Publications

This year’s CAPE conference will explore budgeting in the real world. Real-world budgeting can have multiple meanings. First, it evokes an idea of budgeting that is messier and more political: a broadening of scope. Second, ‘real world’ suggests a focus on budgeting as it actually happens, as opposed to how it should be: positive instead of normative. Finally, it is a call for more realistic approaches to budgeting that take greater account of what can be achieved given a particular institutional and political setting and capacity endowment. Not all of this is new. In fact,  this conference is based on an emerging body of research and country case experiences. The recent publication of two volumes of scholarship covering the whole range of PFM is testament to how much this field has grown, and how diverse the approaches have become – at least on paper.