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Capturing Movement at the Margins: Senegal’s Efforts at Budget Transparency Reform linda beck, e. h. seydou nourou toure, and aliou faye African countries do not score well on budget transparency, according to the Open Budget Index (OBI) ratings for 2010. Their poor performance may be attributed to a combination of factors identified in the OBI report, including a significant level of aid dependency, economic underdevelopment, and a lack of or weakness in democratic institutions. Yet even within Africa, there is wide variation in OBI scores, from top-ranking South Africa, whose score of ninety-two out of 100 surpassed that of all other countries surveyed, including long-established Western democracies, to the lowest-ranking countries of Chad, Equatorial Guinea, and São Tomé and Príncipe, which each received a score of zero for their complete lack of public access to budget information. A closer look at the OBI scores reveals that Anglophone African countries, not only the South African outlier, have fared significantly better than their Francophone counterparts, while Lusophone Africa has a mixed record. With the notable exceptions of Mali and Morocco, whose respective scores of thirtyfive and twenty-eight indicate a “minimal” level of budget information, Africa’s former French and Belgian colonies characteristically provide “scant to no information ” to their citizens. While these Francophone countries are joined by Nigeria on the bottom rung of the OBI scale, most of the continent’s former British colonies provide at least “some” budget information, with ratings ranging from forty-one to sixty points. A reasonable explanation for this clustering could be that postcolonial Africa continues to be influenced by its diverse colonial legacies. This argument, however, requires a half-century of path dependence from the colonial state as opposed to any contemporary modeling, as France and the United Kingdom received identical OBI scores of 87 percent in 224 9 09-2337-0 CH 9:PWW 2284-7 3/14/13 3:00 PM Page 224 both 2008 and 2010 based on the provision of “extensive” budget information by their governments.1 To assess alternative explanations for the relatively poor performance of Africa’s Francophone countries, this chapter focuses on Senegal, one of the six former French African colonies that received a score of five or lower in 2010.2 While Senegal’s OBI score of three reflects a continuing need for budget reform, we maintain that the lack of transparency and limited popular participation in the Senegalese budget process is less a reflection of its colonial legacy than of the current socioeconomic and political contexts in which it operates. By contrasting Senegal with Mali, its better-performing neighbor, we demonstrate that African countries with limited economic resources can nevertheless enhance their budget transparency and participation by liberalizing their political institutions and increasing the engagement of non-state actors in budget processes.3 Budget Transparency and Participation in Senegal Despite a general increase in OBI scores worldwide, Senegal’s 2010 survey shows no improvement from its negligible score of three out of 100 in 2008.4 This rating indicates that the government of Senegal provides the public with very limited information on the central government’s budget. Only three of the eight budget documents identified by the OBI as critical to an open process are published (the enacted budget, in-year reports, and the audit report), although all eight documents are produced by the government, with the exception of the citizen’s budget. Moreover, Senegal’s two major oversight bodies—the legislature and the supreme audit institution—are weak, lacking the resources and capacity to exercise their powers either to amend the executive’s budget proposal or to monitor budget execution. As a result, the OBI report maintains that it is “virtually impossible for citizens to hold the government accountable for its management of the public’s money.”5 Senegal’s negligible score suggests that there has been little to no improvement in budget transparency and participation since the early years of its highly centralized authoritarian state (1963–80), despite more than two decades of political, economic, and juridical reform. To Senegal 225 1. In the first OBI survey, France received the highest score of 89 percent, followed closely by the United Kingdom with 88 percent. IBP (2007). 2. These were Burkina Faso (five), Niger and Senegal (three), Cameroon (two), Algeria (one), and Chad (zero). 3. The OBI and research for this chapter were conducted before the Malian coup in 2012. It will be informative to observe how the...

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