability. The problem with the Kenya CDFs is that this happens at the expense of the separation of powers. MPs act as decision-mkaer and overseers of the public purse. So, how can a government bring community development closer to the community without violating the separation of powers? MPs should specialize in holding government accountable on behalf of thier constituents, not replacing the functions of government. Warren
Government best practice: GEObras, MT, Brazil.
I heard about this while in Mozambique. The Tribunal de Contas, Audit Institution of the state of Mato Grosso, in Brazil, has made great strides in making information available to the public.
The site GEObras, making infrastructure project information extremely available, has become a reference in Brazil. (Unfortunately the interface does not exist in English.) But you can get an idea - you can search infrastructure project by status (completed, started, and paralyzed.) Each project has a space for photos, tender documents, and a link to the exact site of the project on Google Maps. There is a form for citizens to denounce irregularities or make queries, and attach files such as photos.
Basically, it appears that the Audit Institution is opening up its own tools to the public, in an attempt to "crowdsource" infrastructure monitoring. On first glance, it is hard to see where citizens have contributed or commented - photos appear to be mostly by civil servants, but it's a good first step. I think it would be important to highlight best practices by governments too!
http://geoobras.tce.mt.gov.br/Cidadao/
Hurray for good government practices
Janet,
Thank you so much for sharing this great example form Brazil. You are absolutely right, it is very important to show examples where government is taking action in the directions that not only inform civil society but encourage their active participation in taking a role in ensuring services.
I'd like to share an example from our New Tactics database that comes from Korea that also provides a great example of using technology for creating better access of information. The city government in Seoul, South Korea, created an online database to increase government transparency allowing city residents to monitor civil applications. Before the development of the Procedures Enhancement for Civil Applications (OPEN) System, applicants for government permits, such as building permits or other licenses, were not able to understand how their application was being processed - allowing corrupt government officials to demand a bribe to move the application forward. OPEN provides details on the status of applications made regarding 70 municipal government tasks identified as most prone to corruption, including housing and construction projects, environmental regulation and urban planning.
These kinds of efforts initiated by government to respond to citizen complaints and needs are certainly worth highlighting and sharing with other government officials to let them know its possible and it WORKS!
Do others have any good examples to share?
Nancy Pearson, New Tactics in Human Rights Program Manager
Good government transparency practices
Helena mentioned the Open Budget Index - the 2008 results were resleased in February 2009. Depsite the discmal overall performance of governments around the world, the survey also found that 8 governments had substantially improved thier performance on budget transparency between 2006 and 2008. And a further 10 govdernment had improived thier performance in minor, but notable ways. So, increasing national governments - for a variety of reasons - are paying greater attention to budget transparency performance. Improving countries include Kenya, Croatia, Sri Lanka, and others starting from a low base, of course, but showing that it is possible to improve in a relatively short period of time. Moreover, there are governments that score well within every region and the world and income group. There are good performers out there and we should learn carefully about the causes and consequences of thier improvements in the field. And keep the pressure on those that refuse to improve! Warren
Holding up good government practices for incentives
Warren and Helena,
Yes, the Open Budget Initiative and the Open Budget Survey Report 2008 results is a great way for organizations to think about how they might influence their government's budget, spending allotments and transparency. I especially liked the interactive world map for the countries that were rated. What a great educational tool for all ages!
- nancy
Nancy Pearson, New Tactics in Human Rights Program Manager
Canadian experiment
Thanks Krsitin for mentioning the Canadian experiment on pushing the government to announce its draft documents.I wonder is the Canadian governement , which is such a democratic estalishment, would arrest tens of citizens for showing interest in knowing what is going on in their country, my question how would it look like in other largely less democratic spots? Would such countries ruling bodies jail and torture their citizens for such an act?
