Open Budget Survey 2025: From Compliance  to Credibility: Strengthening Budget Accountability in the Western Balkans and Turkye
What would it take for governments to earn the trust of their people?  
The Open Budget Survey helps answer this question and in the case of the Western Balkans and Türkiye, results from our 2025 survey show that while meaningful progress has been made on formal budget transparency and oversight practices, key accountability gaps remain. The challenge now is ensuring that the public and oversight actors can monitor, scrutinize, and inform public spending decisions.

These findings point to a clear set of priorities: governments should provide more information and opportunities for scrutiny during budget implementation. They should make Mid-Year Reviews available that provide explanations if spending plans go off course. They should expand public participation mechanisms across the full budget cycle, especially during budget implementation, so that communities can ask questions and give feedback on whether services are being delivered as promised. And they need to be honest about the fiscal risks that all governments face – about debt, state-owned enterprises and long-term sustainability – so that when difficult decisions have to be made, they can be made in public, with public understanding.

Several countries in the region are already putting these recommendations into practice. Kosovo has built participatory budgeting into the law. Montenegro’s parliament set up a legislative committee that examines audit reports promptly and publishes conclusions. North Macedonia’s open finance portal makes government spending data accessible for anyone to track, on a regular basis. What is needed is the political will to make these examples the standard rather than the exception. The building blocks are there for accountable budgets in all countries. The momentum is real. What is needed now is the political will to make these good examples the standard rather than the exception across the region.
“The Open Budget Survey measures the actual, practical question of whether people and their representatives – parliaments, audit institutions, civil society – can see what is happening with public money, question it, and have a real say in it.”

— Sally Torbert, 
Global Lead of Research and Policy,
International Budget Partnership

“Civil society organizations are instrumental in enhancing accountability and achieving policy and economic and social development goals. They play a pivotal role in fostering democratic reforms and human rights … Ensuring effective participation in decision-making through public consultations is critical. (Countries wishing to join the EU) are expected to establish mechanisms for dialogue and cooperation between CSOs and public authorities at all decision-making levels.”
— Mihai Damascan,
Policy Officer, European Commission,
DG Enlargement and Eastern Neighborhood
Following the survey release, we held several high-level panels to discuss how governments, Supreme Audit Institutions, civil society and other key budget stakeholders see the path forward to ensure budgets are more transparent, participatory and accountable to the people they serve.

Some common themes emerged. Governments in the region have generally been proactive in putting mechanisms in place to enable more transparency, but the political will to ensure that for instance, transparency turns into action in Macedonia, where data disclosures reached a plateau and now have slowed to a trickle, is not evident. Meanwhile in Serbia, the government has implemented safeguards against fiscal risks following a crisis, but the crisis might have been avoided if they had heeded the independent fiscal council’s recommendations earlier.

Positively, both Serbia and Albania have committed to institutionalizing new accountability and transparency practices. In Serbia deep fiscal risk analyses are promised in upcoming budgets’ explanatory notes. And in Montenegro, pressure from investors and its own Ministry of Finance to explain deviations from budget spending in a Mid-Year report is leading to the production (hopefully this year) of a comprehensive Mid-Year Report that will be an institutionalized part of the budget process going forward.
Our first panel of the day posed the question: “Compliance without Credibility? Transparency Gains and Their Limits” 

EXCERPTS FROM OUR PANELISTS
Gentian Opre, Head of Budget Department, Ministry of Finance, Albania

“In past Open Budget Surveys, we didn’t have scenarios on fiscal risks like growth and inflation and state-owned enterprises. There is now a special chapter relating to fiscal risks and state-owned enterprises in the explanatory note of the annual budget, which is a good thing. There was a tendency not to publish this in past years. We did report on these areas, but the quality and depth of the analysis is lacking so we are trying bit by bit to provide this information.”

Bojan Paunović, Head of Budget Department, Ministry of Finance, Montenegro

“What would it take to move from reporting execution figures to producing a mid-year analysis to explain deviations and what it means for the rest of the year? We are being asked this by the Ministry of Finance, our investors and partners who want to see exactly that. It is in the interest of the state to be as transparent as possible. We did publish monthly, quarterly and annual execution reports, but we still lack much more comprehensive mid-year reports, because we need to find ways to automate the information. But we have changed our approach to mid-term reporting and this year we hope to produce a comprehensive Mid-Year Report and then make it a regular thing.”

Vesna Garvanlieva Andonova, Senior Economist, Center for Economic Analyses, North Macedonia

“Monitoring of budget transparency, participation and quality of oversight in North Macedonia is coming from civil society, academia and the media. To do this, first we require data, then transparency and then to move on to the next step. Regionally we have made some progress, but it has now stalled and on transparency and data disclosure we have reached a plateau. It is time for transparency to move more from planning to actual execution.”

Bojana Selaković, Director, National Convention on the EU, Serbia

“In Serbia, they are bypassing the rules for public procurement. For our upcoming Expo 2027, everything that was arranged and spent was exempt from any rules about procurement, (with no interference from) the parliament that should be overseeing this spending.”

Excerpt from IBP article. Original article available at: https://internationalbudget.org/events/from-compliance-to-credibility-strengthening-budget-accountability-in-the-western-balkans-and-turkiye/