Latin America and the Caribbean: Sustained Gains in Openness, but Oversight Is Losing Ground
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Latin America and the Caribbean stands at a critical juncture. A wave of elections across 2025 and 2026 is reshaping the political landscape, while the region’s most pressing challenges persist. Crime and violence continue to threaten the region’s prosperity and citizen security (UNDP), inequality remains among the highest in the world (World Inequality Report 2026), and economic growth has struggled to improve living standards for many (ECLAC). As frustration with these unmet challenges grows, increasing numbers of citizens are turning toward political outsiders and more extreme political alternatives.
According to Latinobarómetro 2024, only 52 percent of Latin Americans respondents express support for democracy. At the same time, the share of citizens who agree that a non-democratic government is acceptable if it solves the country’s problems has risen from 44 percent in 2002 to 53 percent in 2024.
Across the region, people are becoming less concerned with how governments govern and more concerned with whether they deliver. The same study found that on average, 76 percent of respondents in the region believe the distribution of wealth is unfair or very unfair – with this figure exceeding 80 percent in Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia and Perú – highlighting widespread dissatisfaction with the outcomes of economic and social policy.
At its core, these perceptions reflect a fundamental challenge: democracy must deliver. When people do not see political commitments translating into safer communities, quality health and education or employment opportunities, they grow disillusioned.
The budget process is an essential space for people to assess whether governments are delivering on commitments with concrete investments. Although Latin America and the Caribbean has made strides in budget transparency and public participation, oversight powers that can hold governments accountable for delivering results are weakening.
As a result, the gap between formal accountability institutions and people’s expectations continues to widen. Without more robust budget accountability, governments will struggle to restore the social contract and to prove that democracy can deliver meaningful results.
What is the Open Budget Survey?
Implemented globally for more than two decades, the Open Budget Survey (OBS) is a globally recognized benchmark for assessing government accountability in public finance. It measures accountability across three pillars:
Transparency
Is there timely, accessible, and comprehensive information about how government budgets are planned and spent?
Participation
Do civil society and the broader public (including historically excluded groups) have structured opportunities to engage at key moments and influence budget choices?
Oversight
Do the legislature and audit institutions have the authority and practices needed to review the budget and scrutinize how it is implemented?
Together, they determine whether constituencies and their representatives can see how public money is planned and spent, question decisions and deviations, and influence priorities before and during implementation. In this sense, the survey acts as a proxy for democratic credibility in public finance: it signals whether budget systems are open enough to support trust, contestation and corrective action.
The OBS 2025 Regional Analysis for Latin America and the Caribbean
The State of National Budget Accountability in the Region
The 2025 edition of the Open Budget Survey (OBS), covering 11 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean, shows strong progress and resilience in some areas, alongside persistent gaps in others. Since 2019, budget transparency and public participation changed little through 2023, before both rose markedly in 2025, reaching 57 and 26 (out of 100) respectively.
While transparency and participation have improved, oversight—historically one of the region’s strongest accountability pillars—is weakening. Legislative oversight has plateaued since 2019, and supreme audit institution oversight declined in more than half of the countries assessed. In both cases, the erosion is practical, not formal: legislatures and audit institutions retain their mandates but are using them less.
This matters because legislatures are where budgets are debated and approved—and where governments are held accountable for spending. As that scrutiny fades, so does the link between public money and public need.
The future of budget accountability in Latin America and the Caribbean will not be defined solely by further gains in transparency, but by whether countries can preserve and strengthen the institutions that hold governments accountable for results. As citizens grow more impatient with unmet promises, the risk is not simply weaker accountability, but a widening disconnect between public expectations and government performance, with consequences for the future of democratic resilience.
This disconnect can also be attributed to a significant trend affecting the region: the shrinking of civic space. According to CIVICUS, around 60 percent of the population in the Americas now lives in countries where civic space is classified as “obstructed”. This means that citizens, civil society, journalists and activists face diminishing opportunities to monitor government, demand accountability, and influence policy.
By restricting participation, governments lose critical feedback and independent oversight, weakening democratic institutions, and their ability to meet people’s needs.
Transparency keeps advancing, but stops where fiscal risk begins.
