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

Budgeting in Postconflict Countries 439
investments. In turn, the issue of implementation capacity cannot be
intelligently debated without explicit consideration of the quality of
governance. In the absence of strong public accountability, government
decision makers can channel public resources and aid to projects that
maximize their private gain. These projects, in fact, do tend to be the large
projects that often cluster around the middle of an input-output matrix. The
objective of good project implementation for development then becomes
wholly secondary to the exploitation of the rent-producing potential of the
project. As a former minister of planning of an African country—now
“under new management”—once frankly told the author: “We don’t care
about the quality of implementation or the future recurrent costs; for us, the
project has served its purpose when all the contracts have been privately
negotiated.” This attitude is one more reason that rebuilding stable and
accountable governance is next only to restoring security as the primary
challenge in postconflict countries.
The Need for Investment Programming
Connecting the previously mentioned conceptual perspective to the budget
process helps explain why the need for programming public investment is,
if anything, even stronger in postconflict settings than in stable developing
countries. Without integrity and realism in investment programming, the
difference between balanced- and unbalanced-growth strategies reduces to
the distinction between facilitating a lot of corruption within a brief period
of time or allowing the same amount of corruption spread out over a period
of years. Thus, particularly in the fluid postconflict situations, public investment
programming is needed not only on grounds of fiscal responsibility or
efficiency, but even more as a way to shed light on the investment decisions
of the postconflict government. In the absence of robust procedures for
investment choices,“strategic” projects risk becoming those with the largest
rent-seeking potential.
Naturally, as discussed in chapter 8, the need is for an affordable and
rigorous programming process, not the wish list public investment “programs”
all too common in Africa and elsewhere in the 1980s. Also, given the
data and capacity limitations typical of postconflict situations, the investment
program should be as simple, selective, and realistic as possible.
Indeed, investment programming in postconflict countries can be robust
and effective only if it is focused and simple. In answer to the question posed
at the start of this section, in a postconflict setting, robust investment criteria
and accountable governance give validity to the otherwise weak notion of