This guide is designed to facilitate relationships between civil society and parliament with the aim of monitoring Millenium Development Goals (MDG) and the world Bank’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). Detailing the various stages of this relationship, this guide focuses on assessing potential collaboration, building relationships, creating and maintaining monitoring strategies, and publicizing results.

The development of a national budget is considered to be a government’s most important activity. This paper examines the legislature’s ability to influence the budget and reviews the budgetary trends of developed and developing democracies. Drawing from the experiences of several countries, this paper discusses the role of the legislature in reviewing and approving the budget.