Latin America and the Caribbean has built one of the most sustained budget transparency trajectories in the Open Budget Survey. Since 2019, seven of the eleven countries assessed in this round have improved their transparency scores, and the regional average reached 57 in 2025. These gains have survived changes of government across the ideological spectrum, fiscal crises, and the disruption of the pandemic, pointing to a degree of institutional resilience that distinguishes the region. Transparency scores have remained more stable than participation or oversight across political cycles.
That resilience, however, is uneven, and the regional average conceals wide disparities. At 83, Brazil records the highest transparency score among all countries assessed this round, while Bolivia remains near the bottom at 11. Countries such as the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Chile all improved, largely by expanding the detail and comprehensiveness of existing budget documents, with gains spanning multi-year expenditure estimates, revenue detail, macroeconomic forecasts, and information on policies and tax expenditures. Bolivia followed a different path: its Executive Budget Proposal has been produced for internal use only in every OBS round since 2015, except in 2021, when it was made publicly available.
The more consequential finding lies beneath the headline scores. Where the region has advanced, it has done so largely on the core budget documents and the basic information on expenditures and revenues they contain. Where it remains opaque is precisely in the areas of the budget that carry the greatest fiscal risk: contingent liabilities, expenditure arrears, extra-budgetary funds, quasi-fiscal activities and long-term fiscal sustainability.
Debt reporting in the budget proposal is also uneven: 91 percent of countries assessed publish the core borrowing and debt figures, but only 36 percent show how that debt is structured — whether it is domestic or external and what its maturity profile is. Even fewer countries, only 27 percent, disclose the interest rates on outstanding debt. The composition is where the risk sits: a debt stock that looks manageable in total can still carry sharp exposure to interest rate shocks, currency movements and near-term repayment pressure. In most of the region, that exposure stays out of view of the public and of the institutions meant to scrutinize it.
These gaps carry more weight in the fiscal environment the region now faces. ECLAC’s Fiscal Panorama 2026 finds that Latin America faces sustained fiscal pressure and limited fiscal space, with average central government public debt at 52.3 percent of GDP. In this context, the case for stronger domestic resource mobilization is pressing, and the parts of the budget where scrutiny is most needed are exactly the ones where it is least available. The money that is deferred through arrears and contingent liabilities, moved off-budget through extra-budgetary funds and quasi-fiscal activities, or left underexposed through incomplete reporting on assets, debt composition, and fiscal sustainability, is the money the public can least easily see. Transparency in Latin America and the Caribbean has advanced, but it has advanced at the surface. The next stage of progress depends on reaching the layers of the budget where fiscal decisions are hardest to trace, and where their distributional consequences are greatest.
There is one frontier where Latin America and the Caribbean is setting the pace. On the disclosure of tax expenditures, the revenue governments forgo through exemptions, deductions and preferential rates, the regional average is well ahead of every other region assessed. Reporting on individual sources of revenue has strengthened too: every country now breaks down individual revenue sources in its year-end report, and in-year disclosure improved this round.
This progress matters more here than almost anywhere. In a region with the world’s highest income inequality, tax expenditures are among the most consequential and least visible fiscal instruments a government holds: a loss of revenue determined through the tax code rather than the budget, rarely debated, and often benefiting those with the means to claim it.
This progress has not come from governments alone. IBP, partners and other civil society across the region have worked for years to push tax expenditures onto the transparency agenda and to press for stronger accountability over how they are used.
The region is also shaping the conversation beyond its borders. The ECLAC-hosted Regional Platform for Tax Cooperation, driven by Brazil, Colombia, and Chile, builds shared knowledge and common positions on tax policy. Its continuity, however, is not assured: recent elections in several of the countries that drove it have resulted in new governments with markedly different priorities.
Disclosure, however, is not the same as leverage. These gains reflect sustained civic engagement and demand rather than spontaneous government openness, and transparency alone has not loosened the hold that powerful interests retain over tax policy. What the region has built is the ability to see the tax system clearly. What it has not yet built is the capacity to change it.
Other Innovative Practices in the Latin America & the Caribbean Region
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- 91% provide downloadable, machine-readable data
- 82% provide multi-year coverage
- 73% offer interactive tools
- 73% publish documented metadata
- 64% link budget allocations to specific programs.
