Gender Responsive Budgets

Regional Preparatory Meeting for the 10-year Review of Implementation of the
Beijing Platform for Action
Geneva, Switzerland, 14-15 December 2004

The government budget as the main policy executing tool by governments is a powerful instrument for change in any country, and it can be used to cover the needs of the most unprotected or disadvantaged groups in society.

The growing recognition that macroeconomic policy plays an important role in living standards and economic opportunities for the population in general, and women in particular, is behind the economic rationale for introducing a gender perspective into budgets. There are costs associated with lower output, reduced development of people’s capacities, less leisure and diminished well-being when macroeconomic policy, through its different instruments, creates further inequalities instead of reducing them.

Gender budgets initiatives can be organized by Governments as well as parliamentarians or civil society groups.

Progress and Good Practices

The location at the geographical and political level is quite varied including joint government-civil society initiatives. The following examples illustrate the variety of approaches and some of the results obtained.

• The United Kingdom Women’s Budget Group (UK WBG) is perhaps the most successful example of GRB that has been initiated by civil society at the national level or “outside” government initiatives. In addition to the changes on benefits and taxing that the group has been able to influence, another major step achieved has been convincing HM Treasury to undertake a gender pilot project across three government departments. Another important step in linking women’s situation to a specific policy to which the UK Government has given top priority is the WBG Poverty Working Group. Its goal is to present a case to the government to extend its anti-child poverty agenda to include women. In this case the WBG has drawn from the experiences of a wider group of NGOs and has organized a meeting funded by Oxfam, called the “Voices of Experience”, which brought together 35 women who are living in poverty, to share and discuss their experiences, and made policy recommendations to bring them out of poverty.
  
  
• In Canada and the United States other outside government initiatives can be traced, although in these cases there has been no collaboration with government as shadow reports or alternative uses of the budget are produced which are used by activists for lobbying. At the moment, there is only scant information on other initiatives outside government starting in Poland, Belarus, Hungary and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, albeit all are at a very early stage. These initiatives are both at the national and local level and cover different areas or departments. Although in the Russian Federation the Open Society Institute (OSI) piloted an outside government initiative in 2001, sustainability of the initiative proved difficult. Both UNIFEM and UNDP are currently engaged in efforts supporting both government and NGOs to step up the efforts around introducing GRB at both national and regional level and building on the OSI pilot.
  
  
• Sweden and France appear to have the best example of inside government practice and of continuity in presenting a report on a yearly basis as an annex to their main budgetary documents. However, there are important differences in approaches.
  
  
• According to the Budget Act for 2000, the French parliament established the obligation by government to submit an annex to the draft Budget Act setting out the moneys that are earmarked for promoting gender equality and those that are specifically dedicated to addressing women’s needs.
  
  
• The French case, although being highly laudable and a good practice in mainstreaming which is easily transferable to all UNECE countries, does not present a deeper analysis and recommendations. The yearly report is a good starting point as an annual exercise in monitoring the status of women and the efforts towards gender equality throughout the entire French budget, but more is needed. In the most recent edition, however (see 2004 document¹), there is a more conscientious effort on the part of line ministries and regions to report on the spending of various programmes and projects in gender terms.
  
  
• It is also important to note that there is an explicit objective in the 2004 document (p. 6) for specific objectives to be programmed in the coming years, which could facilitate the gender equality analysis of the budget. In addition, the yellow paper includes a yearly scan of reports and academic papers produced on gender equality and the status of women.
  
  
• Sweden for over 10 years has been producing an annual document on the distribution of economic resources between women and men. It is published in the budget proposal prepared by the section of the Ministry of Industry dealing with gender statistics. In 2003, the document was 'upgraded' and moved to the Ministry of Finance. This year there has been a small change, with the document focusing on parents.² The upgrading was actually a part of the '121 point program’, part of a political agenda for negotiations among the socialist Government, the communist party and the green party.
  
  
• The Government acknowledges the significance of the budget as the prime policy instrument and thus considers it highly important that gender analysis of all government policy areas be made within each of the corresponding ministries. The ministries are expected to set gender equality objectives and targets within the programmes they propose in the budget bill.
  
  
• In Belgium, there is also an ongoing national pilot initiative which might also be strengthened by a law requirement. However, the change of government in 2004 has put this initiative on hold. All budget and gender mainstreaming officials of all federal administration and ministerial cabinets received training in the first step. Also, applying the three category expenditure framework elaborated by Sharp and Budlender (1998)³ for all the departments to follow, it was discovered that some departments were already applying some rudimentary GRB analysis without labelling it as such, as it was necessary for their own work. Based on the availability of data and the willingness of a few administrations, a further step was to analyse in depth some areas of third type expenditures that are not usually evaluated in terms of their gender impact.
  
  
• In Spain, changes in the law that regulates the procedure for the introduction of new law projects and regulations (Law 50/1997 of 27 November) explicitly require that a gender impact assessment be attached to each law or regulation project as of 13 October 2003. So far, no information is available on how effective the introduction of this requirement has been. If applied, this should be a very efficient tool for mainstreaming gender into the national, regional and local budgets. In principle it would go a step further than the French initiative, as the focus is on gender impact assessment, not only on women’s situation in each of the areas of the different departments.
  
