Introduction: 
what is budget analysis?

“There is nothing more substantial one can do to influence the government than to engage in the politics of the budget.”  Michael Lipsky, Ford Foundation

The first presentations addressed the link between pro-poor work and budget analysis, with examples of the budget work of Indian NGOs and the growth of the International Budget Project and budget work internationally.

John Samuel, Isaac Shapiro, Mark Robinson and Aurelio Vianna 
on the opening panel

Pro-poor budget analysis:
Budget work means different things, and requires different skills and analysis, depending on context and focus, but in all cases it is essentially about the deepening of democratic institutions.  As Michael Lipsky said, it is the “concrete daily effort to make a connection between institutions of civil society and government.”  It is about the politics of distribution.  In order to find effective ways to debate and contest what our elected representatives do we must know what they do, and that information is held in large part in the budget.  We can find and extract that information and find ways to mobilize people to use it. 

More importantly, budget work is the natural and perfect marriage of grass roots activism and academic research.  Each alone is insufficient to influence policy or change power, so we need to demystify the budget and use it.  We need to understand that it is not a matter of all the money going into poor people’s hands, but the quality and impact of public spending and budget policy. 

The growth of budget work:  
The interest in budget work has been growing from all directions in recent years, as is evident by the number of groups undertaking the work, the number of explicit budget organizations and projects and the number of networks across countries and regions.  

The interesting thing about the work is that it is civil society led, and international institutions are becoming more interested of late.  In the past year connections have been made with multilateral and bilateral institutions as well as international NGOs such as Save the Children, ActionAid and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).  An indicator of the increasing profile of budget work is that in a recent UK Department for International Development (DfID) conference for donors one the two conference days was dedicated to the role of civil society in monitoring public budgets.

One reason for the widespread growth of the work is that it is applicable in many different contexts and stages of democracy.  Work is ongoing at different levels of government from state to local.  Furthermore, the area provides an opportunity for confluence between activism and research – the two essential components of effective advocacy.

Considering the rapid growth of interest in the budget, The Ford Foundation  is funding initiatives with the aim of facilitating that work, providing the context where support is available and duplication avoided to ensure that the energy we each put in to the work has more impact. Or, as John Samuel put it: “being enabling partners in search of making quality budget intervention for transparent and accountable government.”  One initiative towards this goal is the International Budget Project. 

The IBP is part of the US based Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, and runs with three full time and four part time staff.  The Project assists non-governmental organizations and researchers in their efforts both to analyze budget policies and to improve budget processes and institutions. The overarching goal of the project is to make budget systems more responsive to the needs of society and, accordingly, to make these systems more transparent and accountable to the public. The project works primarily with researchers and NGOs in developing countries or new democracies.

The nature of budget work in India: John Samuel, NCAS:  
Civil society activists have been making use of the information held within the budget since 1851, when strategic budget analysis in Bengal strengthened arguments about the provision of primary education. 

The recent movement goes back to the 1990s, and has grown from solid experience in organizing around rights at grassroots level and the need to really focus on change.  Budget analysis followed from the need to influence public policy and the frustration with the official answer that there was no money for provision of basic needs and rights in these communities.

 The work on budgets in India is varied.  At its root the work involves helping people to understand and lose their fear of the budget process and documents, to lose the notion that the budget belongs to experts in Delhi and learn to go beyond law and use the numbers to strengthen their arguments. 

DISHA was one of the first organizations to take up budget analysis as part of their advocacy work. Working in Gujarat with laborers and tribal people they became frustrated with claims that there was no money for food security in the region, so decided to look at the budget in more detail.  Since then the work and expertise has grown and now there is a nation-wide initiative, People’s Bias,  involving 15 groups over 5 states.  

The groups cover the rights of children, women, laborers, tribals and dalits in labor, education, health and also deal with wider issues of globalization and structural adjustment.  The network grew out of a need to synergize this work, and attempts to institutionalize in a non-institutional way, providing a forum and knowledge-based networking initiative.  It includes highly trained economists and grassroots activists, each adding value to the sum of knowledge and experience. 

So, in summary, budget work in India starts from the people, goes into budgets, and then back to people again, adding value to the rights-based, people-centered advocacy efforts at grassroots level.

The policy context for
budget analysis