There has never been a more important time to work on public finances. Budgets are under stress, as governments face doubtful citizens and a lack of trust. The demands on public purses are only going to increase with the costs of climate change, the demographic transition, and the pressure to cope with economic and technological transformations.

Experts have learned a lot about how public systems work and documented the experience of many succesful and failed reforms. International organizations have mobilized resources, expertise and analytical tools to support reform efforts. But the public finance space is fragmented between practitioners and researchers and different academic disciplines. The diversity of ideas provided by political scientists, public administration researchers, sociologists, accountants and economists does not reach global practice.

We want to close these gaps by bringing together innovators and reformers from different countries, researchers from many different disciplines and the experts who intermediate between them.

Our understanding of public finance is deliberately quite open and vague. It includes questions of public financial management, budgeting, fiscal policy, expenditure and revenue policy, fiscal institutions, digital public infrastructure, and so on. Many debates in health policy, civil service management, transparency and accountability have a public finance angle, too. In short, if it deals with the use of public money, it’s public finance!