Abstract
Over the past few decades, many governments throughout the world have promoted gender-responsive budgeting (GRB). With its focus on equality, accountability, transparency and participation in the policy-making process, GRB shares some relevant principles with public governance that call governments at national and subnational levels to rethink their roles in the whole economic system. This worldwide political and managerial interest does not find sufficient space in academic discussion, mainly in terms of public administration and management studies. Adopting an interpretative approach, the present study aims to investigate how an Italian municipality has involved stakeholders in the GRB process. The case study shows that, when GRB is fully developed, the stakeholders involved are both internal and external, and these multiple actors, in pursuing gender equality, cooperate to achieve a common, public aim. In this way, GRB gives effectiveness to the public decision-making process, contributing to greater incisiveness in the local government’s management and creation of a gender-sensitive governance process.
Highlights
Over the past few decades, many governments throughout the world have promoted initiatives to advance gender equality (Budlender 2002)
While the authors examined “the potential of GRB for budget reform, following a long line of efforts to effectuate changes in the budget decision-making process” (Rubin and Bartle 2005, p. 260), the present study aims to investigate how the adoption of the GRB affects public governance and management through stakeholder engagement, in the awareness that “critical to the success of gender-responsive budgeting is the buy-in of stakeholders inside and outside government” (Rubin and Bartle 2005, p. 269)
By pointing out the links between gender equality and efficiency and effectiveness, GRB makes institutions more aware of the consequences of their decisions on civil society, giving citizens a new tool to evaluate the use of public resources
Summary
Over the past few decades, many governments throughout the world have promoted initiatives to advance gender equality (Budlender 2002). The expression “women’s budget” (Budlender 2000) and, in recent times, gender-responsive budgeting (GRB), denote a national or local government budget that integrates the gender perspective into all phases of the budget cycle. The GRB aims to foster greater gender equality, efficiency and effectiveness, as well as transparency, accountability and the participation of civil society in the budget decision-making process. In the gender framework, citizens are both beneficiaries and agents of the process whereby governments, at all levels, redesign their policy-making mechanisms and their accountability systems. As the GRB involves stakeholders and ensures that policy design and the allocation of resources meet the wide variety of citizens’ needs, it must be considered as an important tool of public governance (Brody 2009)
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