Research in Focus with Mark Robinson (March 2007)
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In March 2007, ther GSDRC examined the paper ‘Budget Analysis and Policy Advocacy: the Role of Non-governmental Public Action’ with Mark Robinson. Mark was fomerly the team leader at the Institute of Development Studies, but since this interview has moved to the Department for International Development (DFID). To listen to this interview, please click here. |
 Mark Robinson |
GSDRC:
The document is really interesting and encompasses many dimensions of development– perhaps you could tell me how this project of looking into budget analysis started and provide a brief outline.
Mark:
The document examines non governmental public action with the broad goals of improving the accountability of government decision makers in formulating public budgets but, in the process, contributing to the reduction of corruption in terms of misappropriation of funds, and also broadening the base of democracy. So whilst this might seem like it is a narrow technical subject it actually has much broader implications and they are broader because the set of organisations now set across 40 countries in the world have been using tools of budget analysis to scrutinise public expenditure decision, and decisions of revenue raising to improve transparency of the budget process. This in turn contributes to ensuring that priorities are geared towards the poor and disadvantaged. Therefore part of the project is concerned with ensuring that the budget is spent on what it should be spent on and secondly that the priorities fall to those which are most developmentally significant.
GSDRC:
The paper examines six case studies, and one that struck me as being interesting was Fundar, particularly when they managed to attain a ten fold increase in a budgetary allocation for a national programme designed to combat maternal mortality. Perhaps you could tell us a little more about this example and why you believe it was successful.
Mark:
The project set out to examine what we have really learned about the impact of the work of six leading budget groups. Fundar is one of these; it has been around for about 5 years and specialises in policy research and advocacy using budget analysis as one of its key tools. This example is one of the important success stories in terms of impacting on government budgets for key priority areas; in this case emergency obstetric care for woman in indigenous dominated areas in southern states of Mexico where rates of maternal mortality are extremely high in comparison to the rest of the country. Fundar formed a network group with feminist groups, other civil society activist organisations and used the tools of budget analysis to show how the government was not devoting sufficient resources to tackling this problem.
They first of all campaigned to show that insufficient money was being allocated in the federal budget. They succeeded in achieving a 10 fold increase in programmatic resources but the problem then arose that since Mexico is a federal system the funds have to be transferred on through the states. Many of these states are very untransparent in the way they manage government funds including transfers from the centre. So the problem is, even though the allocation has been successfully increased, it has been very difficult to track its utilisation for combating maternal mortality. There is now ongoing work both trying to track how those transfers are spent on emergency care for pregnant woman but also campaigns to improve transparency legislation in those states. So it’s a double edged campaign but quite phenomenal in terms of its leverage; it managed an increase of 6 million to 60 million dollars at national programme level and is one of the key success stories. One of the reasons for its success is that they harnessed the media who significantly to drew attention to the issue. They also worked with the more progressive public officials and Mexican government and built an alliance with them.
GSDRC:
Another case study which offered consistently interesting ideas was the Indian state of Gujarat. The Developing Initiatives for Social and Human Interaction or DISHA as they are known, are involved with expenditure tracking, budget awareness and literacy, transparency and participation in budget process with varying but considerable success. Could you maybe run through some of their activities and how they have impacted budgetary issues in Gujarat?
Mark:
DISHA was born out of social movement; it is a membership based organisation which brings together a very large number of tribal people in the state of Gujarat, landless labour and women that work on the land into unions. It is activist in orientation and about 10 years ago identified the budget as an area for extending its advocacy work by demonstrating that at this time budget allocation for tribal welfare was well below what they should have been: either the money was not being allocated in the first place or it was not being spent in ways that were primarily design to benefit the tribal communities. As a result DISHA developed a two pronged strategy: they mobilised their tribal constituents in demonstrations and campaigns but also used budget analysis to demonstrate to legislators the problem which existed and influenced budget debate and allocation in favour of increased expenditure for tribal welfare.
DISHA is particularly innovative at the local level and monitors what expenditure commitments are made at the local level of a Gujarat state assembly for local development projects. They will inform local officials in local councils that the money has been allocated - sometimes they know about it but have not seen anything in terms of implementation, sometimes they do not know that the allocation has been made. If DISHA get a negative response they write to the minister, who pressurises the local government official to release the funds. It is a very effective way of tracking budget commitments which is another important aspect of budget work – monitoring what happens on the ground is another critical area which DISHA is involved in as well as other groups such as the Uganda debt network.
GSDRC:
The paper overall looks at six case studies, and whilst some of the activities undertaken by each group are quite cultural specific, others overlap considerably. Do you know of other countries that are looking to adopt similar activities and do you have plans for your research to maybe feed into this and also into the wider budget analysis debate.
Mark:
The work we did at IDS was in conjunction with the International Budget Project (IBP) based in Washington DC. The IBP serves as a hub for capacity building initiatives to support groups wishing to get involved with budget work around the world. IBP has been working very closely with the established budget groups like FUNDAR and DISHA drawing on their personnel to train and impart the technical knowledge required to begin to do budget work. Network of 40 organisations now emerged from a core of about 10 organisations and continues to increase – the actual number of organisations known to have been involved in budget work is 100. They are now established all over the place including post conflict environments like Liberia and Sierra Leone, and in former Soviet Central Asia’s Mongolia and China. It is now spreading rapidly and outside this core of large Southern federal states and gaining the attention of others in the non-governmental world as well as international organisations and governments. In terms of the research serving the needs of that community in fact the research set out with the dual objectives to firstly demonstrate the impact of this kind of work objectively through comparative research and secondly by working with the IPP to provide a body of information which in turn would provide guidelines to others learning lessons from this kind of experience. This has contributed to a Practitioners Guide a follow up phase of work has been planned to build up the capacity of groups to monitor much more systematically their own work and how their own work impacts on both budget allocations and capacity building over a two year period.
GSDRC:
Finally based on your findings what do you believe are the implications, if any, for the way donors will support civil society organisations in future budget advocacy work?
Mark:
There are some very important budget implications however one caveat to bear in mind is that the increasing donor interest in this work meant that it could be narrowly interpreted as simply a good mechanism to improve public expenditure management but as this body of work shows, budget analysis goes far further in that it brings equity as well as transparency. There are many ways donors are seeking to support this work. DFID and other donors are supporting granting mechanism which is administered by the IBP with the purpose of providing resources to new groups who wish to learn about budget work. Budget work on the whole has largely been promoted by private foundations such as the Ford foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and the Open Society Institute who have seen the potential in budget work and have supported it in the last 10 years. More recently multilaterals and bilaterals like DFID and the World Bank are now becoming increasingly more involved, and part of what we are planning on doing is writing a short briefing to communicate the results of the research to the donor community. In terms of how they might respond – one response might be direct support through grant support, as with many NGOS there are issues to do with core funding to sustain activities. As importantly though are donors offering support to create a more enabling environment for budget work. The IBP have recently sought to document budget transparency around the world and this combined with the other advocacy and analysis work could be used for donors to influence governments in improving the openness and transparency of the budget process.
