ABSTRACT
Poor social conditions continue to be a problem throughout the world, and studies of the consequences of limited social development remain widespread. Suggestions from the governance literature indicate that the collaborative engagement of civil society could improve social development by making budget development and resource choices open to a wider range of citizens. This chapter considers whether the action of external collaborative stakeholders associated with open budgets is likely to influence social development. To test this suggestion, we used structural equation modelling on Brazilian municipality-wide data with more than five thousand observations. The contribution of this study is the proposition of a Collaborative Budget Model, in which external collaborative stakeholders have a participatory role helping to achieving social development by combining open budgets and budgetary resources.
