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Fiscal Policy, Accountability and Voice: The Example of Gender Responsive Budget Initiatives

Author: I Bakker
Date: 2002
Size: 34 pages (292 KB)

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Summary

Participatory budgeting and analysis offer a new method of holding governments accountable to their commitments. They can also lead to a more balanced distribution of public resources. This background paper for the United Nations Human Development Report considers the relationship between fiscal policy and accountability, and analyses the development of gender-responsive budget initiatives.

Existing budget frameworks are often at odds with goals to reduce inequality, neither do they produce economically efficient outcomes in developing countries. The dominant global economic model ties taxation and expenditure to market-friendly initiatives rather than socially-responsive programmes. Making budgets more sensitive to poverty and gender could help to achieve more optimal and equitable outcomes, especially in the poorest countries. The example of gender-responsive budgeting is explored as one instrument for tying international and national commitments to public resources. It also requires governments to look at public finances in a new way. Lessons learned from this fledgling practice may be useful for other groups that are excluded from macroeconomic policy making.

The need for participatory budget processes is based on the premise that elected representatives and the poor are often locked out of fiscal policy making. Fiscal and economic policies tend to be more accountable to financial markets and international lending institutions than to citizens. Gender-responsive budget initiatives, which analyse public money through the lens of gender, can help rectify this situation by:

Monitoring and widening targets for gender-equity principles and social development, including commitments made at international level.
Broadening notions of accountability and transparency to include the gender impacts of budget processes and macroeconomic policies.
Ensuring greater consistency between economic goals and social commitments.
Improving budgetary performance and optimising the use of limited resources through better targeting.
Contributing to a more open relationship between government and civil society, partly through the need for gender-disaggregated information and recognition of unpaid work.

When the paper was written, there were more than 40 gender-responsive budget initiatives underway in most regions of the globe. Experiences in countries such as Australia, India and the Philippines, as well as at multilateral institutions, highlight elements of what could constitute ‘best practice’ in participatory budgeting:

Initiatives should be comprehensive and address the various stages and dimensions of macroeconomic and fiscal policy making.
Initiatives need to enhance popular and parliamentary participation in budget scrutiny and implementation. This requires gender-disaggregated information and the use of performance indicators.
Initiatives should be coupled with training programmes to enable wider and more effective participation.
Initiatives should be judged not just on the basis of equality gains, but also on their contribution to economic efficiency and good governance.
National and international initiatives, actions and commitments should be combined to produce a more credible and consistent set of policies. This is required to gain the confidence of taxpayers and market players.

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Source: Bakker, I., 2002, 'Fiscal Policy, Accountability and Voice: The Example of Gender Responsive Budget Initiatives', UNDP, New York
Author: United Nations Development Program (UNDP), http://www.undp.org/