PROGRAMME BUDGETING IN THE WAEMU AREA: TAKING STOCK OF FIFTEEN YEARS OF REFORM (2009-2025) BETWEEN NORMATIVE ACHIEVEMENTS AND EFFECTIVENESS GAPS

There is something puzzling about the WAEMUs budgetary balance sheet in 2025: all the texts have been adopted, all the structures created, all the documents produced and yet administrative practices have not kept pace. It is this gap, between reform on paper and reform as lived experience, that this article seeks to understand. Drawing on New Public Management theory, institutional economics, and the international literature on results-based budgeting, it proposes an original four-level conceptual model normative, organisational, behavioural, and effective reform that allows a precise assessment of where each country actually stands in its appropriation of the reform. Senegal, selected as the primary case study because it is among the most advanced WAEMU states in formal transposition, illustrates the central paradox: undeniable normative achievements coexist with persistent obstacles maintained ex-ante controls, absent IFMIS, current expenditure growing faster than investment. A comparative analysis of Rwanda, Morocco, Ghana, and South Africa shows that these obstacles are not inevitable, but that overcoming them requires targeted responses on the behavioural and technical dimensions of reform, not just the legal one.