This October, the International Budget Partnership (IBP), part of the US non-profit organisation the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, published preliminary findings from the Ask Your Government! initiative, an ambitious research project to investigate what happens when citizens around the world ask their governments for specific budgetary information relating to key international development commitments – including the enquiry, “What was the total amount actually incurred during the past three fiscal years on subsidies for oil, gas and coal production and consumption?”

Subsidy Watch had the chance to speak about the results of this exercise with Helena Hofbauer, the IBP’s manager for Partnership Development, and Libby Haight, one of Ask Your Government!’s coordinators. We also asked several of the IBP’s partner organisations to talk about their experiences taking the project forward at the country-level, including coordinator Victoria Anderica, based in the European non-profit Access Info Europe, and in-country researchers Sakti Golder, Ralph Ndigwe and Renata Terrazas.

SW: Thank you – everyone – for agreeing to share your experiences with us about this project. Helena, could you begin by giving us some background information? How did the IBP come to undertake a survey on budgetary transparency that included a question on subsidies for oil, gas and coal production and consumption?

Helena: Every two years the IBP releases the results of the Open Budget Survey (OBS), an evaluation of the extent to which governments publish the eight documents we consider to be basic in providing budgetary information. (The latest OBS was published just this month and is available on our website.) At some point, we thought it would be good to see what happens when citizens require information – not looking at published documents, but asking very specific budgetary questions. To make this happen, two IBP programs, the Open Budget Initiative and the Partnership Initiative, worked together. Early on, we decided that our questions should be relevant to movements that could use the answers to strengthen their own research and advocacy.
 
Working together with nine international organisations and 80 national-level partners, we asked six questions in a total of 80 countries: two focused on maternal health, directly linked to the Millennium Development Goals Summit in September 2010; two questions looked at aid; and two at environmental issues. Within this latter category, the question on fossil-fuel subsidies came out of our interactions with the Global Subsidies Initiative, and our belief that the reform movement would find this information interesting, particularly in the light of recent commitments to phase out such subsidies. It’s not a comprehensive exploration of government data and transparency, but it’s a first glimpse.

SW: This sounds like a massive exercise – you must be exhausted. How did it work? How was the survey organised?

Libby: We began by collaborating with Access Info Europe and the Centre for Law and Democracy, experts in the right to access public information. They drafted a protocol that we asked all researchers to follow. It used prevailing international standards for access to public information: establishing that 30 days is a reasonable timeframe for a government to send an answer or some sort of response; and also establishing that governments will be given up to three opportunities to respond to requests.
 
The protocol clearly detailed how to go about drafting the information-request letter based on the regime in place in the country: either having an existing information access law; having a constitutional right to information access, but no specific legislation bringing it into force; or no legal standard, in which case an appeal to international standards was made. Each individual question was then inserted into the letter, with instructions as to which agency would be most appropriate to answer the question. Researchers were also asked to check online to see if the information they sought was already available.
 
The protocol provided guidelines on how researchers should follow up on their requests and keep detailed notes along the way. Each time a researcher had contact with government officials, we’d keep a record – how the interaction went from the point of submission to either getting an answer or exhausting all of the three attempts. All researchers were in contact with either me, Victoria Anderica, the coordinator from Access Info Europe, or Caroline Poirrier, researcher of the OBI team who was responsible for coordinating with all francophone countries.

The first request was submitted at the end of January 2010 and we got some of our last answers in July. In some countries, things went very smoothly, but in other countries it was very difficult, so researchers needed extra time to feel they’d had the opportunity to go through the steps to reach a final conclusion. In the case of Angola, for example, there was a massive change in government, so that slowed the process.

SW: Have you reached any preliminary conclusions? Can you tell us anything about the types of responses you received?

Helena: What we can say at this point is very limited because of the kind of information we have and the understanding that we have of that information. We can talk about the fact that there was only one government that provided all the information that was requested in a timely way, out of 80 − already a pretty daunting conclusion. We can say how many governments didn’t provide any kind of answer to the questions that were posed. We can also illustrate how many governments were in-between. But what we don’t know yet, and this is important, is − what do the responses we actually got mean? What does it mean when a government says ‘we don’t have any subsidies to oil, coal, whatever’ and we know that country does have subsidies? Similarly, how do we evaluate the quality of the response?
 
Libby: Yes, I think that right now our first steps have been to separate out how well countries responded from the fact that citizens were asking for this fairly practical budget information. It was surprising how many governments failed to answer the questions. Most are obliged to provide some kind of response. If they judge that the information requested is confidential or cannot be provided, it’s their obligation to justify that decision. Just ignoring the question is a fairly shocking result and it actually happened in the majority of cases. At least one question out of six didn’t get any response in most countries. From a right to information perspective, that very internationally recognised right wasn’t met. The next step is: of those who did answer, what does that information tell us? How complete is that information? We can only measure how complete the response was in terms of how much of the question was answered. We’re not necessarily experts in aid transparency for example.

SW: Unfortunately, we don’t have room to highlight more than a few representative examples here, but Victoria, Sakti, Ralph and Renata – tell us, with respect to fossil-fuel subsidies specifically, what sort of experiences did you come across at a country level?

Victoria: in Europe, 23 countries were asked the question about fossil-fuel subsidies and, generally, the results were not bad, as almost 60% gave a comprehensive answer. There were cases, though, where information was not delivered or was delivered with problems. In Portugal for example, an Amnesty International researcher reported that they had received several angry phone calls from the Minister's office, who could not understand why they wanted to access information regarding the environment. After the reason for the question was clarified, some information was received, but it was very incomplete. This reaction directly undermines the right of access to information, as by law everyone has the right to ask and no reason should be demanded. In some countries, such as Spain, France and Norway, we did not get any answer to our questions, even though we made all three attempts.
 
