Supranational institutions such as the United Nations, the OECD and the European Commission actively promote budget innovations such as SDG or green budgeting. Although there are detailed implementation guidelines for these sustainability budgeting techniques, their broad application at the national level is still in its infancy. This is even more true at the municipal level, where capacity and financial resources are often limited. In this conference paper, I analyze the current state of municipal sustainability budgeting with a special focus on Germany. Based on a literature review, I find a surprising lack of research on this topic. In addition, I conduct a qualitative study to map the German landscape and identify critical factors for implementation. Preliminary results suggest that, in addition to well-known factors such as the central role of the finance department or the existence of a local sustainability strategy, peer-to-peer learning among municipalities and external expertise are important for successful implementation.

The State of Minas Gerais has been facing a delicate financial and fiscal situation, with structural deficits since 2014, mainly due to the increase in mandatory expenses, although public revenue had a considerably lower evolution. This situation led the State’s Executive branch to face serious problems with the fulfillment of its financial obligations.

From the perspective of revenues, it is difficult to promote the State’s revenue growth, since the increase in the tax burden brings negative impacts to the population, who loses purchasing power. On the expense side, adjusting the accounts is also a challenging task, since most of it has a mandatory nature, without any margin of discretion by the treasurer, such as personnel expenses, debt, and the constitutionally established minimum investment percentages for areas like health and education. With that being said, it is urgent to consider more rational and efficient ways to use public resources, especially when it comes to discretionary expenses.

Bearing in mind the making of annual budgets, the incremental methodology - traditionally used by the State - tends to replicate what was executed in the previous year, a situation that makes it difficult for possible adjustments to be made in a rational way. Although the so-called incrementalism simplifies the process by using the previous year’s budget as a starting point, the time saved does not compensate for the continuation of wasted expenditures, which is characteristic of the incremental budget system, especially in times of economic instability (Ibrahim, 2019).

On the other hand, the making of the public budget through the Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) methodology consists of allocating resources based on deliveries and quality levels, aiming to ensure greater harmony between demands and expenses. And, since this methodology can be used both in the public and private sectors, in different realities and different countries, the purpose of this article is to present and analyze the experience of the State of Minas Gerais in implementing ZBB as a method for a better and more rational allocation of scarce resources, aiming to prioritize the policies that have greater value to citizens. For that, a case study was carried out describing the implementation of the ZBB methodology in the State, as well as the results obtained from a questionnaire applied to the participants of the process, in addition to the calculation of the indicator that compares the expenses of the primary and alternate sectors of the entity, before and after using the ZBB method.

Purpose: The university system has experienced a wide process of reform aiming at adopting management accounting and control tools typical of private sector organizations. In the literature, the budget is considered as one of the most important and useful management accounting and control tool because of its capacity to contributing to the building of the foundations for an effective and efficient development of future management activities. The use of the budget has been considered an important tool to translate management logics within public sector organizations but many times this reform process has resulted in a strong colonization of accounting dimension over all the other dimensions existing within a public sector organization. In universities, one of the main effect of this accountingization process has been a marketization of their activities: students are considered sources of financial resources more than persons to whom provide knowledge and skills. Differently, in many cases the budget has been adopted in a formal way because of its mimetic adoption without an effective change in universities. Based on an institutional perspective, most literature has focused on the reasons for the adoption of budgets in universities but very few are the contributions aiming at highlighting the logics and the way of drafting budgets within universities. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of budgeting processes in universities. In particular, it aims to understand what logics the various subjects participating in budgeting process use and above all see how and why these subjects play the different available institutional logics.

Research design: The paper relies upon a case-study approach investigating the experience of a university in its budgeting process to understand the inner logics of action and their play by the subjects involved in. The case study has been developed using an interventionist approach. The potential subjectivity criticised to this methodology is mitigate by the joint analysis of the case with the co-authors and the vast use of official documents as a way for (dis)confirming the interpretation of the case study. From a theoretical point of view, instuitutional logics has been used as a skeleton theory for analysing the case study. By examining the logics used in adopting a budget within a large university it will be possible to contribute to the theory by identifying obstacles and/or enablers of the different institutional logics existing in public sector organizations and the way through which they are played.

Findings: The case studies identify how and to what extent people have been involved in the preparation of the budget of a university, highlighting challenges and opportunities in using such an approach for the decision-making process. The in-depth analysis of institutional logics in the most important phase of resource allocation represented by the budget a university makes it possible to draw the path of involvement and responsibilities in resources allocation, actions undertaken by the actors involved in the process, and effects of actions in terms of cohesion, or fragmentation, of the underpinned logics existing within universities.

Practical Implications: The experience of the university used as case study sheds light on the role played by institutional logics in the decision-making process of budget preparation. It offers a lesson to learn for politicians and managers of universities, and more broadly of public sector organisations, in order to understand at the micro level how logics behind the adoption of decisions about resource allocation are played and its effects on the entire organisation.