- 55% provide real-time or near-real-time updates.
- Only 36% publish outcome-based indicators.
Participation is rising, but its gains remain vulnerable to political change.
Latin America is widely recognized for pioneering democratic innovations that seek to include people in public decision-making. One of the earliest and most influential experiences of public participation in budgeting emerged in the 1980s in Porto Alegre, Brazil. From there, participatory budgeting became one of the most widely known and replicated participatory mechanisms in the world.
Initially, these initiatives were driven by social movements, grassroots organizations, labor unions and popular political parties seeking to ensure that people had a voice in setting priorities, allocating public resources and monitoring the implementation of municipal budgets and public services.
Over time, in Latin America and the Caribbean, new participatory mechanisms were introduced at the national government level and across different stages of the budget cycle, including budget formulation, implementation and oversight. These mechanisms have been established by a range of public institutions, including the executive, legislature and Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs).
The latest Open Budget Survey (OBS) results show a steady improvement in public participation across the region since 2019.
Creating and sustaining meaningful opportunities for public participation in the budget process requires political commitment. Brazil and Guatemala stand out this round for their efforts to expand citizen engagement, following changes in political leadership that placed greater emphasis on participation. The Dominican Republic also demonstrates sustained efforts towards the same.
Notable Participation Scores for Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean
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Not all countries in the region have followed this positive trend. El Salvador’s participation score has declined by 13 points since 2021, reflecting a reduction in opportunities for public engagement in the budget process. El Salvador and Nicaragua, both scoring 7 out of 100, currently have the lowest levels of public participation in the region, consistent with the broader contraction of civic space in both countries.
The OBS 2025 results demonstrate that progress in public participation is possible when governments make deliberate efforts to create and strengthen channels for citizen engagement. These scores capture whether such channels exist and how well they are designed, not how far public input ultimately shapes budget decisions. Sustained political commitment will be essential to transforming isolated initiatives into durable practices that improve accountability and strengthen public trust in budget decision-making.
Oversight institutions have the mandate but are exercising it less.
If transparency and participation are the region’s success story, oversight is its warning sign. Both legislatures and supreme audit institutions are under strain in different ways.
Legislative oversight has stalled. The regional score has hovered between 52 and 54 since 2019, and in 2025 it sits at its lowest point in that span. That flat line is not stability so much as a failure to advance, and beneath it sit sharper movements.
The clearest warning comes from Argentina, where legislative oversight fell from 44 to 28, the steepest single drop this round among the eleven countries assessed. For two consecutive years, Congress did not approve a national budget. The 2024 budget, drafted during the 2023 electoral transition, was sent to Congress but never debated amid political deadlock, and the 2023 budget was carried over into 2024 by executive decree. The result was a budget set by executive decision rather than legislative approval, not because the legislature was shut out, but because of legislative inaction. A similar pattern followed for 2025, when the proposal reached committee but stalled and no final opinion was issued. When the legislature does not exercise its core role of scrutinizing and approving the budget, the oversight function erodes even when the legal framework allows for it.
In Brazil, we see the opposite in terms of legislative overreach. There, Congress has taken control of a growing share of budget allocations through parliamentary amendments, or emendas parlamentares, which give individual legislators direct discretion over where money is spent. At the other extreme, in El Salvador and Nicaragua, executive dominance leaves the legislature almost no room to scrutinize at all. Together these cases carry a single lesson: an active legislature is not the same as an effective one, and formal oversight powers mean little without the political independence and the will to use them to advance the public good.
Audit institutions remain comparatively strong, but increasingly stand alone: the regional audit oversight score is 66, compared with 52 for legislative oversight. The difference between the scores reflects a broader divide between the formal architecture of audit independence and the scrutiny and follow-up needed to give that independence purpose. Protections against removing the head of the audit institution, discretion over what to audit, and clear mandates are now near universal across the 11 countries. What is weakening is the broader accountability system around them. In most countries, audit reports reach legislatures but go unexamined, audit processes are rarely reviewed by an independent body, and audit leaders are called to testify before legislative committees less often than they once were.
