The ‘Economic Literacy and Budget Accountability for Governance: Leaders/Practitioners Workshop’ Organised by IDEAs in partnership with Action Aid International Gurgaon, 26 -31 January, 2008.

This workshop, held jointly with Action Aid International, was part of IDEAs’ efforts to regulate developing country finances, especially new forms of finances in accordance with broad based development needs and to make the budget process more understandable, people friendly and participatory. While Action Aid provided the larger participation and infrastructure for the event, IDEAs’ involvement included providing support in designing the workshop and in providing part of the academic input by inviting speakers from its members. The workshop aimed at enabling participants, who were largely from the civil society organizations but also academics, to deal with expanding discussions on development and inputs from a political economy perspective. The issues highlighted were the questions of financial flows, the provision of finance for development and national development questions. Apart from these issues, specific modules were aimed to be developed on methodologies, tools and instruments. IDEAs, The workshop was designed to enable, both ActionAid and IDEAs to take the process of economic democratisation further, through promoting capacities and collective action on the ground.