Management of Public Budgeting 135 10 The Management of Public Budgeting

For over a century and a half, public budgeting in Western industrialized countries has been predicted on a model that assumed a high level of resource mobilization for public purposes, strong public accountability, and bureaucratic control. This classical budget model, with its stress on annuality, unity, balance, and a regular budget cycle, replaced a pre-budgetary system based on continuity, decentralization, privatization, and flexibility. Although the pre-budgetary model had persisted for many hundreds of years, the introduction of budgeting was an enormous improvement. It emphasized public accountability against secrecy, democratic decision making against autocracy, regularity and control against opportunism and improvisation, and public norms against institutionalized corruption. Introduced as a tool for the financing and control of public agencies, the potential of the budget process was gradually recognized for other purposes, including planning, policy-making, and management. Yet even as the success of budgeting made it an unquestioned assumption of modern government, its own assumptions were under stress (Caiden, N. 1982). Whereas once it might have been imagined that public needs were finite and public resources infinite, the opposite now seemed more plausible: public demands were a bottomless pit and the revenues available to meet them were severely limited (Caiden, N. 1981). Moreover, while the budget cycle and its bureaucratic appendages were the accepted means for controlling government finances and maintaining public accountability, this linkage no longer appeared to be effective. By the 1980s, not only did it seem that the promises of public budgeting remained unfulfilled, but it appeared that it was no longer even performing its basic functions effectively. In some respects, it almost seemed that things were going backward, to the bad old days of pre-budgeting. Was the problem that the accepted budgetary principles, based on notions of tight bureaucratic control, no longer fit the changed circumstances of government