The impossible harmonization of the state’s and donors’ budgetary instruments

The Budget Program by Objectives (BPO) is one of the instruments promoted by aid institutions to implement their commitments to harmonize procedures between states and donors. It is supposed to ensure predictability and transparency in national budgets and to enable the integration within them of donors’ budgetary support. Analyzing the BPO “drinking water and sanitation” in Benin, this article shows that the objective of a budgetary instrument shared between government and donors is not fulfilled, mainly because of the latter. First, only some donors partake in coordination and use the instrument. Second, donors and government do not rely on the same division of public policy into sub-sectors. Third, the resources mobilized by sanitation aid are disproportionate to the place of this sub-sector in Beninese policies. In practice, the BPO “water and sanitation” is primarily an instrument of the main funder of the sector. The collision of rationales, tools, and temporalities in budget programming leads to unsolvable contradictions and to systematic circumventions of the rules in order to enable the use of available resources.