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The way budgets are used may reflect the requirements of particular institutional and organisational contexts, rather than a ubiquitous need to plan and control technical operations. This paper examines the budgetary processes in a particular institutional and organisational setting‐ that of a public sector commercial organisation in a developing country. The findings suggest that in the special circumstances of the organisation studied, the budgetary process is a way of demonstrating conformity with the needs and requirements of external authorities, rather than a means of assisting internal management. These findings are consistent with and added to the understanding of theory which stresses the symbolic and institutionalised uses of accounting in organisations

This study examines how resource dependency affects municipal budgetary process; specifically, it investigates how politically aligned resource sharing between different levels of government along with clientelism interferes with the budgetary process of municipal organizations in developing countries.

The paper adopts a qualitative approach to study two municipal organizations in Bangladesh. The qualitative data are collected from semi-structured interviews with key organizational members. Besides, the study also relies on various publicly available documents and the Local Government Acts to complement the interview data.

The findings of the study divulge dependence on partisan aligned nonprogrammable government funds poses significant problems for municipal organizations in carrying out their budgetary process. Clientelism and informal negotiations of incumbent political leaders are found to play a vital role in such resource sharing decisions. The consequent uncertainties in getting funds have the potentials of interrupting the budgetary process at the organizational level. In some cases, budgets do not appear to be useful as a management tool for guiding organizational activities.

Like other qualitative studies, the results of these case studies are not generalizable because their interpretations are highly dependent on the context of the research sites.

Despite the limitation of a case study research, the results of this study are useful to deepen our understanding of how uncertainty in resource sharing creates clientele behavior and interferes with the organizational budget. Such an understanding helps practitioners and policymakers devise a sound resource sharing mechanism for effective delivery of municipal services on a sustainable basis.

This study provides insight into how precarious central government transfers and clientelism interfere with local governments' budgetary process.

The paper concentrates on the administrative side of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) budgetary process and employs a quantitative approach to test two major hypotheses about the style of decision making and the impact of this style on annual estimations of public expenditures. Therefore, the major question of the paper is not concerned with the content of these decisions (annual estimations) in a substantive descriptive and normative manner, as in public finance studies, but rather with the analysis of the outcomes of these decisions. The paper uses data from annual budgetary allocations to test certain hypotheses and concludes that UAE budgetary decision-makers in United Arab Emirates Federal ministries use an incremental style of decision making to estimate their annual expenditure.

Many studies of the budgetary process focus on the national government while ignoring the state budgetary process and state budgetary actors. Executive budget analysts and legislative budget analysts are important gatekeepers in the budgetary process. These actors were surveyed to ascertain what influences their decisions and to determine what responsibilities are included in their job duties. The results show that many similarities exist between executive budget analysts and legislative budget analysts. Legislative budget analysts are more involved in the budgetary process than many believe. Consequently, they play important “gatekeeping” roles in the budgetary process.

Sometimes regarded as the best method of prioritizing budgetary expenditures, Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) was introduced into China in the early 1990s and systematically adopted since the recent budgeting reform although it has experienced numerous failures in many countries. This study examines ZBB as practiced in Hubei province in China. In Hubei, although the reformers are intended to create ZBB as a general budgeting framework, eventually, it was a Chinese style Target-Based Budgeting (TBB) rather than ZBB that has been put into place. Interestingly, ZBB has not disappeared but is deliberately applied to budgetary decisions of one type of expenditures under the Chinese style TBB. However, even in the field where ZBB is practiced, its achievements are at best moderate. The Chinese experiment of ZBB presents something new not only for the theory of ZBB but also for the budgeting literature.

The purpose of this paper is to draw on a small‐scale study that investigated the relationships between the budget‐setting process and slack, and how budgetary, behavioural and contextual factors can affect this relationship, to reconceptualise the phenomenon of budgetary slack as a budget risk management strategy.

A case study method was employed, which enabled the researchers to investigate factors suggested by prior literature that affect slack creation. In total, nine structured interviews were conducted in a state‐owned Egyptian petroleum company, which gave the researchers a different way of thinking about the budget slack phenomenon.

The authors found that slack is created, but not perceived negatively by managers, wherever they are in the organisational hierarchy. Few factors from the literature appeared to have any effect on the creation of budgetary slack, but the covert view of budget slack as a negative behaviour, adopted by early literature was perceived by participants as unethical and inconsistent with Egyptian culture. Managers did not recognise the notion of budgetary slack, though a “contingency” was created and was seen as entirely rational and acceptable by both superiors and subordinates. These findings are consistent with more recent literature in taking a more positive view, and with risk management thinking.

