Oversight
This toolkit has been created to assist public institutions with a mandate to enforce regulations on political party and/or campaign finance.
Welcome to Oversight — the toolkit for political finance institutions!
While most discussions about how to increase transparency and control over the role of money in political and electoral processes emphasise the importance of implementation, there are very few resources available to support this work in practice. That is why we have created this toolkit for political finance oversight institutions.
This toolkit has been created to assist public institutions with a mandate to enforce regulations on political party and/or campaign finance. It aims to assist oversight institutions on all continents and in all situations in implementing their mandate. The issues covered vary from strategic and operational planning to key activities such as advisory services, control of received financial reports, handling issues of non-compliance and the development of procedures.
Public institutions are the primary intended audience for this toolkit. It will also be of great utility to civil society activists and organizations focused on anti-corruption and providing oversight of the implementation of political finance regulations, as well as legislators, journalists, and others.Our aspiration is for this toolkit to evolve based on your input and future developments, with further information being added over time.
This toolkit has been designed to allow the user to focus in on whatever area is of greatest interest, but also to be an integrated resource that could beneficially be used to guide political finance oversight institutions across their work and implementation of their mandate.
This toolkit has been developed by Lisa Klein and Barbara Jouan-Stonestreet, leading political finance experts with operational experience of working with political finance oversight institutions in Europe and the U.S., together with the IFES Senior Political Finance Adviser Magnus Ohman. In addition, over 30 experts and implementers from over 15 countries have contributed writing sections, providing case studies or undertaking reviews of drafts during the development of this toolkit (see our grateful acknowledgments). The involvement of experts from a wide range of countries has greatly helped to nuance the information in the toolkit, and we hope also its applicability in many contexts.