On Sustainable Human Development: Gender Auditing in a Capability Approach

Abstract

An important social dimension of sustainable human development is gender equity. Women's increasing exclusion and vulnerability require not only targeted government spending for equal opportunities between sexes, but also gender-sensitive policy making. Feminist studies have developed several tools to assess the gender impact of public policy and, in particular, of public budgets. They commonly audit the gender impact of public policies by analyzing public spending through elementary indicators. Their starting idea is that without systematic gender auditing, public policies may generate new (or perpetuate old) inequalities between men and women. According to the Capability Approach, a multidimensional auditing methodology is needed to assess the impact of public policy on women's well- being. In this paper, we introduce an innovative approach to Gender Auditing (GA) of public budgets inspired by the capability approach. This approach has been experimented in a recent attempt to develop gender budgets in Emilia Romagna (Italy) with reference to the Region and to Modena Municipality and Provincial District. Different tools have been designed and experimented. In particular, at regional level, individual well-being is defined in terms of extensions of capability sets and inequalities are seen as multiple dis-functionings in a social space where women are disadvantaged in terms of access to resources, education, health, control over their bodies. Hence, by identifying some dimensions of women's empowerment and some public policy domains, we build a GA matrix together with some simple indicators for GA. At provincial level, the list of capabilities used to define a multidimensional well-being is derived from the capabilities implicit and embodied in the administrative structure and assumed as political responsibilities of the local government with regard to the well-being of residents. The methodology used for the Provincial District is an extended reproductive well-being approach that not only challenges women's inequality but also introduces a new concept of sustainability in the light of women's experience of the fragility of dominant subjects and of the normality of the actual economic system. Finally, at municipality level, the focus is set on the net of institutions that cooperate to guarantee local well-being and particular attention is given to the capability of caring.