Appraising the alignment of development budgets to district development plans in Malawi’s local governments: trends, emerging issues, and challenges

Abstract

Local governments in Malawi and in many countries alike have been making concerted attempts to structure the allocation of resources in the development budgets based on policy priorities declared in District Development Plans (DDPs) as part and parcel of public finance management reforms. This is based on assumption that policy-based fiscal strategy and budgeting is the only immediate tool to give life to DDPs advocated by public financial management practitioners and scholars. However, comprehensive studies appraising the alignment of development budgets to DDPs have been given scant attention at the local level in Malawi. Therefore, the burden of this study was to ascertain whether budgetary resource allocations are aligned to the prioritised development issues stipulated in the DDPs in Malawi’s local governments. The study employed a mixed research design in line with the nature of the specific research questions, where the quantitative approach predominated over qualitative approach. It also made usage of Zomba District Council as an illustrative case study. The central argument is that the budgetary resources are partially aligned to the key priority areas declared in the DDPs as the practice has been riddled with a myriad of challenges such as unrealistic commitments, over dependency on donors and political interferences. The study concludes that local governments’ efforts to align the development budget to DDPs are certainly to bear fruits if the bottlenecks that are reinforcing the status quo are mitigated. The findings of this study are in line with the experiences at the national level where the alignment of the national budget to medium term development strategies hangs precariously in a balance due to primarily limited fiscal space and donor dependent syndrome.