Sakti: the only difficulty I faced in India was identifying the appropriate Ministry – otherwise my experience was good. Initially, I thought that the Ministry of Finance would be the appropriate authority, but after filing an appeal I was promptly informed that my request had been transferred to the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. After a month I got no response, so I filed again, but this time directly to the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. The Ministry replied and gave detailed information on oil and gas subsidies. Since they didn’t give any information on coal, I filed to the Ministry of Coal and they transferred the letter to a government-owned company, Singareni Collieries Company Limited, who finally gave me the last piece of information.
 
Although it was a lengthy process, I didn’t get any especially negative reaction from the institutions − rather, I’d say I got positive ones, to the extent that I received suggestions about who could provide me with the required information and had requests forwarded on my behalf.

Ralph: in Nigeria, we went to the Ministry many times and we couldn’t even get past the junior officer. They just said that it would be forwarded to the directors and that the directors would meet and instruct the officials to give us the information we required. In some Ministries, they said they couldn’t find the file we were seeking, that we had to come back at another time. One Ministry would say come back in a week, another three days, while another would say come back in two weeks. When we did, they’d say the director had travelled abroad. When he came back they would tell us to come back again anyway. That’s all we did for three months.
 
There was one representative who told us, “I see you have been coming here again and again, but let me tell you this – if you come here until next year, you won’t get anything.” They were telling us the truth. In the end, we received not one piece of information from any of the Ministries. We were not surprised because we knew what was happening but we were excited to take part in this project because we need to document this type of behaviour. Right now, when you ask any government official, they will deny that they do these things. So this result was an eye-opener.
 
Renata: In Mexico, we first approached the Ministry of Economy. They answered that it was not within their competency to respond to the question and recommended that we contact the Ministry of Finance. We did this, but they also refused to answer on the same grounds as the Ministry of Economy, saying that we should contact the Ministry of Energy and state-owned petroleum company PEMEX. By this time, the IBP exercise had come to a finish so it was not possible to continue.
 
It is very common for agencies to answer that they cannot answer a question because it is not their responsibility. The same happened when we requested information on subsidies to agriculture (in a separate research project conducted by Fundar). At the end of the day, it turned out that the Ministry of Finance was responsible. 

SW: Subsidy Watch had an opportunity to look through some of the results, and it appears that in many cases ministries claimed that the data on fossil-fuel subsidies was not their responsibility, was held in more than one ministry, or may not have been known at all. What can we say about this result? Is it a government’s responsibility to make sure this information is housed in one place?

Helena: While the question on subsidies might be considered complex, a well-functioning, well-structured government would have to know what it is spending and ceasing to earn because of specific subsidies, which has a direct impact on the size of the budget that can be allocated to everything else.

Libby: This question was particularly revealing of the fact that there is often a bureaucratic logic to organising information that doesn’t make it easy for citizens to find out what’s happening to public money. It’s a complex issue, and it can be hard to order the information, but there’s a responsibility to make it accessible for those who don’t run the policies – everyone has a right to know how their money is being spent in terms that non-experts can understand.

SW: What is the next step for the Ask Your Government! initiative?

Libby: the immediate next step is to begin disseminating the overall results and make them available online, where we can give an increased level of detail about the questions in each country. Access Info Europe is also preparing a report that analyses in much more detail what the results mean for access to public information. The next step is to tease out, if possible, what these results mean for the issues that were covered by the survey. Another thing that we’re planning on doing is to offer some case studies that allow people to see the detail that went into accessing this information. Sometimes boiling down the information into a final result doesn’t do justice to the experience that the researchers have had.

SW: What can be done to encourage countries to improve their budget transparency?

Helena: Uh-oh – that is the one million dollar question! For me, getting citizens to actually ask questions is very important. Governments are used to not giving information, not being asked information, and to even consider public information as private. Basically, I think it has to become standard that if you’re interested in some kind of public service, you’ll be interested in what the government spends on it. This exercise illustrates best the need for citizens to start asking questions.
 
Libby: Yes, and I think that the flip-side is that governments need to recognise that there’s an obligation. If citizens ask a question, they should provide an answer. Not doing so is unacceptable. They need to acknowledge that they have a responsibility to make information available in a way that is timely, accessible, understandable and neither costly nor time-consuming for a citizen to request. Making information available is a place where there’s a lot of work to be done.
 
Helena Hofbauer is the IBP’s manager for Partnership Development. She is based at IBP-Mexico City and works with groups throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America in the development of capacities for civil society budget work and a South-South transfer and sharing of knowledge in the field.
 
Libby Haight is a program officer at the IBP, responsible for coordinating the Ask Your Government! initiative. Since 2004, she has worked in Mexico on transparency and accountability issues in public spending on rural development policy.
 
Victoria Anderica is Access Info Europe’s coordinator for the Ask Your Government! initiative. She also works on an anti-corruption program, the Tell Us What You’ve Done initiative, and has conducted analysis of the legal framework for the right of access to information in a number of European countries.
 
Sakti Golder is a research officer for the Indian NGO the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability. In addition to his contributions to the Ask Your Government! initiative, Sakti has coordinated a UNICEF-supported project Public Spending for Children and issues related to health, centre state fiscal transfers and marginalized groups.
 
Ralph Ndigwe is a member of the Civil Resource Development and Documentation Centre (CIRDDOC) Nigeria, an independent, non-governmental and not-for-profit organisation established in 1996 for the protection and promotion of human rights and women's human rights and the strengthening of civil society.

Renata Terrazas is the Assistant Executive Director of Mexican NGO the FUNDAR Centre of Analysis and Research. She works on issues that include migration, human rights and security.