Our Budget

The prevailing balance of interests and pressures in the City’s determination of public expenditure management is unlikely to reflect a social equity, pro-employee, ethics driven, orientation in any simple sense. It is also likely to reflect complicated information sharing processes, generally held in private rather than public discussions, and designed to exclude groups from the decision-making. It is very likely that any attempts to eliminate walking quorums and other forms of illegal meetings will run into both overt and covert resistance. The adoption of formal budget policy goals by the City will lack commitment and have an insufficient support to achieve meaningful results.
Ideally, therefore, for people interested in understanding the politics of a given budget process it would be valuable to have information about the following: a) The formal structure of roles and responsibilities within the budget process; b) The formal rules governing decision-making, political choice and accountability within the public expenditure management system; c) The networks of stakeholder power and influence (outside the formal allocation of roles and responsibilities), which influence the outcomes of the budget process; d) Incentives for action (covert as well as overt) affecting the decision-making of politicians and officials during budget formulation and execution; e) The latitude for independent discretionary action of bureaucrats at all levels of the budget execution process; f) The norms and values prevailing in key institutions within the budget formulation and execution process.