You might be aware that the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals are currently under negotiation, and I would wager that many of our members are focused on influencing the content of the future health goal – currently worded as “ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing”.But what if we also tried to influence the rules of the budgeting process, trying to achieve greater transparency and public participation? In our last newsletter, we updated our readers about the International Budget Partnership’s (IBP) bid to include goals and targets around budget transparency and participation in the post-2015 framework.The IBP’s argument is that greater budget transparency and participation can translate to more social spending, including in health. That sounds familiar: in a recent AHBN meeting with health budget advocacy organisations in Burkina Faso, many expressed the view that limited budget transparency really hampered their advocacy efforts for more and better health spending. Furthermore, budget transparency will enable the monitoring of government commitments to meeting the SDGs from the beginning.Negotiations for the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals is not the only forum where civil society is pushing for greater budget transparency and participation. Governments, multilaterals, CSOs and the private sector are also currently trying to work out how to reform financial flows that affect development. These flows include domestic public and private resources, international private funds, international trade, external financial aid and technical assistance, and external debt.Negotiations around the reforms required will culminate in a position paper adopted at the Third International Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa on 13-16 July 2015. In the meantime, leaders of this process have published an Elements paper that outlines the basis for negotiations. Civil society organisations, including the International Budget Partnership, have responded to aspects of the Elements paper they are concerned with. Encouragingly, there are 6 proposed areas around budget transparency, participation and gender-responsiveness:
- Encourage the publishing on budget breakdowns according to expenditures allocated to tackling the SDGs
- Meet the standards in the revised Fiscal Transparency Code of the International Monetary Fund
- Create appropriate mechanisms for public participation in budgeting
- Encourage countries to join the Open Government Partnership
- Adopt gender-responsive budgets at all levels
- Meet robust transparency standards on all revenue raising measures
You can find the CSO response to each of these policy proposals on pages 15-17 of the CSO response paper.Curious about budget transparency? Find more information here.Not sure what budget participation involves? Get up to speed by reading this.