The Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT) was founded in 2011 as a multi-stakeholder action network to advance fiscal transparency, participation, and accountability in countries around the world. GIFT’s founding Lead Stewards are the World Bank, the IMF, the International Budget Partnership (IBP), and the Departments/Secretaries of budget of the governments of Brazil and the Philippines. The International Federation of Accountants subsequently joined as a sixth Lead Steward in 2014. Two dozen other official, civil society organisations and donor agencies are stewards of GIFT, including the OECD (see www.fiscaltransparency.net for further details). Since, 2013, GIFT is hosted at IBP and funded by the World Bank, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Omidyar Network.

The basic motivation for establishing GIFT was that the overall state of budget transparency around the world is poor: Measured against the Open Budget Index, the national budgets of 77 countries - home to half the world’s population - were at that time failing to meet basic standards of budget transparency. While there had been some progress in increasing fiscal transparency, it was uneven and slow, and would take a generation to achieve significant and sustainable improvement in many countries. The Global Financial Crisis had also revealed basic weaknesses in fiscal transparency, and prompted a fundamental re-thinking of the approach (see for instance the 2012 IMF paper, Fiscal Transparency, Accountability, and Risk).

GIFT was formed to bring about a step-increase in government openness by bringing multiple stakeholders together to address the challenges in a new and more co-ordinated manner. It has four main work streams: strengthening incentives; advancing global norms; technical assistance and capacity building; and harnessing new technologies.
One of the network’s first actions was to develop a new set of High Level Principles of Fiscal Transparency, Participation and Accountability. As illustrated in the figure below, these are designed to sit above the existing set of international standards, norms, and assessment instruments, to promote increased coherence across those instruments, and to promote the development of new instruments where there are gaps.

The GIFT High Level Principles were endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in 2012, which encouraged member states to ‘intensify efforts to enhance transparency, participation and accountability in fiscal policies, including through the consideration of the principles set out by GIFT.’

High Level Principle 10 asserts a public right to direct public participation in the formulation and implementation of fiscal policy. Given the limited guidance on how public entities should engage directly with the public in managing public resources, GIFT embarked on a substantial multi-year work programme to generate greater knowledge about country practices and recent innovations in citizen engagement. GIFT has completed eight country case studies of public participation in fiscal policy, has developed a set of Principles of Public Participation in Fiscal Policy, and will be publishing a Guide to this potentially transformative new field in December 2016.

Requirements for public participation have recently been incorporated in the 2014 IMF Fiscal Transparency Code and in the OECD’s Principles of Budgetary Governance 2014, and the 2017 Open Budget Survey includes an expanded section on public participation that fully reflects the GIFT Participation Principles. GIFT has also developed an indicator measuring public participation in fiscal policy that is being piloted as a voluntary supplement in a PEFA assessment.

GIFT initiated the establishment of the Fiscal Openness Working Group (FOWG) of the Open Government Partnership at the London OGP Summit in 2013. The FOWG, which is convened by GIFT, supports and promotes the implementation of more ambitious budget and fiscal transparency commitments made by OGP governments. It does this through peer-to-peer learning and exchange of experience between officials; by bringing government officials and civil society budget experts together to discuss transparency and openness reforms in their countries and regions; and by assessing progress in implementing fiscal transparency commitments in OGP Action Plans and commenting on draft Action Plans.

GIFT’s work on harnessing new technologies has focused on developing a global tool for publishing budget information in open data format. This has involved working with Open Knowledge to develop a technical platform, with the World Bank’s BOOST tool (providing budget data), and with governments including those of Brazil and Mexico to test the tool. In September 2016 Mexico became the first government to publish its budget in open data format, drawing on GIFT support.

GIFT has also published considerable research on the evidence for the causes and effects of fiscal openness, including case studies, meta evaluations, and research on incentives.