Ibrahim Omar Elghazawi,PhD
Humphrey Fellow
School of law
University of Minnesota
Canadian experiment
sorry to be coming into this discussion so late in the game. Regarding the Canadian example, even with full disclosure at the federal (central) level, the information obtained would not be particularly useful in monitoring ESCR. The reason is that health care and education for example, are governed separately by each of the 10 provinces. While the federal government transfers funds to the provinces annually, each province will have its own budget and its own social policy. The degree of transparency also differs from province to province. To complicate matters even more, provincial authorities commonly argue that the federal government is the only one with obligations under the ICESR. Therefore even we had all the information we wanted about provincial budgets, it might not facilitate a human rights analysis.
There are other similar complications related to revenue. Budget work should also require us to study government decisions around generating revenue but certain income opportunities (for example tariffs) are regulated under federal authority.
Carole Samdup, Senior Advisor
Economic and Social Rights
Rights & Democracy
Montreal, Canada
www.dd-rd.ca
Transferability
I am a student at the University of Minnesota and in one of my classes, we are developing a project to address the widespread corruption in Zimbabwe. The idea of distributing an analysis of the government's budget in a form that is more citizen-friendly, as proposed over the course of this thread, is an innovative way of informing people as to the use of public funds and forcing the government to be accountable. However, because there is so much corruption, I wonder what mechanisms are in place to ensure the budget released by the government is accurate? The social audits discussed earlier may be an option, but what resources do citizens have to effectively implement that process? Also, regarding the Canadian example, if a developed country is willing to respond to a protest for information by mass arrests, would the Zimbabwean government respond to an initiative like that described above with even greater violence?
Transferability
Hello Zaynab: I've been reading all the comments and discussion, albeit a bit late. FYI, I was a featured practitioner in a previous dialogue on "Training for Nonviolent Action." http://www.newtactics.org/en/blog/new-tactics/training-nonviolent-action
The following comments are presented generally as food for thought. You raise an important question and in order to address it, perhaps it would be helpful to re-phrase it a bit. Is your underlying question: What can people do, who have grievances such as corruption or are living under oppression, when their government doesn't hesitate to use repression, including violence, to quell protests, for information or for other demands? This question goes to the heart of the nature of power. There are different forms of power. People do have power and they can make their voices heard, even under harsh conditions. Civic power (also called "people power") comes from significant numbers of people organized together around common grievances, demands and objectives. This power can be expressed through nonviolent civic action, which entails the use of nonviolent strategies and tactics. Nonviolent tactics are the methods of nonviolent civic action. Protests are one kind of nonviolent tactic. Tactics aren’t inherently effective or ineffective, or low risk versus medium versus high risk. It depends on the context. See: http://www.newtactics.org/en/blog/new-tactics/training-nonviolent-action#comment-1072 (tactical choice) and http://www.newtactics.org/en/blog/new-tactics/training-nonviolent-action#comment-1050 (dealing with repression).
In other anti-corruption campaigns and movements, when a civic group knew that protests would be met by repression, they created other low-risk actions to exert civic pressure. For example, in 1997, the "One Minute of Darkness for Constant Light" campaign in Turkey mobilized approximately 30 million people in low-risk mass actions, turning off lights for one minute at the same time every night. See: http://www.newtactics.org/en/ACalltoEndCorruption. When the MKSS movement in India got no response to serious hunger strikes over demands for information, they strategized and developed new, creative nonviolent tactics that proved to put pressure on the authorities. See: http://www.newtactics.org/en/RighttoKnow.
Scholars have identified over 200 nonviolent tactics, and most campaigns and movements create new ones. They include varieties of civil disobedience, noncooperation, petitions, vigils, strikes, boycotts, monitoring of authorities and spending (highlighted in this month's dialogue), social networking technologies, blogging, coordinated low-risk mass actions, displays of symbols, creation of independent institutions, social/economic empowerment initiatives, street theatre, songs, humor.
Civic power is wielded through the sustained, strategic application of a variety of these and many other nonviolent tactics that are designed to:
While it may seem paradoxical at first, if one looks back over the past 110 years, it's often the case that people living under difficult situations are the most effective in mobilizing and harnessing civic power, and in using nonviolent tactics to win rights and justice and fight oppression. There are lots of educational resources on this topic (including on this site) and if you are interested, let me know.
Shaazka Beyerle, The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict