Legislative Oversight And Budgeting A World Perspective 2008

In most countries, parliament has the constitutional mandate to both oversee and hold government to account. In light of the increased focus on good governance, academics and legislative strengthening practitioners are re-examining parliament's oversight function with a view to increasing public financial accountability, curbing corruption, and contributing to poverty reduction. This volume brings together research from many different perspectives and many different legislative settings worldwide. As the country case studies in section III demonstrate, the accountability mechanisms or oversight tools available to the legislature vary based on constitutionally defined powers of the legislature, institutional arrangements between the branches of government, divisions of authority between national, regional, and local governments, the degree of legitimacy conferred on the legislature, and the resources available to it. The budget process provides critical opportunities. Section II of this volume is devoted to examining budget oversight from the formulation and approval of the budget, to implementation and the ex post examination of the public accounts. Special attention is also paid to mechanisms to assist parliaments such as Public Accounts Committees and independent parliamentary budget offices. This title will be of interest to parliamentarians and parliamentary staff, legislative strengthening practitioners, and students of legislative development.

In January 2011, parliament was restored in Myanmar after two decades of military rule. Startlingly, it began to repeal obsolete laws, scrutinize government expenditures, summon ministers to the floor, and discuss the state's annual budget. It also allowed its elected representatives to make public the grievances collected from constituents infuriated at enduring practices of land confiscation, petty corruption, and everyday abuses of power. Yet ten years later in February 2021, parliament was shut down, again, by a coup d'état. What has been learned in the span of a decade of post-junta parliamentary resurgence? How could an elected legislature resurface - and function - in a country that had only limited experience with parliamentary affairs and representative politics since its independence from British rule? What lessons can be drawn from the Myanmar case for parliamentary institution-building and legislative developments (and decay) in post-authoritarian and praetorian contexts? This book offers a compelling account of Myanmar's halting efforts to develop the institutional framework and practice of a parliament-based democratic governance between 2011 and 2021. It charts the stages of such a legislative resurgence, tracing its causes, and exploring how various institutional and political legacies both informed and constrained the re-establishment and operations of the Union legislature, or Pyidaungsu Hluttaw. Embracing both ethnographic observations and a methodical engagement with legislative proceedings and historical material, Renaud Egreteau investigates how parliamentary life (re)emerged in Myanmar in the 2010s. His analysis concentrates on key legislative mechanisms, processes, and tasks pertaining to government oversight, budgetary control, representation, and lawmaking and interrogates how they were learned, (re)appropriated, and (mis)performed by Myanmar's new breed of legislators and parliamentary staff until the 2021 army takeover.

This book sheds new light on the often shadowy, but essential role of committees, which exist in modern parliaments around the globe, and it questions the conventional notion that the ‘real’ work of parliament happens in committees. Renowned country specialists take a close look at what goes on in committees and how it matters for policy making. While committees are seen as the central place where policy is made, they often hold their sessions closed to the public and calls for transparency are growing. To understand this "black box" it is necessary to look within but also beyond the walls of the committee rooms and parliament buildings. Bringing together formal and informal aspects, rules and practices shows that committees are not a paradise of policy making. They have great relevance nonetheless: as crystallization points in the policy networks, as drivers for division of labor and for socialization and the integration of MPs. The new insights presented in this book will be of interest to scholars, students and professionals in parliamentary affairs, legislative studies, government, and comparative politics. They are also relevant for political analysts, journalists, and policymakers.

This book investigates Parliaments’ capacity to oversee government activities, policies and expenditures. Utilising a comparative approach, the book presents a new examination of oversight tools and discusses the conditions under which such tools are employed effectively. The result of a 9-year collaboration between the authors, this book draws from the findings of survey data collected by the World Bank Institute and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, analysing information from 120 parliaments. The book represents a rigorous attempt to test whether international organizations are correct in claiming that the quality of democracy and good governance can be improved by strengthening the oversight capacity of legislatures. It discusses the tools available to parliaments worldwide, and taking a comparative approach considers which tools are more or less common, how oversight capacity can be estimated, how oversight capacity is related to other institutional and constitutional factors, and above all what ensures that oversight tools are used effectively. This analysis reveals that while the quality of democracy and good governance benefit from effective oversight, oversight effectiveness cannot be reduced to oversight capacity. The book urges policy makers and reformers to change their approach from strengthening capacity to securing that the capacity is put to good use. Parliamentary Oversight Tools will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners of legislative politics and governance.

The Handbook is a virtual encyclopedia of public financial management, written by topmost experts, many with a background in the IMF and World Bank. It provides the first comprehensive guide to the subject that has been published in more than ten years. The book is aimed at a broad audience of academics/students, government officials, development agencies and practitioners. It covers both bread-and-butter topics such as the macroeconomic and legal framework for budgeting, budget preparation and execution, procurement, accounting, reporting, audit and oversight, as well as specialist subjects such as government payroll systems, local government finance, fiscal transparency, the management of fiscal risks, sovereign wealth funds, the management of state-owned enterprises, and political economy aspects of budgeting. The book sets out numerous examples and case studies describing good practice in public financial management, and is highly relevant for use in both advanced and developing countries.

This important book explores the cultural conditions that favour political accountability. It examines the channels through which accountability can be secured and the role that accountability plays in ensuring good governance. In addition to problematizing the notion of accountability, the book suggests that it is the product of three different—albeit, related—processes: taking account of voters’ preferences, keeping account of voters’ preferences, and giving account of one’s performance in office. It further explores the relationship between accountability and political culture by analyzing the relationship between accountability and religion, religious denomination, familism, civicness, secularism and postmaterialism, revealing that the level of accountability is influenced by the diffusion of post-material values and by the level of civicness in a given country. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students, and practitioners in governance, the political economy of institutions and development, democracy, and more broadly to political science, international relations, political theory, comparative politics, sociology, and cultural studies.