Early doctrine of budgetary incrementalism in the theory of Charles Lindblom and Aaron Wildavsky

Abstract

Despite numerous attempts of contemporary financial executives to enhance the national process of public budgeting with innovative solutions, the model of traditional, incremental budgeting still withstands as a primary form of budgetary technicism. The crucial contribution to describing and radical popularization of incremental ratio in the field of public budgeting was made by American scientists Aaron Wildavsky and Charles Lindblom who are considered to be the pioneers of early doctrine of budgetary incrementalism. Charles Lindblom approached the phenomenon of incremental decision-making in the context of wider social scene, advocating the advantages of marginal changes of public policy decisions in all spheres of decision-making as opposite to radical deviation from formerly adopted course of action. On the other side, Aaron Wildavsky explained with great precision the incremental ratio in decision making process in the field of public budgeting, that is annual budget decision making. According to Wildavsky, we should not pose the question how the process of public budgeting should look like ("what is a good budget?"), but we should only describe this process as it essentially is, or only could be. This leads us to the conclusion that incrementality, in the theory of early incrementalism, is viewed as an innate characteristic of budgeting process despite various reform initiatives.