The most revealing finding is structural. On whether a legislative committee examines the audit report of the annual accounts and publishes its conclusions, 64 percent of countries have scored zero across the entire 2019 to 2025 period. The loop that should connect what auditors find to the legislators who can act on it is broken across most of the region, and it was broken before this assessment. Audit institutions are producing serious findings into a void, with little that follows in practice. In a region where people are asking an increasingly pointed question, whether their governments deliver, audit bodies working in isolation from the rest of the accountability system are not a technical shortcoming. They are a governance failure.
The problem does not end with legislatures not acting. Even where audit findings of the annual accounts are produced and examined, there is rarely any public record of what happens next, because almost no one closes the loop by reporting on what the government has done in response. Only in Brazil and Peru do the executive, the audit institution or the legislature publish reports tracking government action on audit recommendations or findings. In the rest of the region, the trail goes cold after the audit is published: findings are issued, but there is no public record of whether anyone acted on them.
This is where the danger zone becomes concrete. The audit accountability loop that would let a citizen know whether a government is delivering runs through four steps: the audit institution examines whether programs actually achieve their objectives, the executive reports on actions taken in response to audit findings, the audit institution or legislature independently publishes its own report on what the executive has done, and a legislative committee scrutinizes the audit of the annual accounts and publishes its conclusions.
Across most of the region, at least one of those links is missing, and often several are. When the loop breaks, delivery cannot be independently verified, and the space that opens is filled by a different kind of politics. As noted earlier, a growing share of citizens say they would accept a non-democratic government if it solved the country’s problems. That sentiment is not only about frustration with results; it is about the absence of a credible way to check whether results are being delivered at all. When the institutions that should verify delivery cannot do so, people are left with promises they have no way to check.
Ways to Strengthen Budget Accountability in the Region
Transparency
OBJECTIVE
To deepen disclosure in the areas of the budget where fiscal risk and distributional consequences matter most
RECOMMENDATIONS
Executive governments should disclose the full picture of fiscal risk in the budget proposal and supporting documentation, including contingent liabilities, expenditure arrears, quasi-fiscal activities, extra-budgetary funds, financial and nonfinancial assets, and long-term fiscal sustainability projections.
Executive governments should publish debt information that goes beyond outstanding stock to include composition, currency, interest rates, and maturity profile, so that legislatures, auditors, and the public can assess exposure rather than only volume.
Executive governments lagging behind should bring tax expenditure reporting up to the standard already set by leaders in the region, going beyond estimates of forgone revenue to identify who benefits and to evaluate whether these instruments achieve their stated objectives.
Executive governments should present budget information in one place and in machine-readable form, so that disclosure translates into use by the public.
GOOD PRACTICES
The Dominican Republic is among the few countries disclosing the areas that carry the greatest fiscal risk, where most of the region remains opaque. It provides substantial information on its financial assets, contingent liabilities, and long-term fiscal sustainability, the last anchored in an explicit analysis of the risk posed by the state pension system, and partial information on nonfinancial assets, expenditure arrears, and extra-budgetary funds. It is also among the region’s leaders on tax expenditures, disclosing not only the revenue forgone but the intended beneficiaries of each preference. And it makes budget information usable: six of its published budget documents include numerical data in machine-readable form. This did not happen all at once. The Dominican Republic has posted the most consistent transparency gains in the region over successive rounds, strengthening the content of the documents it already published rather than relying on any single reform. That steady, cumulative approach is what turns disclosure into a durable practice rather than a one-time gain.
Participation
OBJECTIVE
To institutionalise participation so that it endures beyond political cycles and reaches those the budget most affects
RECOMMENDATIONS
Executive governments should establish participatory mechanisms at every stage of the budget cycle, including execution, where opportunities for public engagement remain weakest.
Governments should report back publicly on how public input was used, so that participation becomes an exchange rather than a one-way consultation.
Participation mechanisms should be designed to reach historically underrepresented groups, with specific efforts to identify and engage those the budget most affects.
Legislatures and audit institutions should open their own processes to public input, extending participation beyond the executive and into approval and oversight.
