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POLICY INSIGHT
BEYOND THE NUMBERS

Guardian Hails IBP Paper

| By CBPP

The Guardian picked the International Budget Partnership’s (IBP) paper chronicling its efforts to expand budget transparency as one of the newspaper’s top five publications of 2013 on transparency.  IBP is an organization within the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that works with civil society to improve governance and budget systems and reduce poverty worldwide.

In September 2011, IBP and civil society partners in 10 countries with limited transparency, as judged by IBP’s Open Budget Survey, launched an advocacy initiative to increase the amount of budget information the countries made available to the public.  In six of the countries, governments began publishing new budget documents, which will enable citizens and others to monitor government spending for the first time.

The paper that the Guardian heralded, “Getting a Seat at the Table: Civil Society Advocacy for Budget Transparency in ‘Untransparent’ Countries,” documented IBP partners’ experiences through the initiative.  The paper concludes that:

These advocacy projects have had a nuanced but overall positive impact on budget transparency practices in the 10 countries where the project was implemented. Overall, this result is impressive given that the partner organizations operated in contexts with persistent barriers to improvements in budget transparency and adverse governance environments.

Click here to read more about IBP’s work around the world.

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