The Accountability Gap: Can Citizens Track Who Decides, Who Spends and Who Delivers Public Projects?

Document- and Data-Based Investigative Report

Prepared and published by: Mohamed Chaieb Barhoumi
ATEP MED – Arabic Digital Center for Media & Development

Introduction: Who Is Accountable for Public Projects?

Every public development project begins with a decision. An institution identifies a need, a project is proposed, financial resources are allocated, procurement procedures may follow, a contractor or implementing body is selected, work begins, payments are made and, eventually, the project is expected to deliver a public service or measurable benefit.

Yet for ordinary citizens, the chain connecting these decisions can be difficult to follow.

A project may be publicly announced without making it immediately clear who proposed it, who approved it, who financed it, who signed the relevant agreement, who implemented it, who supervised the work, how much was actually spent and who is responsible for verifying the final results.

This investigation examines that accountability chain in Tunisia.

The central question is straightforward:

Can citizens follow the journey of a public project from the original decision to the final result?

The investigation does not assume that a lack of easily accessible information automatically means that a project was improperly managed. Public administration involves complex procedures, multiple institutions and different levels of responsibility. Instead, the purpose is to determine whether sufficient documentary evidence exists to establish responsibility at each stage and whether citizens can independently understand how public resources are being used.

The investigation follows the chain:

Decision → Budget → Financing → Procurement → Contract → Implementation → Monitoring → Payment → Completion → Public Benefit.

1. Who Decides?

The first question concerns the origin of a public project.

Who identified the need?

Was the project part of a national development strategy, a sectoral programme, a regional plan or an annual investment programme?

Which institution proposed it?

Which authority approved it?

What evidence was used to establish that the project was necessary?

These questions are important because public investment begins before money is spent.

A project normally reflects a public policy decision about priorities. Roads, schools, hospitals, water infrastructure, agricultural investments, employment programmes and other public interventions compete for limited resources.

An investigation therefore needs to establish how the original decision was made.

Was the project based on documented needs?

Were regional inequalities considered?

Were expected beneficiaries identified?

Were costs estimated?

Were measurable objectives established?

The answers can help explain not only where public money is spent but also why a particular project was selected.

2. Who Provides the Money?

The second stage is financing.

A public project may be financed through the state budget, external loans, grants, development partners, public institutions or combinations of different sources.

Identifying the financing source is essential.

The investigation should establish:

How much money was allocated?

What was the source of financing?

Was the financing domestic or external?

Was it a grant, loan or another form of financing?

Were there conditions attached to the financing?

Was the original amount later modified?

For projects involving international development financing, the investigation should also examine the financing agreement and the responsibilities assigned to the Tunisian authorities and the development partner.

The objective is to follow the money without assuming that financing itself represents a problem.

The key question is transparency:

Can citizens identify the source, amount and purpose of the resources committed to a public project?

3. Who Spends?

Budget allocation is different from actual expenditure.

A project can receive an allocation without spending the entire amount during the same period.

Therefore, the investigation must distinguish between:

allocated funds,

committed funds,

paid funds,

and, where available,

final expenditure.

This distinction is particularly important when examining multi-year projects.

A project may receive an initial allocation and later require additional resources.

A budget may be revised.

Implementation may be delayed.

Payments may occur in different financial years.

The investigation should reconstruct these changes through official financial documents rather than relying on a single figure.

The central question is:

Can the public follow how an initial budget allocation becomes actual expenditure?

4. Who Receives the Contract?

Once a public project moves into implementation, procurement becomes a critical stage.

The investigation examines the available procurement documentation to establish who was selected to carry out the work or provide the service.

The documentary trail may include:

Tender announcement → Bids → Evaluation → Award → Contract → Amendments → Implementation → Completion.

Where public information is available, the investigation can examine the contract value, implementation period, scope of work and responsible contractor or service provider.

The fact that a company receives a public contract does not by itself indicate a problem.

The investigative question is whether the process and resulting contract can be understood and verified through appropriate documentation.

Citizens should be able to determine, where legally and practically possible:

What was purchased?

Who was selected?

For what value?

For how long?

Under what conditions?

5. Who Implements?

Signing a contract does not mean that the project has been delivered.

Implementation is another stage requiring monitoring.

The investigation should establish which entity is responsible for carrying out the work and which institution is responsible for supervising it.

In a construction project, for example, several actors may be involved.

There may be a public contracting authority, a contractor, an engineering consultant, a technical supervisor and other stakeholders.

The investigation therefore asks:

Who is responsible for implementation?