GOOD PRACTICES
The strongest mechanisms in the region show what the recommendations above look like in practice: they reach beyond the usual participants, they extend across the budget cycle, and they close the loop by reporting back. Guatemala went to unusual lengths to widen access, issuing its invitations to participate in four languages, Spanish, Mam, Kaqchikel and Q’eqchi’, to reach Indigenous populations. In the Dominican Republic, budget priorities are set through local and regional councils, moving from the municipal to the provincial level before entering the national budget, and the executive published a written record listing the inputs received and summarising how they were used in formulating the annual budget. Brazil extended participation furthest across the cycle: its process for the multi-year plan engaged social movements representing underserved populations at both the formulation and monitoring stages, produced a public feedback report, and set up an online platform to track implementation, reaching into execution, where opportunities for public engagement are usually weakest. Each pairs inclusion in who is heard with responsiveness in showing what was done with it, which is what turns consultation into influence.
Oversight
OBJECTIVE
To close the loop between audit findings and action, so that oversight can answer whether governments deliver
RECOMMENDATIONS
Executive governments should publish regular reports on the steps they have taken to address audit findings and recommendations.
Audit institutions and legislatures should publish reports tracking what the executive has done in response to audit recommendations, so that follow-through is a matter of public record rather than internal correspondence.
Legislatures should examine audit reports promptly, publish their findings and recommendations, and hold regular hearings with audit institutions.
GOOD PRACTICES
Peru comes closer than any country in the region to closing the audit accountability loop. Its Comptroller General publishes reports tracking what the executive has done in response to audit recommendations, and a legislative committee examines the audit report and publishes its conclusions, a step eight of the eleven countries assessed do not take at all. Peru has also opened the loop to the public: since 2023 the Comptroller General has met with civil society to gather input into the National Control Plan, and this round it published feedback showing how those inputs were used. Together these practices connect auditors, legislators, and the public in a sequence where findings have somewhere to go. Peru shows that the missing links elsewhere are not a matter of institutional capacity but of practice, and that they can be built.
A Deeper Look at LAC Civil Society and Our Collaborations in the Region
In Latin America and the Caribbean, civil society has been the constant. It has been essential in advancing accountability: sustaining scrutiny where legislatures have not exercised theirs, keeping participation alive where formal mechanisms have closed, pressing for the inclusion of groups the budget too often counts but does not consult, and turning budget information into arguments that connect with what people experience. Partners have helped make tax debates legible, brought public input into audit programs, and tested whether budgets deliver what they promise. The resilience documented in this report is not only institutional. It rests on a civic infrastructure that has held through political turnover, and that is one of the main reasons the gains of the past two decades have not reversed. IBP has been collaborating extensively with civil society partners across the region to advance accountability in practice. Below are a few stories, projects, and analyses in which partners have used budget evidence to press for change in their communities.
Argentinian auditors unite with civil society to fight a rampant disease
Image credit: Asociación Civil por la Igualdad y la Justicia (ACIJ)
Jamaica partners share insights from their training in budget advocacy
Image credit: IBP
El Salvador partners reflect on the power of budget advocacy training
Image credit: IBP
Latin America Tax Expenditure Research, Analysis and Learning (LATERAL) project
Image credit: Lucy Brown/ Shutterstock
Integrating gender and climate change in public budgeting: The case of Mexico
Image credit: Marisol Benitez/ Unsplash
Open Budget Survey Partners
| Argentina | Asociación Civil por la Igualdad y la Justicia | Website | |
| Bolivia | Fundación Jubileo | Website | |
| Brazil | Inesc – Instituto de Estudos Socioeconômicos | Website | |
| Chile | Observatorio Fiscal del Centro Democracia y Opinión Pública de la Universidad Central | Website | |
| Dominican Republic | Fundación Solidaridad | Website | |
| El Salvador | Fundación Nacional para el Desarrollo (FUNDE) | Website | |
| Guatemala | Centro Internacional para Investigaciones en Derechos Humanos (CIIDH) | Website | |
| Honduras | Foro Social de Deuda Externa y Desarrollo de Honduras (FOSDEH) | Website | |
| Jamaica | Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CAPRI) | Website | |
| Nicaragua | Expediente Abierto | Website | |
| Peru | Ciudadanos al Día | Website |
Laura Castillo Cabral
Alex Ciconello
Andrés Ponce Morales
Elena Mondo
Cynthia Romero
Sally Torbert
Cosette Wong Highfill
Rajan Zaveri
Lilianna Ziedins
