Putting Gender Budgeting into practice

Two levels can be distinguished in putting Gender Budgeting into practice, both of which have two sub-levels:

• The level of the actors
  
  • in putting Gender Budgeting into practice and
  • in implementing it.

• The level of the subject matter of putting Gender Budgeting into practice
  
  • in the budgetary process and
  • within the framework of (other) specialist tasks.

The roles of the actors in putting Gender Budgeting into practice are the same as in putting Gender Mainstreaming into practice, since Gender Budgeting is part of Gender Mainstreaming. The main roles are those of the top and middle management  (top-down) and the function of participation (bottom-up). But putting Gender Budgeting into practice in technical terms presents special problems of subject matter.

To begin with, the complex economic contexts and processes involved in the distribution of resources and their interplay with gender equality between women and men must be analyzed. This alone is a specialized challenge, which can only be dealt with step-by-step in individual subject areas.

When Gender Budgeting is being applied to building a (public) budget, the knowledge thus gained must be standardized and related effectively to a budget plan. As budget plans traditionally derive from questions of content, there is a particular problem here. There are similar problems in putting Gender Budgeting into practice, for example in medium-term financial planning or in overall considerations of the national economy which provide the basis for policy decisions.

The following remarks on putting Gender Budgeting into practice relate essentially to putting into practice in public budgets, as the most experience currently exists in this field with numerous initiatives.

Before the levels of implementation mentioned above are dealt with in detail, a few questions and GB approaches that could be used as starting points and for orientation should be mentioned.