Who verifies technical progress?

Who approves completed work?

Who authorizes payments?

Who records delays or problems?

Understanding these responsibilities is essential when assessing the performance of a public project.

6. Who Monitors?

Monitoring is one of the most important links in the accountability chain.

A project may encounter delays, cost changes or technical problems.

The existence of such difficulties does not automatically indicate mismanagement.

What matters is whether they are identified, documented and addressed through the appropriate procedures.

The investigation will therefore examine available monitoring information.

Questions include:

Were progress reports produced?

Were deadlines monitored?

Were financial and physical implementation compared?

Were problems formally recorded?

Were corrective measures taken?

Who was responsible for monitoring?

Were monitoring results communicated to relevant stakeholders?

The absence of accessible information can itself become an important transparency question, although it should not automatically be interpreted as evidence of wrongdoing.

7. Who Pays?

Public payments are another important part of the accountability chain.

A project can have an approved budget and a signed contract, but payments normally occur according to contractual and administrative procedures.

The investigation should therefore distinguish between:

budget allocation,

contract value,

financial commitment,

and

actual payment or expenditure.

For major projects, a multi-year financial timeline can reveal how spending evolved.

This can help identify whether expenditure broadly follows the implementation schedule or whether there are significant differences requiring explanation.

Again, a difference does not automatically establish misconduct.

It establishes a question that should be investigated through documents.

8. What Happens When the Project Is Delayed?

Public projects can be delayed for many legitimate reasons.

Land acquisition, technical changes, procurement procedures, financing arrangements, contractor difficulties, administrative processes or unforeseen circumstances can all affect implementation.

The investigative responsibility is therefore to establish the facts.

What was the original deadline?

What is the current deadline?

How long has the project been delayed?

What caused the delay?

Was the contract amended?

Did the cost change?

What work remains?

When is completion expected?

The responsible institution should have the opportunity to explain documented delays.

This approach transforms a simple statement such as "the project is late" into a documented investigation into why it is late and what consequences the delay has produced.

9. When Completion Does Not Mean Impact

A project can be officially completed and still require further examination.

A building may be finished but not fully equipped.

A water network may be constructed but provide an unreliable service.

A training programme may reach its numerical target without producing sustainable employment.

An agricultural project may distribute equipment without producing lasting increases in income.

For this reason, the investigation distinguishes between:

completion

and

impact.

Completion is an output.

Impact is the measurable change experienced by beneficiaries.

The central question becomes:

Did the completed project actually produce the public benefit for which it was financed?

10. Who Benefits?

A public project ultimately exists for people.

The investigation therefore places beneficiaries at the end of the accountability chain.

Where possible, reporting should establish:

Who was supposed to benefit?

How many beneficiaries were targeted?

How many were actually reached?

Were the intended communities served?

Did the service improve?

Did household conditions change?

Are benefits continuing?

This is particularly important for development projects whose objectives involve poverty reduction, employment, social inclusion, rural development or improved access to services.

A project cannot be fully understood through financial data alone.

The beneficiary perspective provides the final test of whether the intervention produced a meaningful result.

11. The Regional Accountability Question

Accountability also has a geographical dimension.

Citizens in different regions may experience public investment differently.

Some areas may receive major infrastructure investments while other communities continue to face shortages in basic services.

The investigation can compare selected projects across different governorates by examining:

Investment amount

Population served

Project objectives

Implementation period

Completion status

Service availability

Beneficiary outcomes

The purpose is not to create simplistic rankings between regions.

The objective is to determine whether regional differences in public investment and results can be explained by documented needs, policy priorities and measurable development objectives.

12. Following External Development Money

International development financing creates another layer of accountability.

When a development partner finances a project in Tunisia, several questions become relevant.

How much financing was approved?

What were the objectives?

Which Tunisian institution implements the project?

What procurement procedures apply?

What indicators are used?

How is progress monitored?

What reports are published?

What happens if objectives are not achieved?

For journalists, development-finance documents can provide valuable evidence for tracking the relationship between international financing and local results.

The investigation should distinguish between the amount approved by a development partner and the amount actually disbursed or spent.

It should also distinguish between project outputs and long-term outcomes.

13. Building an Accountability File

For each selected public project, ATEP MED can build a standardized accountability file containing:

Project name

Location

Public institution responsible

Original objective

Financing source

Original budget

Revised budget

Procurement procedure

Contractor

Contract value

Implementation deadline

Current status

Financial execution

Physical implementation

Beneficiaries

Monitoring arrangements

Completion evidence

Field observations

Beneficiary testimony

Institutional response

Available evidence of impact

This structure can transform complex public documents into a clear investigative record.

