How can donors improve accountability in developing countries?

Vivek Ramkumar and Paolo de Renzio from the International Budget Programme have published a new brief, Improving Budget Transparency and Accountability in Aid Dependent Countries: How Can Donors Help? (pdf)

Here's the main finding:

There are four main ways in which bilateral and multilateral donor organizations can affect budget transparency and accountability in aid-recipient countries. The first is by influencing recipient governments’ capacity and commitment to make budgets more transparent. The second is by supporting other actors (CSOs, legislatures, SAIs, etc.) in making better use of available budget information. The third, and most direct way, is by changing their own practices with regard to transparency and accountability. Finally, the fourth is by conducting additional analysis on the ways in which aid affects budget transparency and accountability in poor countries

Obviously, we at aidinfo agree with these recommendations.

More generally, I think we need to link up more purposively the movements to improve the transparency of budgets, to improve the transparency of aid, and to improve the transparency of payments for natural resources (eg the extractive industries transparency initiative, Kimberly process on diamonds etc).   There are a lot of synergies - in particular, enabling civil society organisations in developing countries to take an overall view of resource allocation and use, building capacity, developing tools, using new technologies, and making more use of user-generated (or crowd sourced) information.