Public Sector Governance and Accountability Series: Budgeting and ...

134 Alta Fölscher
Conclusion
The introduction of new rules for budget processes and methods does not
automatically mean that they will be applied in a meaningful way. Experience
has shown that overcoming deeply entrenched incremental institutions and
their associated patterns of behavior is an arduous task. Budget systems of
developing countries are littered with the remnants of earlier efforts to
introduce new techniques into the system. The debris of earlier failed
attempts often impedes new reform initiatives, because target audiences are
already familiar both with the terminology used and with the likelihood that
no real change either is required or will result. This is no wonder. The effectiveness
of budgeting rules depends on their credibility. Their credibility
depends on several preconditions, including a capable and committed
ministry of finance, political support, and the presence of complementary
reforms (or at least the absence of competing nonbudget public administrative
reform initiatives).
It is therefore important to understand that budgetary reforms do not
by themselves change the fundamentally political nature of budgeting; they
will not turn the budget process into a controlled, sequenced, and rational
process. Budget processes are inevitably messy: the hope in the introduction
of new techniques is not to completely sanitize these processes, but rather to
minimize dysfunction and maximize the extent to which rational links are
made between past performance, future objectives, policies, allocation of
resources, and future required performance. Budgeting practice, as it has
evolved over the past few decades, has sought a balance between the costs of
incremental budgets and the improbability of achieving comprehensive,
pure rationality.
Note
1. This section draws on Fölscher and Schoch (2005).
References
Campos, Ed, and Sanjay Pradhan. 1996. “Budgetary Institutions and Expenditure
Outcomes: Binding Governments to Fiscal Performance.” Policy Research Working
Paper 1646, World Bank, Washington, DC.
Dean, Peter N. 1989. Government Budgeting in Developing Countries. London: Routledge.
Fölscher, Alta, and Michelle Schoch. 2005.“Multi-Year Budgeting.”In CABRI 2004 Budget
Reform Seminar: Overview and Summary of Discussions. Pretoria: Collaborative
Africa Budget Reform Initiative.