Gender Responsive Budgets (GRBs) are political interventions to change the nature of budgets, policies and programmes. How does what gender-responsive budget (GRB) initiatives have done in practice compare with the claims and expectations about what they can achieve? This paper, compiled for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, attempts to bring some realism into the discussion, planning and assessment of these initiatives. The paper also stresses that different initiatives have different objectives and different outcomes which depend on context, who is involved, and a host of other things.
GRBs are often understood as engagement with economic policy, but this detracts from the aim of using gender budget work to integrate social and economic considerations. The budget is the monetary reflection of all government policy. It is therefore a form of policy analysis from a gender perspective which focuses as much, if not more, on the policies underlying the numbers in the budget.
The worldwide interest in GRB work since the 1990s occurred alongside a more general interest in budget work within civil society. The recent rapid growth in the number of GRB initiatives testifies to the perceived potential of these ventures. The application and development of GRBs can make a number of crucial contributions:
- GRB work is a useful tool to support mainstreaming gender in government policies, involving targeting allocations for women as a necessary form of affirmative action.
- GRBs have been successful where detailed approaches relying on one or two indicators have been promoted rather than broad, cross-cutting themes.
- GRB work in relation to rights-based approaches has been most effective when done in close co-operation with advocacy groups.
- High levels of political representation for women provides an environment conducive to GRBs, particularly where women’s groups have been active and mobilised during a recent political transition.
- Some initiatives can claim budget changes, including increased allocations for reproductive health in Mexico, Child Tax Credit in the UK and child support grants in South Africa.
Overall, however, more than 50 GRB initiatives around the world have produced relatively few budget changes. Whether an initiative can play a particular role depends on the actors, their goals, their understanding, the activities they undertake, as well as the political and social context in a particular country. Difficulties in changing budgets and policies can be outlined as follows:
- Policies rarely change because of a single initiative, but rather because of the combination of a range of forces.
- Policies seldom change because new and better facts are presented, hence GRB work is most effective when it supports the directions that policy makers already want to take.
- GRBs resulting directly from increased participation of women in parliament have occurred only where leaders of government were openly supportive of GRB initiatives.
- Engagement of women parliamentarians with GRBs is constrained by their incapacity to change budget proposals tabled by the bureaucracy and the timing of budget debate.
- GRBs require a multi-disciplinary approach to counter the strong tension between the economic planning side of budgets and the non-economic element of advocacy.
- The technical nature of budgets can inspire fear among those from a non-economics background.
