Summer is a time when cities and municipalities slow down, streets become quieter, official premises briefly fall silent, and the everyday rhythm of public life appears to slip into a kind of lethargy. Yet behind the closed doors of assembly halls, among minutes, decisions and piles of documents that often go unnoticed, institutional life does not stop. Decisions are made, budgets are executed, and the accounts for the previous year should, in accordance with the law, by this point have taken their “final” form.
And no, this is not the opening page of a novel by Dobrica Ćosić, although it may briefly have that feel. What follows is not a story about officials, stamps, filing cabinets and thick folders, but about something much more concrete: decisions on final budget accounts and the money allocated from public budgets to Youth Policy, as well as how easy or difficult it is to trace where that money goes.
To trace the path of public money through the budget, we first need to understand the criteria according to which it is classified and labelled. This is where budget classification comes into play. It comprises programme classification, organisational classification, functional classification, the economic classification of revenues and receipts, the economic classification of expenditures and disbursements, and classification by sources of financing. The list of classifications is long enough to make it easy to get lost in this maze of terms before the search for public money has even begun. For that reason, we will focus on programme classification.
According to the Rulebook on the Standard Classification Framework and Chart of Accounts for the Budget System, programme classification is defined as a way of presenting revenues and expenditures according to the tasks and activities of budget users, with the aim of ensuring the efficient management of resources through programmes designed to contribute to strategic objectives in line with the country’s economic policy.
Implemented with the aim of ensuring efficient management of resources through proposed programmes that contribute to achieving strategic objectives in line with the country’s economic policy. In simpler terms, programme classification helps us understand where budget money goes and which policy objectives it is intended to support. This is why programme classification matters for our search. If we want to determine how much funding is allocated to young people, we need to be able to clearly identify where those funds are located in the budget and under what designation.
At this point, it is important to clarify that the term “allocations for young people” is used here in a narrower sense and refers to funds intended for the implementation of Youth Policy – that is, programmes, measures and activities aimed at improving the position of young people and implementing Youth Policy.
It is precisely at this level that our search for the answer to the question begins: how much money is actually allocated to youth policy at the local level?
At the level of the Republic of Serbia’s budget, this trail has a clear designation and name: Programme 1302 – Youth Policy. The budgetary address of Youth Policy at the national level is clear, making it possible to identify, monitor and analyse the funds allocated to this programme. The problem, however, emerges when we move down a level – from the national to the local level, namely to local self-government units (LSGUs). In their budgets, this trail is no longer as easy to follow, as allocations for young people are presented within another programme – 1301 – Development of Sport and Youth. It is precisely at this level that our search for an answer to the question begins: how much money is actually allocated to Youth Policy at the local level?
The path to that answer has not always been straightforward: one document led to another, one decision on a final budget account led to a subsequent issue of the Official Gazette, and one PDF document led to hundreds of pages that sometimes had to be reviewed manually. The situation is further complicated by the fact that there is no separate programme code 1302 for Youth Policy at the level of LSGUs, as there is in the budget of the Republic of Serbia.
Yet the problem is not that data on budget allocations do not exist – quite the opposite: there is plenty of data. The problem is that their formal availability is often not sufficient to make them genuinely usable for citizens, researchers and civil society organisations. The issue, therefore, is not only how much money is allocated to young people, but also whether we are actually able to clearly see that money in local government budgets.
The complexity of accessing these data becomes most apparent when you try to find them yourself.
Sisyphus pushed a stone uphill. We search for money in LSGU budgets.
The search for the 2024[1] final budget accounts of an LSGU often did not begin in one clearly designated place. Instead, it required reviewing the official websites of cities and municipalities, searching for decisions in different sections that were not always easy to identify at first glance, and, in many cases, systematically going through Official Gazettes published in the following year in order to locate the final budget account decision in the first place.
In some cases, the search took on an almost Sisyphean character: once the document was finally found among dozens of Official Gazettes, it turned out to have been published as a scanned PDF file, with no text-search functionality (Ctrl + F).
Instead of taking a few seconds to search for keywords such as “Development of Sport and Youth” or “1301”, the researcher was forced to go through the scanned document page by page in search of information that should be accessible within a few clicks. Once Programme 1301 – Development of Sport and Youth was finally located, all of its programme activities had to be reviewed in detail in order to find the relevant information under code 0005 – Implementation of Youth Policy. Naturally, the fact that a document is difficult to locate, or sometimes even more difficult to search, does not in itself mean that a local government is concealing anything, nor can such a claim be made without evidence.
However, when similar obstacles recur again and again, and when information about public money is scattered across different documents, formats and publication platforms, the question arises as to whether this constitutes merely the formal fulfilment of the obligation to publish budget documents, or genuine transparency that enables relevant stakeholders to gain meaningful insight into local government budget allocations.
The demand for greater visibility and comparability of local budget allocations is not merely a matter of interest to researchers, citizens or civil society organisations. Efficiency, transparency and accountability in the management of public funds are also recognised as one of the objectives of the current Public Finance Management Reform Programme for 2026–2030, adopted by the government of the Republic of Serbia on 14 May 2026.
A review of the available budget documents leaves another important impression: the funds allocated to young people appear relatively modest in relation to the overall budgets of LSGUs. A detailed analysis will provide the full picture, but the way in which these funds are allocated and presented in final budget accounts already raises the question of how much of a priority Youth Policy actually is for local governments.
If we cannot fully establish how much money is actually allocated to young people, it is difficult to assess whether those funds are sufficient in the first place.
One way to improve the transparency of allocations for young people would be to introduce Programme 1302 at the LSGU level as well. If there is a clearly designated programme for Youth Policy at the national level, the same logic should be applied in cities and municipalities. A clearly separate programme code would make it easier to identify, monitor and compare funds allocated to young people, thereby enabling a more straightforward assessment of how much local governments are actually investing in Youth Policy. In other words, if we want to trace the path of public money, the first step is to give it a clear address.
Introducing Programme 1302 at the local level would not, by itself, magically resolve all the challenges facing Youth Policy. It would, however, represent an important step towards greater transparency by making funds allocated to young people clearly visible. This would directly facilitate their monitoring, comparison and public oversight, while also creating greater space for a more informed public discussion about how much we actually invest in young people.
Ultimately, the issue is not simply whether 1302 exists as a separate programme, but whether the budget system provides sufficiently clear, comparable and verifiable data on public allocations to enable independent analysis, evidence-based assessment of public priorities and a more informed public dialogue.
Author: Tamara Jelić, Institute for Development and Innovation
[1] 2024 was selected as the most recent year for which sufficient data on final budget accounts were available at the time of the research.