  
• In Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the United States, there are also excellent within government local-level initiatives, which show a variety of approaches and results as well as areas or departments covered. Here it is interesting to note that the tools usually recommended by experts were not wholly adequate for the needs of the local-level finances and that innovative methodologies have been applied to adapt or create new tools for analysis.
  
  
• The Italian initiative was the result of a seminar that the Ministry for Equal Opportunities organized in 2000 on gender impact assessment of government budgets, which was attended by local administrators from all over Italy. The Ministry proposed a plan to implement gender responsive budgets at the central government level, but the newly elected government in 2000 did not follow it through. However, at the regional level, the idea took hold and by 2002 there were already four regional initiatives underway.
  
  
• In the United States, the city of San Francisco, by unilaterally adopting CEDAW, has begun to gradually introduce gender responsive budgets into all its departments. It has produced a Handbook, and each year more departments are reported to have engaged in the analysis, but there are so far no reports on the changes that have resulted from this activity.
  
  
• In the Swiss canton of Basel, the Office for Equality took the lead in introducing such budgets in 2003, although some previous documentation on expenditure in social areas had already been produced. While no changes in the budget could be recorded, politicians as well as journalists are now more sensitive to the issue, in spite of recent reductions in the resources of that Office.
  
  
• In Spain, the pilot experience in the Basque country is the first and most advanced in the country, and other initiatives at the local and regional level are now under way. EMAKUNDE, the Basque Women's Institute, which was founded in 1988 as an autonomous organization dependent on the Presidency of the Basque Government, has been in charge of moving the initiative forward. In both Switzerland and Spain, the central role of local or regional women’s machinery has been crucial in the introduction of the concepts and analysis of the budgets, in collaboration with the corresponding departments.

Challenges

Three challenges are apparent in most of the experiences reviewed:

• Weak understanding of gender issues in general (and thus the need to continue awareness raising)
• Inadequate or insufficient participation and buy-in by all stakeholders (the fiscal authorities in particular), which, in turn, is a crucial element of the sustainability of the initiative
• Developing the proper tools at the different levels of government, including data

Involvement of civil society is yet another element that should be reviewed within most government initiatives

Areas for Further Action

The areas for further action are linked to a mix of activities at the political and technical levels. The three main ones are as follows:

• Continued awareness-raising efforts around gender and budgets.
• Continued efforts to introduce a gender perspective into data collection and analysis.
• Continued lobbying and/or strengthening legally binding requirements, including international commitments to women and using other requirements linked to spending of public funds, as in the case of the EU structural funds and aid money, to use GRB as a tool for effectively mainstreaming gender into all government policies.

Role of the UNECE

UNECE provides a regional platform for the discussion and regional exchange of best practices. One of the recommendations of its Regional Symposium on Gender Mainstreaming in the ECE Region (28-30 January 2004) was to organize trainings on gender budgets for respective units under Ministries of Finance. The final report of this meeting is summarized in the following box.

There are a number of successful cases of engendering the budget in the UNECE region initiated by central Governments (Sweden, France), local governments (Italy, Spain, Switzerland) and civil society (Canada, Russian Federation, United Kingdom); The good practice case of the Gender budget project of the city of Basel (Switzerland) indicates that there are already methodologies and processes which could be used by other countries; The initiatives vary in the targeted budgetary area (tax and benefit systems; expenditure of various departments), instruments used (beneficiary assessment, gender-disaggregated public expenditure; revenue incidence analysis); A common problem is the difficulty in obtaining and correctly interpreting the right type of data to do gender budget exercises as well as proper sequencing; Beneficiary assessment can sometimes run into the problem of who receives the income transfers or services; women are often the recipients but not the final beneficiaries and can be mistakenly identified as receiving “too much” from the budget; There should be clarity between policy and budgeting; The assumptions about the gender neutrality of the budget can be deconstructed by showing that unpaid care work is saving the government money as cuts or insufficient social expenditure is assumed to be absorbed by households, and women carry this weight disproportionately; The arguments used by governments to honour commitments made to other international treaties or conventions, such as NATO, should have the same weight as the commitments made to protecting women’s rights to economic security.

Table: List of Countries by Location, Scope, and Results of GRB Analysis

For further information, please contact:

Ewa Ruminska-Zimny
Coordinator, Beijing +10 Regional Meeting
United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)
Palais des Nations – Office 329-1
CH-1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland

Phone: +41 (0) 22 917 16 98
Fax: +41 (0) 22 917 00 36
E-mail: [email protected]
Web site: http://www.unece.org/oes/gender

References

“Gender responsive budgets – Progress and challenges” – Secretariat Note for the Regional Preparatory Meeting for the 10-Year Review of Implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action (Beijing +10) - ECE/AC.28/2004/7

Report from the Regional Symposium on Gender Mainstreaming into Economic Policies,
28-30 January 2004 (http://www.unece.org/oes/gender/documents/REPORT.pdf)

Notes

¹ http://alize.finances.gouv.fr/budget/plf2004/jaunes04/811.pdf
² The latest report can be downloaded at http://www.regeringen.se/content/1/c6/03/00/97/99d957f1.pdf (in Swedish).
³ The three categories are: first level or spent on programmes that address gender imbalances, the second level is equal opportunity expenditures and the third level is general expenditures.

Ref: ECE/GEN/04/N04