14. Data, Documents and Field Reporting

The strongest accountability investigation combines several types of evidence.

Documents establish what was officially planned.

Financial data establish how resources were allocated and executed.

Procurement records establish contractual responsibilities.

Monitoring reports establish reported progress.

Field visits establish physical conditions.

Interviews provide human evidence.

Beneficiary testimony helps assess real-world effects.

Independent verification helps test important claims.

No single source should automatically be treated as sufficient for every conclusion.

The investigation should cross-check important information whenever possible.

15. Giving Institutions the Right to Respond

Accountability journalism requires fairness.

When an investigation identifies an unexplained difference between a project's objectives and its implementation, the responsible institution should be contacted.

Questions may include:

Why did implementation differ from the original plan?

Why was the deadline changed?

Why did the cost change?

What corrective measures were taken?

What is the current status?

How many beneficiaries have been reached?

What evidence supports the reported results?

Institutional responses should be accurately represented.

This provides readers and viewers with the evidence necessary to understand competing explanations.

16. The Citizen's Right to Follow Public Money

At the centre of this investigation is a simple principle:

Public money requires public accountability.

Citizens do not need to understand every technical detail of public administration to ask legitimate questions about public projects.

They should be able to identify, as far as public information permits:

Who decided?

Who financed?

Who contracted?

Who implemented?

Who monitored?

Who paid?

Who benefited?

What changed?

The more clearly these questions can be answered through accessible evidence, the stronger the accountability chain becomes.

17. The Accountability Gap

The accountability gap appears when one or more links in the chain become difficult to establish.

A project may be publicly announced but its implementation status may be unclear.

A budget may be published but project-level expenditure may be difficult to follow.

A contract may be awarded but information about final completion may be limited.

A project may be completed but its long-term impact may not be measured.

These gaps do not automatically establish wrongdoing.

But they create legitimate areas for investigation.

The role of evidence-based journalism is to identify those gaps, investigate them and ask responsible institutions for documented explanations.

18. The Central Investigative Test

The investigation proposes a simple accountability test for selected public projects:

Can we identify who decided?

Can we identify how much was allocated?

Can we identify the financing source?

Can we identify who received the contract?

Can we establish what was implemented?

Can we establish how much was spent?

Can we identify who monitored the work?

Can we verify completion?

Can we identify the beneficiaries?

Can we demonstrate what changed?

If the chain can be reconstructed through reliable evidence, citizens have a clearer picture of how public resources were transformed into public services.

If important links cannot be established, those missing links become the subject of further investigation.

Conclusion: Making the Accountability Chain Visible

Public projects are more than budget lines.

They represent decisions, financial commitments, contracts, implementation responsibilities and expectations of public benefit.

For citizens, however, the most important information is often dispersed across different documents, institutions and stages of the project cycle.

This investigation seeks to bring those pieces together.

It follows the chain from:

Decision → Budget → Financing → Procurement → Contract → Implementation → Monitoring → Payment → Completion → Beneficiary → Impact.

The objective is not to accuse institutions or contractors without evidence.

It is to establish what can be documented, what can be verified, what remains unclear and which explanations are provided by the responsible authorities.

The central accountability question is therefore:

Can citizens trace a public project from the moment a decision is made to the moment a measurable public benefit reaches the people it was designed to serve?

Where the answer is clear, transparency becomes measurable.

Where the answer is incomplete, the missing information becomes a legitimate subject for further reporting.

And where the evidence reveals a difference between public commitments and actual results, journalism can document that difference and ask the institutions responsible to explain it.

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Investigative Methodology & Accountability Focus

This investigation combines document-based research, public-budget analysis, procurement research, financial tracking, project monitoring, open-data analysis, field reporting, interviews, beneficiary testimony and independent source verification.

For each selected project, the reporting will compare the original objectives with the financing, contractual arrangements, implementation progress, completion status and measurable outcomes.

The methodology maintains a clear distinction between planned objectives, allocated resources, contractual commitments, reported implementation, verified outputs, operational services and measurable impact.

Where important discrepancies are identified, the investigation will seek documentary evidence and request responses from the relevant institutions and stakeholders.

The objective is to make the public accountability chain visible and understandable:

Who decides → Who finances → Who contracts → Who implements → Who monitors → Who pays → Who benefits → What changes.

A document- and data-based investigative report

Prepared and published by: Mohamed Chaieb Barhoumi

ATEP MED – Arabic Digital Center for Media & Development