Gender-Responsive Budgeting: The Case of a Rural Local Body in Kerala

Abstract

This article discusses gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) at the local level in Kerala by studying a village panchayat, the lowest tier of rural local government. GRB of a rudimentary form, known as Women Component Plan (WCP), had been in existence at the local level for the last 20 years as a key feature of participatory planning. The study adopts a fourfold classification of all projects implemented in the panchayat on the basis of their gender friendliness and calculates allocation and expenditure under each of these categories. The data on which the article relies relate to the expenditure incurred under the annual plans rather than budgets, which are based on inflated and unreliable data. The article ends by making some observations based on the data and the overall experience of Kerala in gender budgeting.

Internal Factors Influencing Gender-Responsive Monitoring in Non-Governmental Organizations

“…Most respondents believed that mainstreaming gender in the budget influenced genderresponsive monitoring in NCAE. The finding is in line with study findings by Nair & Moolakkattu (2018) that gender-responsive budgeting in development programs is critical to effective genderresponsive monitoring. Most respondents believed that having a specific budget or budget lines allocated to monitoring influenced gender-responsive monitoring in the organization.…”

Gender-Responsiveness and Its Influence on Gender Equality and Economic Performance of State Colleges and Universities

“…Additionally, responding to human capital and decent work-related gender issues can be resolved through appropriate budgeting. These findings support the claim of Nair and Moolakkattu (2018) that implementation of gender-responsive programs and activities requires gender-responsive budgeting (GRB), and a common tool used by organizations with great concern on gender and development (OECD, 2017). In addition, UNESCO (2012) ascertained that organizations require to have a culture of gender inclusion (cited in Zuabi, 2015) and supportive structures and affirmative action from university leaders (Grenz et al, 2009).…”

Gender budgeting in emerging economies–a systematic literature review and research agenda

“…Likewise, Dey and Dutta (2014) find that gender budgeting approaches in India remain piecemeal and are often subject to populist measures "rather than substantial gender sensitive concerns" (p. 508). This lack of political will is also raised as a hindrance to implementing gender budgeting in Manyeruke and Hamauswa's (2013) study on Zimbabwe and in Nair and Moolakkattu's (2018) study on India. Nakray (2015) observes a decoupling between adopted instruments and their actual use.…”

“…Most research in the social sciences has been conducted in "WEIRD" (Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) societies, although these represent only 10% of the population (Azar, 2015). Differently though, when it comes to gender policies, governments in high-income economies have sometimes lagged behind-for example, at the local level, where studies frequently address the implementation of gender budgeting in EEs (see, for example, Edralin, 2011;Gunluk-Senesen et al, 2015;Mahadevia et al, 2019;Nair and Moolakkattu, 2018;Sumbas and Koyuncu, 2019), rather than focussing on experiences in high-income economies. Responding to calls to consolidate knowledge on gender budgeting and to further engage with the literature (Galizzi et al, 2019;Verloo, 2019), this study focuses on adopting gender budgeting in EEs and synthesises this rich stock of existing knowledge in EEs.…”