The evidence from this small study in a single organisation obviously cannot be generalised to the whole population. More research is needed in different contexts in order to discover whether managers may perceive this link between budget contingencies and risk management. Also, further research may explore the ethical dimension of behaviour and its possible foundation in religious values and beliefs, to see if this influences how building “contingencies” into budgets is perceived.

If we were to stop portraying the creation of budgetary slack as a negative behaviour and accept that practitioners find it acceptable in managing budgets in an uncertain economic environment, more managers may be open about it.

The main contribution of this paper is that it proposes that what was originally described as a negative behavioural phenomenon be rethought as a positive risk management strategy. Though other authors have viewed budget slack more positively, none has made the explicit link to risk management. The authors reposition budget slack in terms of contingency planning and show how this is consistent with risk management thinking.

Three rival internal change theories of budgeting have characterized the twentieth century. Internal change theories consider the importance of change made inside governments; exogenous factors do not have a significant bearing on outcomes in these approaches. The century started out with the rational/scientific, then moved to incrementalism by mid to latecentury. The century ended with the garbage can model. This paper tests the descriptive power of each of these models on budget outcome data. The methods used in this study were time series modeling of monthly U.S. national government budget outcomes from 1968 to 1999. The results provide support for both incrementalism and rational/scientific budgeting. There was no support found in this study for the anarchical tendencies associated with the garbage can theory of budgeting. These results suggest that the garbage can model may not deserve its reputation as the dominant budgeting paradigm at the close of the twentieth century.

Large organizations typically mandate that managers attend budget meetings and exchange budget reports with their immediate supervisor and budget staff. We explored whether such organization-mandated budgetary involvement is related to managers’ budgetary communication with their supervisor in terms of budgetary participation, budgetary explanation, and budgetary feedback. Questionnaire data from 148 managers employed by 94 different companies were analyzed with regression. Mandatory budget meetings with supervisor had a positive relationship with all three forms of budgetary communication with supervisor, and mandatory budget reports from supervisor had a positive relationship with budgetary explanation from supervisor. Mandatory budget meetings with budget staff had a positive relationship with both budgetary participation with supervisor and budgetary feedback from supervisor. Mandatory budget reports from budget staff had a negative relationship with all three forms of budgetary communication with supervisor. The results failed to support proposed relationships between mandatory budget reports to supervisor and budgetary participation with supervisor, and between mandatory budget reports from supervisor and budgetary explanation from supervisor. Implications of the results for future research and budgetary system design are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the new Budget Act (2015) and the new budget cycle influence and were influenced by the contextual environment of the Tanzanian parliament and how this changed parliamentarians’ (MPs) budgetary oversight roles.

The paper employed analytical concepts explained in the contextual framework proposed by Alsharari et al. (2015) to explore changes in budgetary oversight roles after the implementation of the reforms. Interviews, video clips and document review were employed in the data collection. Data were analyzed using the thematic approach.

The values of the new Budget Act and the new budget cycle were in conflict with the prevailing institutions, political and power aspects. The MPs modified a few provisions in the new Budget Act and in the new budget cycle. Legitimating budgetary oversight roles as a result of institutional pressure emerged but stopped. Although there was a change in MPs formal powers and MPs involvement in budgetary oversight, there was stability as the change was ineffective.

The paper only extracted relevant aspects of the contextual framework, which were sufficient to achieve the objective of the paper. Moreover, the study was conducted only a few years after the implementation of the reforms. Therefore, it might be too early to reach conclusions. Yet, the paper serves as the basis for further studies investigating changes in budgetary oversight roles after the implementation of the reforms.

In order for the parliament to hold the government accountable to the electorate, there is a need for reforming the nature of the government system, improving MPs capacity, harmonizing Budget Act with prevailing constitution and demonstrating the political will to use MPs’ formal powers. The findings suggest that effective change in budgetary oversight by focusing on formal institutions only is unlikely.

This paper provides a more robust explanation on how the integration of institutional, political and power aspects shape budgetary oversight roles in parliaments. It is the first paper to explore accounting change using the contextual theoretical framework in an organization of a parliamentary nature. The paper responds to Kim’s (2018) call for conducting case studies to explore changes in budgetary oversight roles by investigating potential attributes of institutions when operating in practice.