Budgeting is historically one of the most important decision-making process in the government domain (Hughes 2003), and in order to make public budgeting more effective people must take part of such process (Hyde 2002). However, actually, governments have maintained the secrecy of their budgetary information and their respective decision-making, involving only a few agents in the process (Khagram, Fung, and De Renzio 2013). Such secrecy has been the subject of much discussion since the adoption of open budgets for improving governance results (Khagram, Fung, and De Renzio 2013, Ling and Roberts 2014, Gaventa and McGee 2013).
According to Denhardt and Denhardt (2007, 25-9), greater discretion, responsiveness, and openness, actually, are on evidence in new public governance, which is based on ‘citizens’ engagement, focus on ‘public interest’, and structured in a ‘democratic citizenship’ environment. In the new public governance model, the management of the public budget allows interaction between government and non-governmental stakeholders, in a network of public, civic, and business institutions. Therefore, it is a key to achieving better social outcomes (Osborne 2006, Holland et al. 2012). Following this line of thinking, we should expect better public organization’s performance in states that have mature governance initiatives, such as the open budget perspective (Ling and Roberts 2014).
Although the recent interest in the open budget approach from public administration scholars, the extent on how budget contributes to reducing poverty, and, consequently, to achieving social development outcomes remains unclear to date (Khagram, Fung, and De Renzio 2013, Ling and Roberts 2014, Gaventa and McGee 2013). Considering this a window of opportunity for contributing to this theoretical and practice gap, the overall aim of this paper is to propose an governance framework from a open perspective for starting the debate on the importance of collaborative means on the budgetary process.
For so doing, we present a definition of the open budget. Afterward, we develop an open budget framework of governance, as well as propose five theoretical propositions. Finally, we discuss the possibilities of the open budget framework and present considerations about the consequences for public administration theory building and empirical applications.
REFERENCES:
Denhardt, J. V., and Denhardt, R. B. 2007. The new public service: Serving, not steering: ME Sharpe.
Gaventa, J., and McGee, R. 2013. "The impact of transparency and accountability initiatives." Development Policy Review 31 (s1):s3-s28.
Holland, J., Ruedin, L., Scott-Villiers, P., and Sheppard, H. 2012. "Tackling the governance of socially inclusive service delivery." Public Management Review 14 (2):181-196.
Hughes, O. 2003. Public management and administration: an introduction: Palgrave MacMillan.
Khagram, S., Fung, A., and De Renzio, P. 2013. Open budgets: The political economy of transparency, participation, and accountability. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Ling, C., and Roberts, D. K. 2014. Evidence of development impact from institutional change: a review of the evidence on open budgeting. In World Bank Policy Research Working Paper. Washington, DC: WB.
Osborne, S. P. 2006. "The New Public Governance? 1." Public Management Review 8 (3): 377-387.
Key Words: Open Governance; Transparency; Participation; Accountability; Budget Resource
