Abstract
Public Participation (PP) and Fiscal Transparency (FT) in government fiscal processes are emphasized as ways to foster democratic responsiveness and accountability in the use of public funds. South Africa (SA) is currently faced with enormous PP and FT challenges, which indicates a lack of consistency towards its FT and inadequate PP on the fiscal processes of the government.
This study was designed to gain a nuanced understanding of the role of PP in improving FT in SA and recommend strategies that can be developed and implemented to maintain the transparency status of the country. By addressing the research objectives including conceptualizing the concept of FT and PP, the theoretical underpinning supporting PP and FT, explaining the roles and challenges of PP and FT, determining the factors liming FT and PP in SA, strategies on how FT can be improved and assessing the status of PP and FT, the study managed to achieve the research objectives.
The study utilised the literature analysis method to achieve the research objective. Therefore, the methodology research design and qualitative research methods were employed throughout the study. To adequately collect data for this study, the secondary data collection “unobtrusive” was consulted thus the data from the National Treasury (NT), International Transparency (IT), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), academic/scholarly papers, and government official documents.
The findings of the research indicate how inconsistent SA is on FT, for example, the score indicates 89 in 2017 and a decline to 87 in 2019. There is also an indication of a limited PP throughout the fiscal processes of the government with a score of 14 out of 100 in 2019. Undeniably, SA has been making budget documents readily available to the public from 2010 to 2019. The decision on the allocation of resources is still made at the top level whereas the public inputs are not considered. The budget reporting mechanisms are strong. However, participation and accountability in government fiscal matters are still weak.
These growing challenges cannot be resolved in a short period but rather with the solution of the growing influence of participatory budgeting. Civil society organizations, citizens, and governments are creating new institutions that result in
v
better forms of FT and good governance. SA should make it mandatory to prioritize providing feedback on how the government uses the pre-budget consultations and budget implementation through public inputs. To improve FT and maintain the hard-earned transparency score, the government needs to allow citizens to testify during its hearing on the audit report. Thus, resulting in PP and improving the country’s FT. To adequately avoid challenges of corruption, loss of national and international investors, and getting into debt due to lack of reliable, accurate, and accessible fiscal information, SA needs to have a strong PP to play an oversight role and provide inputs during fiscal decision-making processes which will improve FT.