ABSTRACT
Public budgeting attracts two strands of usage. The first is as a field of practice, which has moved side by side with the journey of human civilization. The second is as a field of study (theory), which is relatively young as compared to the field of practice. As a field of practice, public budgeting is part of public financial management (PFM) which remains a core function of any government whether the country concerned is a developed or a developing one. Public administrators are directly or indirectly involved in public budgeting at some or all of formulation, implementation, accounting and reporting stages as well as oversight. As a field of academic study, public budgeting remains at the heart of the broad discipline of public administration but more specifically within public finance and public procurement (supply) specializations. PFM broadly encompasses the mobilization of revenue and the allocation of these funds to various activities intended to deliver public services. In any country, Uganda inclusive, the instrument used to attain the objectives of government is a public budget. The term public budgeting covers the processes and intricacies involved in formulation and development, implementation, accounting and reporting about the budget as well as the oversight functions of a public entity’s budget. The existence of the above two strands used to describe public budgeting implies that the term public budgeting has an academic connotation beyond just the practice. The theoretical understanding of how the public budgeting process is undertaken and the forces that come into play to produce a budget for a country, the disciplines that shape our understanding of public budgeting, the various approaches as well as whatever is done to prepare people in schools and universities to effectively undertake the process of public budgeting fall within the domain of public budgeting.
