Around the world, governments are making ever more complex decisions about how to raise and spend public resources, often under acute pressure from shrinking fiscal space, rising inequality and declining public trust. Traditional fiscal reforms have expanded transparency and improved technical processes, but they have not reliably produced fairer outcomes or sturdier accountability, especially where powerful actors can still block or divert change. This gap has sharpened interest in approaches that start from politics and power, rather than from institutional blueprints alone.
This synthesis paper introduces and tests a “fiscal ecosystem” approach as one such lens. Instead of treating finance ministries, legislatures, supreme audit institutions, courts, civil society, media, the private sector and international actors as separate pillars, it examines them as an interconnected ecosystem whose de facto roles, relationships and coalitions determine how fiscal decisions are made and contested. By focusing on how accountability relationships are activated or blocked in practice, and on whether fiscal systems are seen as both accountable and equitable, the paper connects day‑to‑day fiscal governance to the renewal (or erosion) of the broader “fiscal contract” between states and citizens.
Building on case studies from Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa, the paper maps how different fiscal ecosystems actually function, how veto points and alliances emerge, and how arenas of accountability shift over time. It distills a set of practical lessons for reformers: starting from de facto power rather than formal mandates, building politically credible coalitions for accountability and equity, planning for short reform windows, treating ecosystem‑building as a strategy in its own right, and asking whether accountability systems generate real consequences, not just more information. While the fiscal ecosystem approach is still evolving, the paper argues that it offers a promising foundation for a new generation of research, policy and practice aimed at making fiscal decisions more contestable, more aligned with public priorities, and ultimately more fair.
Read and download the paper here:
Read also the individual papers here: Fiscal Ecosystems in Transition: Lessons from South Africa, Indonesia, and Brazil