Aid
Sector Budget Support in practice
Assessing Sector Budget Support
Authors:
G. Handley (ed); Overseas Development Institute
Publisher:
Overseas Development Institute, London, 2009
The development of more programmatic approaches to aid delivery is intimately linked to the aid effectiveness agenda and the Paris Declaration. This paper is a literature review pertaining to the operation of Sector Budget Support (SBS) in practice. It aims to develop a typology of SBS characterizing different approaches in operation and covers a range of sector support modalities in use at country level. It presents and discusses evidence from selected case studies.
The paper discusses the methodological approaches to budget support evaluation as follows:
- Intervention logic – is an important element of solid evaluation. Intervention logics were missing from original donor programs so now they are ‘retro-fitting’ ex-post intervention logics
- There is increased emphasis on statistical impact evaluations as a complement to theory and intervention logic.
- The record of Sector Wide Approaches have been mixed but there has been progress in the development of policies, plans and budgets, and improvements in donor coordination. Donor procedures tend to be problematic
- The shift in aid modalities towards budget support has been small and common basket funds can act as stumbling blocks in the transition towards budget support at the sector level
- The financial architecture associated with different forms of traceability and associated earmarking is complex, and results in significant transaction costs. Traceability, earmarking and associated additional arrangements determine how SBS works in practice
- The coordination of General Budget Support and SBS should be more actively pursued in order to increase mutual coherence and overall effectiveness
- In highly decentralized or federal environments, a shift towards programmatic aid modalities is often associated with centralising tendencies
- The role of leadership on government side is an important factor in the success of new approaches to aid delivery.
